Let’s Write The Mantra For Web3

Photo by Brent Ninaber on Unsplash

The last time that we created a great new communications model, we called it the Internet. Not since the telegraph or the telephone had human beings created such a new way for two-sided communications. (Newspapers were two-sided only as far as “Letters To The Editor”.) Radio and television are one-sided loudspeakers. The Internet or World Wide Web was a new measure of communicating and community. Rather than one voice, two or more people could speak, interact, share their lives and invite others to do the same. But without imagination or design, they decided to overlay the Internet with clumsy banner ads — outdoor boards for the Internet. Commercialism. Just as outdoor boards spoiled vast panoramas of the American continent, they despoiled the Internet. Today you often can’t get past the smattering of adlike objects to find the content hidden like buried treasure somewhere beneath. Surrounding the banner ads grew Web 2.0, a hostile environment of surveillance capitalism, stalkers, hackers, privacy invasion, theft and intrusion. Opportunists, crashers and thieves abound. Fake news on the one hand and echo chambers on the other. We are now encountering the next generation of worlds: Web3. How will we build this new beginning? Will Web3 be shaped once again by lazy minds according to the distorted mores of Web2 and the worlds of marketing, attribution and bad manners? Or is there something less disappointing? Is this…