Molly White

the bitcoin price is up, which means it's time for endless comments from crypto bros who somehow both 1) know that i'm critical of crypto and 2) have no idea why i'm critical

i would say it's aged very well tbh, but they'd have to watch the talk to know that

https://blog.mollywhite.net/is-web3-bullshit/

So far, the primary successes of web3 have been in shiny marketing selling people the opportunity to invest in vaporware. In regulatory arbitrage, exploiting the fact that regulators have been slow and hesitant to act on unregistered securities offerings. And in outright scams and grifts. Many people in crypto say they welcome regulation—again, you’ve heard that here— as though it is not the lack of regulation that has enabled so many of these projects in the first place. So many problems in today’s web are driven by capitalistic forces driving ruthlessly towards the enrichment of monopolistic tech companies rather than the betterment of society. You’ll have to excuse me for doubting that our utopian web dreams will be achieved through the introduction of a hypercapitalist technology that aims to financialize everything on the web even further, and exposes user data on public ledgers where it can be scraped by even more tech companies than are profiting off data today.

There will be a web3. The web has been evolving ever since its inception, and there is no doubt in my mind that we are overdue for a fundamental shift. Will it be blockchains and crypto? Venture capitalists and blockchain startup founders really hope that you think so. I hope that the rest of us will continue working towards utopian goals like the ones I mentioned earlier—the ones that many people who are working in web3 and on web3 projects share—without necessarily being shackled to a technology that holds little promise for the web. Revolution is possible. But it’s unlikely that we will be fighting for revolution alongside the same venture capitalists and tech companies who helped to get us into this mess in the first place.

As technologists, our duty is to develop responsibly, and we should be striving for more in the web, pushing to evolve it into whatever web3 may turn out to be, and chasing those ideals that could make the web truly wonderful. But when presented with lofty promises we have to remember to distinguish the steam-powered computers from the truly revolutionary. Dig deep. Ask the hard questions. Criticize the flaws. And cut through the bullshit.

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