[ih] Some of the people who built the internet think it’s time for a reboot—starting with social media

[Jorge Amodio]

Can you reboot human nature?

-Jorge

> On Dec 18, 2021, at 2:50 PM, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> *Members of the tech elite are banding together to bring the Web back to
> its idealist origins. They call their vision ‘Web3.’*
> 
> *Jack Dorsey and the Unlikely Revolutionaries Who Want to Reboot the
> Internet*
> 
> The internet hasn’t turned out the way it was supposed to.
> 
> In its earliest incarnation, before some Wall Street Journal readers were
> born and the rest had fewer automatically renewing digital subscriptions,
> it was supposed to be distributed, user-controlled and, in a word,
> democratic.
> 
> Then came Big Tech and the attendant centralization, windfall profits,
> culture wars, misinformation campaigns, Congressional hearings, EU rulings,
> antitrust battles and techno-nationalism that have characterized the past
> decade.
> 
> What if there was another way?
> 
> What if, to take but one example, users of social networks collectively
> owned them, or at least could vote on how they were run and what kind of
> speech they allowed? And what if similar questions could be asked of just
> about any tech company whose primary product is software and
> services—whether financial, cloud computing, or even entertainment-related?
> 
> These are the questions investors, engineers and more than a few
> starry-eyed tech dreamers are asking themselves—among them former Twitter
> Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, whose interest in these questions helps
> explain his sudden departure from Twitter.
> 
> The answers are taking the form of services and apps that are the first
> outlines of what their creators hope will someday eat the internet
> completely: a distributed, democratically ruled “Web 3.0” or “Web3” that
> will rise like a phoenix of 1990s-era Web 1.0-idealism from out of the
> ashes of the corporation-controlled Web 2.0 that all of us currently
> inhabit.
> 
> Here’s the basic idea: New technologies like blockchain present the
> opportunity to loosen the centralized stranglehold that companies and
> governments have over everything from internet platforms to intellectual
> property to the creation and distribution of money. These technologies
> operate by spreading responsibility or ownership among a group of users,
> who, for example, use their computing power to electronically fabricate—or
> “mine”—cryptocurrency, or record transactions for digital art.
> 
> These technologies represent an evolution of cryptocurrency beyond
> bitcoin—which some in crypto communities now deride as mere “digital gold.”
> In addition to monetary value, the “tokens” that make up these systems are
> each also encoded with information that has some other use, whether it’s
> membership in a club, the right to vote on how a company conducts itself,
> or even just data.
> 
> The blockchains that underlie all this are just ledgers of information
> stored on many different computers at once. This lets any given blockchain
> be resistant to control by a government or corporation, and lets people
> exchange tokens on that blockchain securely and transparently.
> 
> This future, a second chance to use technology to upend traditional power
> structures, is being trumpeted by silver-tongued hype-people of every
> stripe, from venture capitalists to armchair oracles on social media.
> 
> Others see the entire enterprise as worse than a waste of time. They view
> bitcoin as a currency with an outsize (and, many argue, completely
> unnecessary) energy and carbon footprint
> <https://www.wsj.com/articles/crypto-miners-struggle-to-cut-carbon-emissions-11634808781?mod=article_inline>.
> And they see crypto broadly as a classic, doomed to fail techno-solutionism
> <https://www.publicbooks.org/the-folly-of-technological-solutionism-an-interview-with-evgeny-morozov/>
> (the
> belief that technology can solve any problem) Ponzi scheme pushed by
> latter-day medicine-show hucksters eager to exit their investments in
> unregulated securities before the market collapses or the Securities and
> Exchange Commission gets around to regulating them.
> 
> Mr. Dorsey, no quack, is clearly in the believers’ camp—and is, indeed, one
> of its most prominent members. In July he told investors bitcoin would be a big
> part of Twitter’s future
> <https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/22/jack-dorsey-says-bitcoin-will-be-a-big-part-of-twitters-future/>,
> and in August he tweeted
> <https://twitter.com/jack/status/1424854924194729984>that it would unite
> the world.
