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 a world changing evolutionary opportunity to reshape the attitudes, expectations, value exchanges and borders of humankind? Some of us think so: we are here to launch a new beginning. We believe it is time to build something different. Something that is unmoved by wealth or hierarchy — instead it is open, equable and launches a new episode in human potential and growth. We do not know what shape this will take or what it will be called, but we know that it will not be hinged to the past. It will not cling to humankind’s basest desires or to smash and grab political moves. It will burst open the historic bad habits repeated in political history — the political seesaw of war and conquest and the constant struggle for redrawn borders and hegemony. Instead, we will raise our expectations and find new currency in positive human interests and interactions. We admit one thing — that we do not know what we search for, only that we will (must) find it.