(2021-09-24) Brander Weird Web3 Energy

Gordon Brander: Weird web3 energy. Epistemic Status: careful speculation. I can feel a hunch forming, but I’m less confident of my conclusions in this post than in the other two. (2021-09-18) Brander The State Of The Web

Before the advent of the internet, apps ran on your computer and saved data to your computer. The internet flipped this around. Web software ran remotely on server computers, and saved data remotely to giant databases.

New business models built moats to go along with the walls. Payment platforms offered trusted hubs for exchange. SaaS found it could rent software to businesses. Aggregators discovered how to leverage data silos and network effects to monopolize demand and commodify supply.

So how did feudalism end IRL? It’s complicated, but my sense is that part of the answer has to include money.

Money is a protocol, a shared idea that has power to the extent that people participate in exchanging it.

It’s interesting, also, how NFTs have created a whole new product-market fit for IPFS and FileCoin. If you’re going to spend large amounts to acquire an authentic certificate of ownership, you better make sure you have a permanent place to store it. IPFS benefiting from NFTs feels like a clear example of asset bubble money funding infrastructure.

I think read of this whole thing right now is eldritch, rather than utopian. Complex distributed systems, like the web, markets, society, ecosystems, biology, are emergent

Faced with this dilemma, we find ourselves ecologists. Entangling ourselves with complex systems, and co-evolving with them has become our human condition. They are often critical to our survival, but they don’t care about our survival, (and we often don’t care enough about their survival). We can’t control them, but maybe we can garden them?

value of a web3 token may actually increase when composed with other systems.

Aggregators emerged at the intersection of these attractors, and broke the evolutionary loop of technology, leveraging network effects to fend off componentization and freeze the evolutionary landscape in place.

But the crash leaves something important behind: infrastructure. Bubbles fund the deployment of canals, factories, railroads, shipyards, highways, electrical grids, cellular towers, broadband. This infrastructure becomes the foundation around which society rebuilds itself after the crash. So, are cryptocurrency, NFTs, and web3 a bubble? And if so, what kinds of durable infrastructure might this bubble be funding?