> 
> His departure from Twitter reflects the allure that Web3 has for many of
> those in the tech elite. Mr. Dorsey is now full-time at Block—the new name
> he gave to Square, his digital payments company, where he is
> enthusiastically championing cryptocurrency.
> 
> Block—the name was inspired partly by the blockchain
> <https://twitter.com/Square/status/1466158911413760004>—owns Cash App,
> which allows users to buy and send bitcoin. It also created a patent
> alliance to share crypto-related intellectual property and funds Spiral, an
> independent team of open-source bitcoin technology developers whose most
> recent promo video includes a muppet version of Mr. Dorsey
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOT78Bgy1Qw>answering the question “When
> did you know something was wrong with our financial system?”
> 
> Other famed tech seers are excited about Web3, too. In June 2021,
> Andreessen Horowitz, the venture-capital firm co-founded by Marc
> Andreessen, announced a $2.2 billion fund—its third—to invest in blockchain
> and crypto-related startups. Globally, investment in blockchain startups in
> 2021 has shattered all previous records, topping $15 billion so far this
> year, a 384% increase from total investment in all of 2020, according to CB
> Insights
> <https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/blockchain-trends-q3-2021/>.
> 
> Almost every company with “Web3” or “blockchain” in its pitch deck
> describes its mission as a user-centered quest to empower—and just as
> often, enrich—its users, making them owners and investors as much as
> customers.
> 
> DeSo—which, confusingly, is simultaneously a not-for-profit foundation
> <https://www.deso.org/>, a blockchain and a cryptocurrency token, but
> explicitly not a traditional for-profit corporation—is in many ways typical
> of the form. The idea behind DeSo is that everyone should be able to create
> their own social media service, but also that they could be interconnected
> in ways that, say, Facebook <https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/FB> and
> Twitter would never be—including shared accounts and other shared data.
> 
> “The thesis behind DeSo is that if you can mix money and social, you can
> create new ways for creators to monetize,” says Nader Al-Naji, founder and
> head of the DeSo foundation. “Instead of creators monetizing from ads, they
> can monetize from DeSo coins.”
> 
> DeSo has created a new cryptocurrency (named DeSo) that, for example, could
> be used to “tip” other users for their posts, replacing likes with actual
> money—or at least DeSo tokens that can be traded for dollars on the usual
> cryptocurrency exchanges. Like other next-generation cryptocurrencies,
> inspired by Ethereum, these tokens also can store the data that actually
> makes up a social network, such as the text of posts (one of Ethereum’s
> inventors, Vitalik Buterin, was involved with bitcoin early on and in 2013
> proposed the Ethereum protocol in part because he wanted to create a world
> in which no single company could control digital assets). This dual
> function illustrates the inspired weirdness that is Web3: If money can
> become code, then money can be way more than a means of exchange; it can
> also do anything that other software can do.
> 
> This core insight, a sort of E = mc² equivalence between money and
> software, is why true believers in Web3 think it could have such a huge
> impact. Suddenly every activity humans engage in, from buying and selling a
> house to liking a post on social media, can be made part of a token-based
> financial system of a scale and complexity that makes today’s look like an
> antique.
> 
> Paul Meed, CEO of Moonbounce, one of the startups building an app with
> DeSo, thinks that using crypto to create new kinds of exchange between
> creators and their fans on social media will ultimately work, but that it’s
> still early days for the idea and technology. Making every interaction
> between friends on a social network into a monetary transaction still feels
> strange for most people, and he sees a great deal of pushback from young
> people and fans of creators whenever the idea comes up.
> 
> “I have a friend with a couple million subscribers, and he made one test
> video on YouTube where talked about NFTs, and it was his most downvoted
> video of all time,” he adds.
> 
> Rather than funding DeSo in the traditional manner—by creating a startup
> and asking the wealthy mandarins of venture capital to part with money in
> exchange for partial ownership—DeSo instead sold early investors, including
> Andreessen Horowitz, some of its crypto tokens. Any social media service or
> app built atop the DeSo blockchain—there are more than 200 of them so far
> <https://bithunt.com/explore>, all of them tiny—must use the DeSo token.
