Claustrophobic is certainly not how I feel about the web, but I imagine most people do. They feel trapped by it. The future feels like it’s already owned by Google or Facebook or some other enormous corporate interest, so I can understand that impulse to create something new like web3 because of that. Fuck the corpos, man! Let’s build our own thing!
But ugh. I can’t help but feel that all these crypto folks are looking in the wrong place. Merging the blockchain and the web is not how we make the web better, less scary, more safe, more free. The blockchain is not punk rock.
Sigh, so many people are falling to the lure of Web3. Two more people who I follow fell for it in my feed today. Saw another over the weekend who I’ve read some articles but always was a little suspicious of, and yep.
their rugged individualism just makes them unable to see any of our current problems as systemic, and so their solution is to just recreate basically the same structures with different people in charge
— roy (@roysmeding) November 14, 2021
yeah i think this nails it
"the REAL problem with feudalism is that *i* should be a lord" https://t.co/FAFQHxhWSf
— eevee (@eevee) November 14, 2021
Yeah, silos suck and we need to de-corporatize the internet. But IndieWeb is the answer, not Web3 😭 Web3 is a predatory pyramid scheme that’s destroying the planet at exactly the fucking moment we need to Not. Fucking. Do. That. Making everything cost money and be a transaction is the fucking opposite direction of how I think the internet and world should go. We’re trying to get away from capitalism, not make more differenter somehow even worse capitalism.
As Robin Sloan says, “Cards on the table: I am not merely a skeptic, but a full-fledged enemy of Web3.”
I feel like there might be a link between Web3 and libertarian thinking…🤔 Something about ignoring systemic problems and putting everything on the individual… ignoring externalities… excusing the blatant problems that government protects us from… trusting other people to do the right thing (for the long term) and not what’s best for them (in the short term)…?
Also, like, crypto is so fucking complicated. I don’t want to hear ever again that starting a website is too hard. If you can figure out blockchain, you can purchase a domain name and webhosting, point your nameservers to your webhost, and install WordPress. Done. Instead of getting imaginary money and wasting a ton of energy and producing a ton of emissions, you’ll get a place to write and think and control your own content. Way better use of time and energy.