Web3
= "a decentralized version of the internet based on blockchain technology, emphasizing user sovereignty, data privacy, and peer-to-peer interactions without central intermediaries". [1]
Definition
"The term ‘Web3’ refers to the practices of participating in digital infrastructures through the ability to read, write and coordinate digital assets"; "offering a participatory mode of digital self-organizing and shared ownership of digital infrastructure through software-encoded governance rules and participatory practices." .
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517231159002)
Contextual Quote
"Web3 is a collective exploration in ‘self-infrastructuring’. The verb ‘to infrastructure’ denotes the activities, processes of integrated materials, tools, methods and practices that make up and change an infrastructure (Star and Bowker, 2010). Thus, infrastructuring is an ongoing process of doing, and these processes are incremental, iterative, and long-term (Karasti et al., 2010). Web3 originates from anti-establishment ideals, and aims to provide the prefigurative means to build new structures for decentralized, self-governance from within the prevailing power structures of society."
- Kelsie Nabben [2]
Description
1. OASA Network:
"Web3: new iteration of the World Wide Web based on Distributed Ledger Technologies (such as blockchain) that allows projects and communities to launch and rule their own token-based economies. Typically incorporating concepts such as decentralization, blockchain technologies,an dtoken-based economics. Contrasting to web2 where data and content are centralized by 'big tech'. Web3 distributes information/control amongst its users who have a higher degree of autonomy on how their data is used."
(https://oasa.earth/papers/OASA-Whitepaper-V1.2.pdf)
2. by Ananth Natrajan and Nitin Gaur:
"Web3 as a technology paradigm aims to provide rails for creation, tokenization and movement of value and assets. The Web3 aim to solve content ownership and provide portability of digital assets by tokenizing them paves the way to trade this tokenized value for other fungible tokenized assets, thereby enabling creators to monetize their work effort. These work efforts may include (but are not limited to) mining and the creation of content, such as art, music, and other forms of nonfungible tokens, that represent a stake in an ecosystem, much like game tokens.
In a future where dynamic, borderless organizations without hierarchy can undertake much of the value creation, a supply of services is more conceivable with interconnected value networks, exchanges and bridges providing connectivity between these ecosystems. These decentralized exchanges or asset bridges not only provide an avenue to exchange various asset classes but also facilitate the global movement of assets, thereby creating truly global economies that attract digital natives and a talent pool."
Discussion
What is Web3?
Kelsie Nabben:
" ‘Web3’ is a generic term that refers to platforms that leverage public blockchain and related technologies to enable decentralized coordination of data and digital assets, instead of relying on central intermediaries. This differs from the first generation of the military and scientific internet in the 1960s–1990s (known as ‘Web1.0’) (Abbate, 1999), the second generation of personal computers and mass adoption of the internet which coincides with the re-centralization of economic capabilities and benefits and the rise of corporate digital platforms and advertising-driven revenue (known as ‘Web 2.0’) (Potts and Rennie, 2019), and the Semantic Web (or ‘Web 3.0’), which is an extension of the technical standards of the World Wide Web to make digital information machine-readable and actionable (Shadbolt et al., 2006). Web3 aims to offer an alternative digital infrastructure to that of centralized platforms, applications, and value that have been developed on the internet. If Web2.0 gave people the ability to read as well as ‘write’ digital media to the World Wide Web (for example, blogs and social media platforms) but enabled big data surveillance (Ball and Webster, 2020), then Web3 is a platform infrastructure to read, write, and coordinate.
The promise of Web3 is a decentralized infrastructural base that anyone can build on to create new economic and social paradigms, for individual or collective control and coordination of shared resources. The unique, composable properties of Web3 that enable digital value creation and the coordination of digital assets in a decentralized manner include cryptographic private key management (mathematical algorithms for secure communication over insecure channels), shared, distributed consensus of blockchain-based ledgers (databases), and opensource software. It is not so much that digital assets are ‘owned’ as they can be controlled for new models of coordination that extend beyond existing paradigms of data ‘ownership’ and monetization. Public blockchain technology leverages public key cryptography, meaning each person can control their own wallet ‘address’, rather than entrusting the custody of their digital assets to a third-party (such as a cloud-service provider or a corporate company). In theory, these public blockchains are not able to be owned or controlled by any single private actor or group because they are ‘decentralized’. Decentralization refers to the technical attribute of a subset of distributed system where multiple authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by all (Troncoso et al., 2017), as well as an ideology that manifests in the social, political, economic and legal dynamics of a system (Bodó and Giannopoulou, 2019). Grounded in notions of the purity and infallibility of mathematics, computer-based cryptographic economies (or ‘cryptoeconomic’ systems) combine cryptography and economic incentives to ‘reshape the nature of firms, governments, markets and civil society’ through new modes of communication, cooperation and organization (Berg et al., 2019). What is being imagined, built, and coordinated on these infrastructural foundations extends far beyond just financial assets, to include Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Regenerative Finance (ReFi), Decentralised Societies (DeSoc) and ‘open’ Metaverses (Nabben, 2021a). Combinations of these technologies and organizational frameworks offer a utopian promise of self-sovereignty through digital organization (Corballis and Soar, 2022; Ibrus and Rohn, 2023). Less is known about the social outcomes of these tools and infrastructures in practice.
