Web3

Two posts ago, I traced the connections between Steely Dan and the Metaverse and it all ended up looking pretty grim. We appear to be living in the cynical dystopia of a Steely Dan song, and whereas it might be cool to listen to and imagine, actually experiencing it for real, or for what passes for real, is another thing entirely. The maxim that if you’re not paying for something, you’re the product is exemplified by Meta. They own us. Slaves don’t have to buy their food or shelter. Nor are they paid. I almost went one stage further with this, because in all of this there might be a glimmer of hope in the form of Web3, but decided instead to hold it over until today.

As usual, I’m afflicted by uncertainty regarding not knowing what others do and don’t know, so I don’t know if you, the reader of this blog, know what Web3 is or not. I might just be telling you about something you’re very familiar with, or I might not. Nonetheless I do plan to introduce the idea because I’m not that familiar with it myself.

First there was the internet. After this had been around a few years, Tim Berners-Lee introduced a method of linking documents from within their text known as HyperText Transfer Protocol and the Web was born. Www at this stage could be referred to as “Web 1.0” in retrospect, although it was never called that as such. It was just the Web and nothing was needed to distinguish it from an earlier version, although it had its own predecessors in the form of the internet itself and the likes of Usenet, Arpanet, email, FTP servers, packet radio and bulletin boards. The substrate of the Web is substantially similar even today in terms of hardware. This version of the www consisted of static web pages. A website consisted of interlinked documents of text and graphics which sat on a server somewhere and were rendered by web browsers into something the user could interact with. Websites were “out there” and we could go and have a look at them.

I’m a late adopter. I didn’t get internet access until September 1999 CE. Around that time, the term “Web 2.0” was already in use, although it didn’t catch on until 2004. It’s characterised by social media websites, although that isn’t exactly what it is but what’s made possible by the idea. Web 2.0 is the generation of web pages for the individual user rather than their static, passive presence on servers. In other words, it’s customisation and it means the web we see in a browser is often not the same experience as anyone else has. Nowadays we can see the seeds of the negative influence of FB and other social media in that description. It means that what we experience puts us in a bubble and potentially in an echo chamber, what has in the past been called a “reality tunnel”. You’ve probably seen the experiment where a Palestinian and an Israeli search for the same term on Google and the difference in the results they get. This is not a situation conducive to dialogue or productive interaction. Berners-Lee himself has said that the term is fairly meaningless jargon, but he’s also on record as saying that social media have done untold damage to the internet and society in general.

In order to serve individual users customised pages, a service needs to know things about you, and knowledge is power, in this case power over you, or rather us. I don’t need to go into this yet again. We all know about it. A second issue with the www nowadays is that it’s difficult to implement the “right to be forgotten”. A teen may tweet something ill-advised in a moment of high emotion which later jeopardises their career, and there’s nothing they can do about it. It’s just “out there”. Of course I share a lot of the unease which many people feel about social media, but I have a separate form of disquiet with it which ultimately stems from the idea that I can’t control it. I have, as far as I know, never had a virus on any device I’ve used in the past twenty-three years, although I did have a virus on the ZX81 which I wrote myself as an experiment back in the mid-’80s. I have, however, been hacked on Twitter, or more precisely, been cracked on it, not to desecrate an older usage of the word “hack”. This is because, even though we have the illusion of Web 2.0 being “just for us”, in fact it’s all “out there” beyond our control and we don’t get to code it, control its security or do anything else meaningful. This wouldn’t matter so much if social media sites didn’t also store a lot of personal information, which again we’ve lost ownership of. I can’t really drive but I can ride a bike, and to me the absence of a direct connection between muscular effort and what a motorised vehicle does compared to how it feels to cycle, which also lacks the direct connection walking has, is similar to the removal of agency one feels on, for example, Facebook. It is true that it facilitates something like connection between people, perhaps an illusory one, but there’s a cost to that similar to the cost of petrol, road tax, insurance and maintenance with a car, except that because we’re not owned by cars in the same way as we are by social media, we only have to pay money for that rather than sell our souls for free.

I am at least as addicted to social media as the average person on the Clapham omnimobile and I cannot cast the first stone. This ubiquity makes us all aware of its problems, and you know what I’m talking about, so nobody is really uninformed about this aspect of it. It’s been accused of creating a culture of narcissism and amateurism. In theory we can all do something about this, which is one reason why I have occasionally done things like post pictures of toasted sliced bread or boring kitchen utensils. It probably doesn’t work much. However, one of the hazards to mental health FB poses is that it makes people’s lives look better than yours, which can be depressing, particularly if you are a depressive person. The word “amateurism” crops up there as a quote from a journalist, and it isn’t quite what it’s about. There’s a well-known tendency for areas of knowledge one isn’t well-informed about to look easier until one starts to learn more, and this is I think what the writer concerned is referring to. Actual amateurism needn’t be bad – after all, it has the Latin stem for “love” in it – but this is more people blundering in in ignorance and shouting down the better-informed. There are other issues here due to Dunning-Kruger cutting both ways and also being somewhat misunderstood as such.

