Readers may wish to begin at the first post of this series:
A brief history of “the web” is in order here.
By now, the idea of the World Wide “Web” is just about as ubiquitous as they come. But what of this numerical naming scheme?
What is Web 3, and by implication what constitutes 2 and 1? Furthermore, is there a Web 0?
Today there are a variety of pithy statements being tossed about to describe this lineage:
Jay Graber puts it this way:
“Authority on the web establishes who ultimately has control over content.
Web 1.0 — Host-generated content, host-generated authority.
Web 2.0 — User-generated content, host-generated authority.
Web 3.0 — User-generated content, user-generated authority.”
Chris Dixon likes it more succinct:
“web1: read
web2: read / write
web3: read / write / own”
These speak to content generation, consumption, authority, and ownership, but there are many more facets through which to investigate these phenomena without reducing it to monolithics like control and property. Web 3 is about integrity in relationship.
Each iteration of the web (and yes, we’ll get to unpacking what constitutes “an iteration” of the web) can said to be marked by some breakthrough(s), and these in turn affect the dynamics of a plethora socio-/economic/cultural/technological conditions.
As a technological infrastructure (allowing communication between computers at a distance), we can date the vision of the Internet to Mr. Licklider in the early 1960s, and the subsequent establishment of a Wide Area Network to the inception of the ARPANET before the end of that decade.
We’ll call this the Dawn of the Web (Web 0.) The term “Internet,” would arrive just a few years later with the introduction of the TCP/IP protocol and the first public service provider, Telenet. (Maybe Web 0.5?)
Web 0, we might say, lasted for 20 years as the dominant implementation. This period was largely characterized by technological innovation, and a raw receptivity to a primordial creative space.
In the latter decade, a wide variety of hobbyists, futurists, and academics would engage and develop this emerging phenomenon to the point of the first formal instantiation of the World Wide Web, or as we suggest here, “Web 1.”
It is important here to recognize that we are not speaking simply of wires, switches, and electrons, but in fact the emergence of a brand-new social context. Cyberspace was both of this world, and not and, as we would soon see, culture and society would be reinvented within. (Diplomatic relations would be needed.)
Web 1 enabled the infrastructure of this new territory of human activity. A territory “without” borders (see Mr. Licklider’s enunciation of the Intergalactic Computer Network):
“an electronic Commons open to all.”
The glory days of Web 1 were characterized by the magic of Google (1998) and the waves of peer-to-peer filesharing “services.”
Web 1 saw dominance (although, for now, each of these iterations persists as substrata of the next) for about 13 years. In contrast to the earlier era, this time was far more broadly contentious as the conversation shifted towards digital rights, and real struggle. Perhaps the most salient feature of this era in these terms is the establishment of the Great Firewall of China, constituting a speciation event in this new medium.
In 2002, PayPal and the early social networks were born; centralized, private organizations facilitating direct peer to peer communication of user sourced content on a large scale for the general public. Web 2 had begun. These early upstarts and their imitators would innovate rapidly, “capturing” users to be monetized in ever greater numbers; dawning the empires of the FAANG.
Perhaps poeticly, the rise of these giants corresponded to the Great financial crisis in the late 2000’s, and gave rise to the mysterious figure, Satoshi Nakamoto who would “single-handedly” spark the match giving rise to Web 3.
For the purposes of this article, we will date the inception of Web 3 to the formation and subsequent distribution of the Bitcoin Genesis Block on January 3, 2009. Where, up to this point, information on the Internet was freely duplicable, this innovation marked the moment when a state of authority over a piece of data could persist regardless of where that data roamed.
Where Web 2 saw empires capturing the feral natives, Web 3 may be considered the revolution, the nature of which is the central inquiry of these pages.
So as we can see, from the start, The Web, has been not just the play of technology, or ideology, but like all human activities, the intersection of both.
This technology, enabling a set of activities and setting loose a wild new frontier for human inquiry and engagement, created a distinct world (cyberspace,) at first in ways apart, but destined to collide and merge with the wider physical domain at large.
There is a very interesting tension that emerges here. The Internet is in essence a communications technology. Like language, writing and books and the printing press before, this sacred lineage represents a volatile edge space for the evolution of the human experiment.
Language communicates. Writing communicates information across space and time. Books communicate ideas. The printing press communicates ideas at the scale of culture; and the Internet communicates all of these and more, not just at the scale of culture or language, but quite unimaginably more.
In the relative history of humanity, this technology is brand-new. Technologies of communication convey thoughts, ideas, and culture, and innovation in any of these dimensions (including the underlying technologies) have a recursive effect on all of them.
Without undergoing a deep study of the history of taboos, it is not hard to look back over just the recent past to learn how all of these things: language, writing, books, the printing press, and indeed the Internet, have all run headlong into the polar dynamic between preservation of things as they are, and the evolution that remains universally insistent.