People often discuss the decentralization of Web3 and its importance in democratizing finance, empowering ownership, and creating a more transparent, open world. In this post, however, I want to talk about one concept that I believe isn’t commonly discussed  --- “time” and blockchain’s ability to transform our relationship with the concept of time, ultimately giving humans the best chance in the history of the world to theoretically exist forever.

The concept of time is often elusive. What does it really mean? Is there a past? Is there a present? Is there a future? Do any of these actually exist or is it something humans make up as a way to make sense of the world?

Many Eastern and Western philosophies generally agree that the present is the only aspect of time that exists. I think I can also assume that most of us agree that the future doesn’t exist yet. But what about the past? Does it exist? For the purpose of this post, I want to mainly explore this concept of the past.

Philosophers such as St. Augustine argue that the past doesn’t inherently exist in and of itself but exists only in the form of memories or recollections of events that once occurred at some point in the previous present. Essentially, Augustine is saying that the past exists in our minds in the form of memory or images, but we are no longer able to access the actual moments that the memories correspond to — makes sense so far.

However, a glaring issue with the past existing in this form is the concept of fallibility. How so? Because memory is fallible and subject to change. For example, I may remember events from high school or college with little accuracy. The events may have been fresh in my mind at the moment they happened but over time became elusive or distorted. Another good example of the fallibility of memory is eyewitness accounts of crimes. According to research, eyewitness accounts are only accurate ~50% of the time, and account for ~50% of wrongful convictions.

An argument could be made that the concept of record keeping (writing, drawing, etc) exists and could solve this issue by potentially storing some objective version of events at given moments in time. However, for most of history, record keeping has also been fallible.  For example, if you search online for the survival rate of ancient literature, you’ll find figures estimating that between 80-99% of pre-modern literature has been lost. An article from The Guardian also touches on this subject and states that a museum of lost art would contain more objects than all of the world's museums combined.

And for the records that do exist, they’re often from the royalty or societal elite from a respective time period and often not from the average person. By losing these pieces, we’re losing insights into the lives of many persons and their personalities, hopes, fears, and desires -- effectively removing them from the past as if they never existed.

This is how the world worked for most of its existence. Pieces of our past were 1) missing, thus effectively erasing part of the past from ever existing and 2) inequitable, where the pieces that remained were often not from the average person.

Then came the Internet, which theoretically could solve these issues. The problem of record survival could potentially be solved because of our newfound ability to “digitize” records and avoid the impermanence of the physical world. The issue of equity also seemed to be solved as Web 2.0 saw social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and TikTok give billions of people the ability to capture their life and who they are at any and every moment.

Under the assumption of equitable permanence -- Web 2.0 theoretically would allow the lives of everyday people to be captured and exist in the past for themselves or generations at future moments in time to look back on. A kid in the year 3021 would be able to look back at my Twitter profile and have some glimpse into who I was.

However, all of this is theoretical. What are the odds that Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or Tik Tok exist in a 1000 years? Even 100 years from now?  Because our data is centrally stored on these platforms -- when they go out of existence, then essentially we do too. Even in the short term, we run the risk of practically being erased from the past. You can search online and find reported instances of people, who have used certain websites for years of their life, suddenly being disabled or banned and unable to access their accounts. Though these cases may be possible to resolve, this still highlights the fragility of our information when held in centralized systems.

Such examples as shown above would imply that over time, our current forms of record keeping in the age of the Internet are actually not much more effective than pre-Internet times -- with most of our records being bound to not survive and those that do will probably be artifacts from societal elites or greats of our respective time. However, this doesn’t have to be the case, and this is where I see the concept of Web3 and blockchain playing a unique role in transforming our relationship with the concept of time. Due to its decentralized nature, Web3 gives us the ability to preserve our data in a way that doesn’t depend on the existence of a few centralized entities. If I upload a piece of content onto a decentralized system, it’s there, and it’s there forever. Its existence doesn’t hinge on Facebook, Google, or X company existing to keep it there. Its existence also doesn’t hinge on the risk of a company deleting the content or account for any reason. Once on-chain, it will exist forever.

By allowing our data to simply exist, with little threat from external sources, Web3 protects the integrity of our past in the ways that we hoped Web2 would. We now have the perfect storm of 1) a non-fallible past due to decentralized permanence and 2) a past that we as individuals ultimately control, which improves equitable persistence of events. This effectively gives us the best chance in the history of the world for records to remain permanent and for the life of every person (regardless of who they are) to transcend time. Documents, pictures, videos, posts -- all pieces of us and who we are  -- existing as the past, forever in the spectrum of time.

Does this completely resolve Augustine’s notion of the past not existing in and of itself because we can never actually go back to a specific point in time? Probably not, since physical time travel is not currently possible. However, this does potentially solve the fallibility issue noted throughout and gives us the first chance to have a past that continues to exist in its true form.