So then:

(There’s that heading again!)

Right. A couple of days ago I was going on about how bad the Blockchain was because of its huge carbon footprint. Today I’m going to talk about what might be a positive aspect of the method. The same technology responsible for NFTs and cryptocurrency can also be used for other purposes, one of which is, unsurprisingly given the existence of NFTs, maintaining control and ownership of one’s own data and content. Web3 could be the antidote to the negative effects of Web 2.0.

First of all, the Blockchain. I may well get this wrong. A blockchain is a database shared between devices on a network that records data in blocks which are cryptographically linked. Due to the cryptographic keys, blockchains have an irreversible and uncrackable time arrow which means the order in which things happen can be trusted, and that trust is reinforced by the sharing of the data. This reminds me of a system I thought of in the early ’90s for storing legally binding documents without requiring paper copies, when I saw the horrendous degree of paper wastage in a local council office. The point is that it can serve as a record of events which can’t be easily altered. To alter a record, you’d have to work your way sequentially up the chain almost simultaneously on all copies of it, change it, and save it, and I’m guessing the changes you make would have to preserve the checksums of the data. Maybe it will be cracked at some stage but right now I don’t think it has. Oh, apparently it has. Hmm.

The idea behind Web3, also known as Web 3.0, is that the user can retain ownership and control of their own data and content. This won’t necessarily solve all the problems of Web 2.0 but will make some difference because it decentralises the data in question. It no longer belongs to the likes of Meta and Twitter. In theory, considering that our data are worth something to the companies that sell advertising, this ought to mean that owning them means we can sell them. Some people think Web3 is over-hyped and it’s hard to tell at this stage. Certainly lots of other things like this have turned out to be flashes in the pan.

Some people see the future of the www as being fundamentally altered by Web3, because it means that users will succeed in being anonymous and will be able to withdraw their data from social media and elsewhere if they want. They expect the big social media companies and others to transform from being organisations headed by CEOs to DAOs – “Decentralised Autonomous Organisations”. To me this sounds unrealistically utopian and I can’t see the rich giving up power so easily, or rather their perceived power (I’ll get there one day!). There are further issues with money which I’ll go into later.

The video-sharing site Odysee uses this system. Odysee was set up in order to circumvent some of the perceived problems with YT, though not all of the widely-perceived issues. YouTube has copyright strike issues over minor or effectively non-existent infringements, censorship and there are often spam-style comments. Odysee runs on the LBRY (pronounced “library”) blockchain, which works like peer-to-peer filesharing, so the videos are not hosted by a server running the site itself, and uploaders can receive direct payment in LBRY tokens for their content. There’s also a search engine, which is fine, but also a suggestions algorithm, which is potentially less fine because it could trap people in echo chambers again. The only content banned from Odysee is “terroristic” (their word), incitement to violence and literal torture. From what I’ve seen, a lot of their videos seem to be from YT and many of the rest are by right-wing extremists. This may be the kind of thing which one just has to tolerate in order for other good things to happen, but at least as far as the site is concerned it looks to be introducing exactly the kind of things which caused YT to become problematic in terms of advertising and corralling people into reality tunnels in the first place. Also, it seems to me still that money can be put behind certain ideas to promote them by posting more content and they can also be censored by the Powers That Be removing their own embarrassing content, such as a political party removing “promises” after election.

At the moment, a lot of what’s on Odysee looks like videos which were on YT but are either copied and placed there or uploaded by the YT channels themselves. They look very similar to YouTube videos. Presumably it has a lot of its own stuff as well but it isn’t clear how much of that is stuff which is right wing extremist. I have seen a video against the new Policing Bill, so possibly not all of it, although that could affect the right as well as the left. I’ve also seen a lot of anti-vaccination stuff. Rule-breaking content becomes unlisted, so a user is unlikely to encounter it unless they know it’s there.

What, then, would a Web3 internet look like if it catches on? There would probably be a lot more politically unusual content, presumably lots of porn, so no change there, and also perhaps less accountability because people could remove embarrassing content themselves. But people might actually get paid for content and just being there, possibly very small amounts. On the other hand, it might just not happen at all, mainly because people with loads of money have the resources to stop it one way or another.