> The more people and groups build, the more valuable the DeSo token could
> become. That’s the company’s business model, rather than charging licensing
> fees or selling advertising.
> 
> Analogies fail in corporate arrangements as novel as these, which is one
> reason blockchain startups remain obscure to most investors. Critics claim
> such obfuscation is deliberate, and is as much about hiding suspect
> financial and technical engineering as it is a consequence of any supposed
> innovation in business models.
> 
> “The current blockchains are like woefully underpowered computers that can
> only do a very, very small amount of transactions, and the things they can
> do are shockingly limited,” says Stephen Diehl, a programmer in London whose
> frequent essays about the pitfalls of blockchain technology and Web3
> <https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/web3-bullshit.html> have made him one of
> Web3’s most visible and cogent critics.
> 
> Even many of the longer-standing attempts to refashion the internet into
> Web3 are still too inchoate to tell if they’ll ever amount to anything.
> Before Mr. Dorsey’s obsession with crypto reached its current apotheosis,
> he announced in 2019 a project begun by Twitter, called Bluesky, to
> “develop an open and decentralized standard for social media.”
> 
> The goal was to make Twitter or some new service into a flexible and easily
> accessed repository for things known as tweets, which people could sort and
> view in a variety of new apps built by outside companies. Bluesky—which is
> to be independent of Twitter, though it currently has no partners other
> than Twitter—would be more like a service for developers, a role like that
> of Amazon Web Services. In this way it would be different than a
> consumer-facing company with the implicit responsibility for everything
> that happens on it and the ability to ban current presidents, as Twitter
> did on Jan. 8 to then-president Donald Trump
> <https://www.wsj.com/topics/person/donald-trump>.
> 
> Bluesky was spearheaded by Twitter’s current CEO
> <https://www.wired.com/story/parag-twitter-crypto-dorsey/>, Parag Agrawal,
> but appears to have made little progress since it was announced. Twitter is
> hiring for BlueSky and remains committed to the project in the long term,
> said a Twitter spokeswoman. Blockchain could be integral to how the project
> is made real, she said.
> 
> Twitter’s halting attempts to reinvent itself, and its co-founder’s
> abandonment of it in search of new ways to reinvent the internet with
> blockchain at Block, illustrate the promise and pitfalls that drive much of
> the interest in this technology. “Everybody sees the problems with the
> malign influence of social media these days, and Web3 has become the
> messiah technology that’s going to fix all these things,” says Mr. Diehl.
> 
> Grand promises notwithstanding, it’s not yet clear whether Web3 and its
> supporting technologies will be soon-to-be-forgotten vaporware, or the next
> world-wide web.
> 
> In the future everyone might be able to mint a new crypto “coin” at will,
> whether they’re using it to raise capital for a business, monetize the
> popularity of social-media creators, or collect money for their school’s
> PTA. Or it’s possible regulators, who this month called crypto startup CEOs
> <https://www.wsj.com/articles/crypto-ceos-to-testify-before-lawmakers-weighing-greater-regulation-11638959403?mod=article_inline>
> to
> appear before Congress, will decide that the downside of companies issuing
> what can look like securities outweigh the opportunities for new kinds of
> financial and technical engineering they might enable.
> 
> Whatever happens in the coming years, the torrent of money and interest
> flowing into Web3 companies and projects, and the mainstreaming of
> blockchain technologies by Block and its competitors
> <https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/visa-launches-crypto-consulting-services.html>,
> are a measure of just how dissatisfied even many of those who built the
> current internet have become with it—not to mention how much they think
> they can profit from solving the very problems they created.
> 
> Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims at wsj.com
> 
> Appeared in the December 18, 2021, print edition as 'The Unlikely
> Revolutionaries.'
> https://www.wsj.com/articles/jack-dorsey-and-the-unlikely-revolutionaries-who-want-to-reboot-the-internet-11639803654
> 
> -- 
> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
> living as The Truth is True
> -- 
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