Claims about Web3 include that it presents an ‘exciting and terrifying’ future (Park et al., 2022) that ‘reinvents the internet through token-based economics’ (Voshmgir, 2020), so that ‘people can coordinate more easily and build or repurpose innovations that serve their needs’ (Rennie et al., 2022). Just one of the countervailing tendencies to many claims about Web3 is that technocratic solutions often omit the complexity of human society and obfuscate the role of people in building and maintaining digital infrastructure, rather than acknowledging the social inputs that shape and maintain technological interventions. Some scholars have pointed this out, including the assumption that technical networks without a centralized intermediary manifest democratic decision-making, as well as digital equity requirements, such as digital literacy and access to an internet connection (O’Dwyer, 2020; Manski, 2017; Nabben, 2021b). Web3 also presents a new market for existing big tech companies to try to capture value, as has occurred with previous hopes for democratic, digital networks (Greenstein, 2015). Few concrete definitions, analytical lenses, and examples of ‘Web3’ exist as it is a nascent and emerging field of technological and institutional innovation, and Web3 is yet to prove it can live up to its claims as an infrastructure."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517231159002)
Web3 as self-infrastructuring
Kelsie Nabben:
"As well as a promise, a fantasy, or a technology, Web3 can also be viewed as infrastructure that provides a basis by which to support other activities. Information infrastructures are the material objects constructed by people, composed of relationships between social and technical elements, including technologies, people, processes, standards and actions (Star and Ruhleder, 1996). Infrastructures are ‘shared, evolving, open, standardized, heterogenous’, providing an installed base on which to build (Hanseth and Lyytinen, 2012). Technologies, such as cryptography and blockchain transaction ledgers, become infrastructures when they are assembled and embodied as part of human organization to support one or more functions within a broader ecosystem (Star, 1999). Thus, infrastructure is relational and ecological and cannot be understood apart from its use (Star and Ruhleder, 1996). Bowker, et al. argue that when dealing with information infrastructures, we need to look not only at the technology but the entire array of social organizational forms, practices and institutions that accompany, make possible and inflect the development of new technology, their related practices and their distributions (2009: 103). Institutional infrastructures accompany technological infrastructures as the sets of political, legal and cultural institutions that form the backdrop for economic activity and governance to enable or constrain operations, and organize and configure societal relations (Hinings et al., 2017). In this context, Web3 is both a technical infrastructure that provides a basis for people to own their own wallet addresses to coordinate digital assets and build decentralized applications, as well as an institutional infrastructure that provides a substrate to support other economic and governance activities. According to one analysis of Web3 whitepapers, creators are defined as ‘we’, ‘thinkers and doers’, ‘community members’ and ‘contributors’ and the supposed beneficiaries are ‘all humans’, ‘humanity’, ‘individuals’ ‘the global society’, and ‘everyone’ (Tan et al., 2022). What binds the diverse intersection of characters exploring all corners of Web3 is the desire to build their own information infrastructures to enable new economic models of organization.
I call this practice in Web3 of when people are able to participate in designing, owning, operating, governing, and/or maintaining their own infrastructure, ‘self-infrastructuring’. Self-infrastructuring is when people have the ability to place boundaries around their own actions in relation to shared purposes or goals, that are then expressed in technical and institutional infrastructure. The verb ‘to infrastructure’ denotes the ongoing activities, processes, tools, methods, and practices that make up and change an infrastructure (Star and Bowker, 2010). The purpose of infrastructure is to support a particular activity in an adaptable and persistent way. For example, one ‘social DAO’, provocatively named ‘Friends with Benefits’, states their aim is to ‘equip cultural creators with the community and Web3 tools they need to gain agency over their production by making the concepts and tools of Web3 more accessible, building diverse spaces and experiences that creatively empower participants, and developing tools, artworks, and products that showcase Web3's potential’ (Nabben, 2022). Despite good intentions and widely innovation social customs and technical tools, this is a hard thing. In my multi-year ethnographic encounters with Web3 communities both online and in-person, it is apparent that Web3-natives just don’t know ‘how to infrastructure’ yet.
The ideologies Web3 espouses include a politics of decentralized organizing, self-governance, and newfound agency through cryptographically verifiable ownership in digital domains. Yet, the technical and institutional models of how to do this are still being conceptualized and developed. Infrastructure, and the practice of infrastructuring, has fallen out of the common, collective understanding of technology in favor of startup-era products and business models that productize people as data, VC capital as funding, and growth as the trajectory. Whilst products are designed to capture attention and earn revenue, infrastructures are invisible when operating effectively. Furthermore, products are easily replicable, temporary and disposable, whereas infrastructures are persistent and require maintenance. Web3 communities are being required to rediscover the practice of infrastructuring and develop novel tools and institutional arrangements for self-infrastructuring to pursue their ambitions of collective coordination and self-governance. The second-order effect of this experimentation in ‘how to infrastructure’ is that infrastructures are both great enablers of society and have significant, often unanticipated, implications (Star, 1999)."
(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517231159002)