The Web 3.0 Versus Web 3 War is Being Fought in Your Living Room, And You Should Be Aware of It!
A "Don't Count Us Out Yet" Original Opinion Piece
Photo Credit: Rawpixel (blocks and coins) / Fast Company
Excess capitalism. Increased income inequality. The rich getting richer. Google and Facebook pivoting corporate resources to continue to monopolize new Web 3 areas such as the metaverse and artificial intelligence.
Could all these potential problems be solved by the right future approach to Web 3? Where new startup ventures funded the old way and existing monopolies get overtaken by a decentralized internet model? Where most resources go to creators instead of Web 3.0 technology providers?
Our answer is maybe, but with a much better chance of this happening if professionals who are not really involved in the day-to-day technology world start to understand that this battle has already started in your living room or wherever you log on to the internet.
So, let’s take a look at what is going on.
One of the premises of our publication is that the development of Web 3 or 3.0, whichever side you are on, is going to create new wealth and prosperity levels the world hasn’t seen yet.
These levels will be much greater than those in Web 2.0, which create global access to many products and services, or the industrial revolution, which enhanced lives through mass production.
The simplest way to say this human civilization has moved from agricultural to manufacturing to a primarily service-based economy in the past and now will become digital with the internet as the prime force.
E-sports, digital art, NFT ownership, genetic cures for many human diseases, technology-based solutions to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere and augmented reality shopping, to name a few, will dominate the economic growth of the world in the next 10 years.
However, the power of who owns the majority of these products is still unanswered.
On one side are the traditional finance and tech giants working to fund new companies, digital currencies and approaches. The main reason for funding is the same as before.
Write a business plan or start a new division in an existing tech company and the overriding decision is based on how much return versus how much risk is involved. In other words, how much money can you make and the chances of you making that amount becomes the driving force for getting resources.
The finance and tech giants' group usually goes by the name of Web 3.0 and is driven by creating more capital from existing resources. It has all the traditional hedge fund, venture capitalist and institutional investors on their side.
We especially watch the firm Andreessen Horowitz and its publication a16Zz for insights into where this area might be headed. However, if there’s no money in creating a cryptocurrency that will provide food or money to starving citizens of a war-ravaged company, that is not going to be a private financial enterprise event unless there is money to be made by doing it. We would call Marc Andreessen the creator of one of the original internet search engines, Netscape, the five-star general of this approach.
On the other side are Web 3 creators, who are mainly into doing new things with the tech world that make life easier, better or different for no primary financial-based reason. Rather, they do it more for the satisfaction of improving society.
Some of these developments will probably become the biggest creators of new wealth, but most aren’t going to be funded by the traditional financial system. Imagine if Mark Zuckerberg, instead of creating Facebook to get dates at Harvard, created a business plan to make money on it first and then create it. Facebook wouldn’t have been the same.
Ask Bill Gates, Henry Ford or Elon Musk how much money they think a relatively unknown scientist could get from the existing financial community. Even for breakthrough work on fission that might solve the sustainable planet problems we have now, but only has a very small chance of success. They need government or charitable funding, and there is not a good enough risk versus return there.
On this side of the fight is one CEO, Jack Dorsey, who gets criticized for dropping out of being the CEO of Twitter, looking like he hasn’t washed or shaved his face in years. For years, Wall Street analysts have written he really thinks about the plight of the world too much and doesn’t think enough about how to maximize value of his companies.
Now, let’s be aware of some things before we all look at Dorsey as the good approach, because he truly is trying to work on problems that might be useful to society rather than ones to make money.
First, there will probably be a lot of failures and perhaps dead ends. How much money do you think has been put in nuclear energy or cancer therapies over the past 50 years? And we are just at the cusp of creating some real value here.
Second, most breakthroughs that really change the world don’t come from traditional charity or government funds because they are so different. Think of the Wright brothers, who were first compared to Samuel Langley, who the United States government gave $50,000 and was in the news almost every day, but lost the race. Not the perfect solution either.
Rather than picking one versus the other right now is is that you, the reader and non-tech professional, should know about this and have a say in what’s next. You are as important as either side of this war, and our goal is to keep you informed and educated enough to look at both sides and help create the future.
For further information on this fight, we suggest the following articles.
This article on inclusive capitalism from Fast Company is easy to understand and explains how the lines are being drawn.
If you want to read up on the personal battle between Dorsey and Andreessen on this fight, the New York Times covered it well.
Finally, for years Ben Thompson has been a thought provoking leader in the tech world writing Stratechery. Here is his take on what’s coming next, and his thoughts are worth reading.
Author’s note here: he really thinks the driving force of Web 3 will be political, not economic, wow!
Best,
Craig