Op-ed: Web3 — sense and nonsense

As with any narrative, the Web3 narrative serves specific stakeholders and remains in turn, sustained by them to serve their interests.On one side, it

is the investor facile admonition at a euphemism for the term that K Street does not prefer (“crypto”); on another side it is a half-hearted attempt by the hoi polloi on LinkedIn/Twitter to attach themselves to what they see as the next huge thing; on a third side, it is a proactive effort by some established crypto players to piggy-back on the investor marketing and attempt to legitimize themselves; and, from a 4th side, it is a pre-emptive campaign by the deep-rooted technology industry giants to handle market expectations and position themselves as the unavoidable winners of this ostensibly evolutionary trend.Let us pull

the curtain back and debunk what is happening behind the scenes.The Original(Static)Web: Access to Information, Search and E-Commerce”Well, I discovered it irritating that in

those days, there was different information on various computers, but you needed to go to different computer systems to get at it. Likewise, sometimes you had to discover a different program on each computer. So, finding out how things worked was truly hard. Frequently it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee.”That was his aha minute, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee went on to invent a fundamentally brand-new method to

share info utilizing hypertext. He likewise managed to invent HTML, HTTP, and the concepts behind URI/URLs in his spare time and coded the first web internet browser (“WorldWideWeb.app” )and the very first web server (” httpd”)to boot.Now, to give credit where credit is due, the respected innovator Vannevar Bush had previously envisioned libraries of research study with annotations comparable to today’s links, and it is no accident that link analysis eventually became the cornerstone for search algorithms. Search led to fulfillment i.e., purchasing and selling over the web, and the introduction of SSL 1.0 to protect online transactions sealed the offer, so to say.We had actually become online “consumers”. Then modern-day Silicon Valley took over to do what it does best, which is to”capture”value, and we saw what occurred with the dot com bust.The Second

(Dynamic)Web: User-Generated Content, Social Media and Surveillance Capitalism The Web 2.0 tag became a catch-all phrase to refer to the mushrooming design of allowing consumers to engage and collaborate with each other through “social networks”, virally bootstrapped by”user-generated material”. This was in contrast to the first wave of the Web where users were restricted to passively “consuming”whatever material was rendered down the HTTP pipeline from the website.Berners-Lee did not like this tagline– he is said to have actually explained it as lingo. But we did not care, and with the introduction of Facebook, YouTube, etc we were enthralled by the new “social” web(VC-jargon)or the “read-write”web(technology industry jargon)and we were all now content creators. Life was excellent up until the realization that nobody else was paying either which we had all now become the” product “. The prophets who had anticipated a shifting away of control back to the user and to the consumer-creator continue to be confronted with the reality of a dystopian system of security commercialism; “the unilateral claiming of private human experience as complimentary raw material for translation into behavioral data”to price quote Professor Shoshanna Zuboff.Yes, it is totally free, but at what expense? Loss of privacy, business and state monitoring, weakening and seeding, and feeding suspect at the local, national, and supra-national levels, and sowing division left, right and center. However keep in mind, the ads are individualized, and the behavior manipulation is subliminal to provide the devil his due.The tradition of

Web 2.0 will be seen in how it reconciles its identity as an amazing profit-making device that turned business and organization designs on their head with its own contentious early 21 st century role in the American zeitgeist.Sovereignty: What the Web is not, and what Blockchains are about”We have actually proposed a system for electronic deals without counting on trust”. That was Satoshi Nakamoto’s succinct conclusion in his influential paper.A system for electronic transactions without relying on a trusted third party.That is it. There is absolutely nothing in there about the Web, or Web 2.0 or the putative Web 3.0. If you are building a system for electronic transactions without relying

on a relied on third party, then by all means use blockchains.

Else, go your merry way.In useful terms, blockchains are economic platforms that enable the advancement of systems for processing electronic transactions without depending on a

relied on 3rd party. Why economic platforms? Since, unlike all traditional computing

platforms, blockchain platforms have intrinsic financial rewards that ensure the stability of the infrastructure.Now, there are side effects to not relying on a trusted third-party, especially sovereignty i.e., control over relevant( private)data or other assets, capacity to select where such assets are saved and/or custodied, and the capability to offer access to important information( or not)to those who require it for nevertheless long you picked to.Sovereignty is intriguing; it is substantial, and it will be vital in the coming years. You understand this and I don’t require to state more here.The community did not require to use the term Web3 till the VC-types appeared; to go full circle, Berners-Lee recently called out that”In reality, Web3 is not the web at all”, and he has his own proposition termed”Web 3.0″to reshape the Internet, to add to the word-salad; maybe, it is time to drop this baggage and simply call it a blockchain. Neither more nor less.Posted In: Guest Post, Opinion, Web3 Guest post by John deVadoss from ngd enterprise inc ngd enterprise constructs blockchain designer tools for industrial and customer scenarios, with a focus on making it possible for mainstream adoption. Learn more → Recent Web3 Stories New$60M web3 fund from Axelar offers close