Earth 3.0?

Nah, it's Web 3.0, silly! Indeed, Web 3.0 seems to be the buzz-word that has many proponents and detractors of new internet technology debating about the future of our favorite shared space. But, as I'm about to explain, the development from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and possibly to Web 3.0 mirrors somewhat the evolution of human culture and socioeconomic organization...

Humanity. We are an exceptional species among many, and in our relatively short span of existence we've had a wild and ever accelerating ride on the planet. From scattered small tribes, we settled down and grew ever larger societies up to the scale of nation states with a shared future within those nations. But in modern times, post several industrial revolutions, we're losing sight of that shared future and have become highly individualized. The tribe had a shared future, so did the nation state, but in a world buckling under the pressure of globalization, any semblance of a shared future, a shared present even, is out of sight. The same economic system that decided we need to globalize, has also ripped apart any cohesion between us, rendering us increasingly alone, in our own bubbles behind our own screens in our own houses. It's me against the world, the individual homo economicus against the forces of globalization. At least that how it feels, like we're becoming more and more powerless against the greater forces that drive us towards a globalized economy and world, rendering our democracies useless and our votes impotent.

When the world wide web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, the same year the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain fell, it came with a promise of connecting the world. It was the realization of the adage that knowledge not shared is knowledge wasted. "Let's share knowledge," Berners-Lee must have thought, and with that idea in mind he invented the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which made possible the creation of easily accessible websites; Web 1.0 was born. HTTP became the solid foundation upon which creators could make their information known to the world, and soon many "nerds" started learning HTML, the scripting language to make websites, to publish on the young internet. There weren't many users yet, as PC's were still relatively expensive and we only had dial-up connections worth a couple of kilo bits per second. Web 1.0 was mainly read only; users couldn't easily create their own content and couldn't really interact with the websites. Scattered small tribes roamed this new virtual earth, although many of them were in reality the big companies who soon discovered the need for an online presence.

We then slowly evolved into Web 2.0, which made the World Wide Web far more interactive. Maybe this is a good point to pause and say that Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 are in fact buzz-words that don't have an official definition yet, so results may vary when searching the internet for these terms... At the end I'll share Berners-Lee's definition with you. Web 2.0 for me mirrors humanity's settling down and forming nation states, as it was the birth of the big platforms we use today. End users can now easily publish their own content on these platforms, like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and so on; these are the virtual nations in which we build our own houses. But with gaining this kind of interactivity, we've lost the solid foundation that was the HTTP protocol. To build something, a game for example, on Facebook you must use its own API (Application Programming Interface). FarmVille was a hugely successful game on Facebook, made by social game developer Zynga. But when they had a disagreement, Facebook was able to pull the foundation from under the game; the open protocol HTTP doesn't have that problem of centralized ownership. The virtual nation states can easily revoke your visa and ban your content for whatever reason they deem sufficient.

And that's where we are now, with the dream and prospect of Web 3.0 almost in sight. The promise of a decentralized internet is sweet music in the ears of most creators. Like mentioned in the below linked video, after Bitcoin NFT's are the biggest success of the blockchain technology era. You don't have to believe that a jpeg is worth millions (and please, don't) to appreciate the endless possibilities of the technology. However, the success of Web 3.0 depends on how decentralized the control over it really becomes. Since we're moving in the direction of Proof Of Stake (POS) blockchains and away from Proof Of Work (POW) blockchains, decentralized control can only be achieved with decentralized ownership of the blockchain's tokens. Judging by several blockchains' initial token allocations it must be said that we're on shaky ground here with some of them; take a look at this image. Cardano allocated 81% to public sales, where Solana was highly centralized with only a couple percents allocated to the public, for example. Only if ownership of the tokens can be diluted enough, can we speak of a decentralized platform. There's also the danger of large investors buying up the lion's share of a particular token, so we're not there yet.

As promised, here's Tim Berners-Lee's definitions of Web 1.0, web 2.0 ad Web 3.0 respectively: read-only, read-write and read-write-executable. But like I said, definitions differ. Web 3.0 brings us, in my opinion, to the same fork in the road in the virtual world as we find ourselves in the real world; will we go on the path of more centralized power with less opportunities to make our voices heard, or will the future be truly decentralized giving back the influence promised by the democracy we pretend to still live in? If we are to become a global tribe, will we still have our own voice, will we still have political and economical agency, or will we "own nothing and be happy about it," like the goons at Davos would have us believe? We'll see.

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