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Actually bearing such recall, or burdened with the stupefying impression that web always was, some living beings now sense how digital technologies open up a precipice of uncertainty, as yet rimmed with thin and rickety fences, which we may straddle. You also may remember, the days when web became two point zero. From a pack of theorists, agitators, their indistinguishable service, some twenty years back, we became aware that we’d witnessed the first era of the web. And soon we learned that what was never named ‘Web 1.0’ had itself been conjured up by a combo of military advisors, libertarian geeks, institutional scientists hung-up in room 404, and dollar worshippers who’d freshly wormed their way out of decaying communes. The dot-com collapse was forgotten, or forgiven, billows of user-generated baloney submerged our screens and we eagerly shed and conceded data, ‘the new gold’. There was the soporific talk of ‘web squared’ and the ‘Internet of things’; mind-numbing spiel of all and every sensory snippet sliding onto, into the web, after the promises of metaverses, and more metaverses warmed-up. Several proclamations of ‘Web 3.0’ were attempted, before Satoshi’s contraption started to be hailed as the great ‘game-changer’.

I confess forthwith that I wasn’t at all inspired by what Gavin Wood and others began naming ‘Web3’, back in 2014. It knocked one without rocking the other, as a translation of the cheeky French saying might go. I was unresponsive to a call from a reliable colleague to check out a September 2016 conference in Berlin, on “Blockchain for Good”. The blurb had mentioned distributed ledger technology as a “potentially disruptive innovation” that could “redesign economic and political interactions” based on “a process of decentralized, automated and trustless record keeping”. Instead of looking into that barrage of bravado, I flew out to a critical media sociology get-together in Lisbon, to give a talk, “The expansion of digital intermediation platforms: where will the web stop?” Blinkers fastened, I concentrated on presenting the dour results of six years of fieldwork on the so-called ‘collaborative’ platforms of cultural crowdfunding, holiday accommodation, carpooling, e-commerce and sexual encounters.

The two occasions I’d come anywhere near crypto adepts was: one, a guy trying to make deals with insurance companies in Quebec, oddly on the fringe of an academic conference, who suggested I purchase some ETH; two, a Danish leftist crowdfunding platform manager who considered crypto a clever way of funding radical movements (they wanted nothing to do with it). The topic gained somewhat more significance when I saw a close family member, and a childhood friend, both going ‘down the rabbit hole’ into the ‘Internet of transactions’. My curiosity was further piqued as I became aware that beyond crypto and ‘decentralised finance’, fresh legions of entrepreneurs, on all continents, were busy setting up blockchain based applications in (or upon) the culture and communication industries: audio and video streaming sites, journalism and publishing services, social networking protocols, gaming marketplaces… Countless ‘tools’ were being built for creators and end-users to take part in the governance of decentralised platforms, to curate and monetise content, to generate revenue from their data flows and their ownership of digital assets. I was all the more intrigued as all this hustle appeared to be taking place somewhat in the shadows, with generative AI capturing widespread public attention in 2022 – and suddenly becoming the number one hit topic in media and communication scholarship.

A lot of this book could have been written without ever setting foot into the realm of Web3. In fact, some of it was, as the core issue that it grapples with is that of the generation of value, or ‘valorisation’, a concept that I’ve been exploring for several decades in the field of culture and communication industries, and in the context of their so-called ‘digitalisation’ (Bouquillion & Matthews, 2010; Matthews et al., 2014; Matthews, 2017; Codagnone et al., 2018; Karatzogianni & Matthews, 2020). Broadly speaking, for years, I was genuinely puzzled by the fact that in so many languages – Indo-European, Semitic, Sino-Tibetan, etc. – the same term is used to designate, on the one hand, beliefs, ideas, wholly symbolic qualities, and on the other hand, money, abstract numerical entities, sheer quantities. I was amused, at times intrigued by this polysemy, and by what struck me as fragments of the same riddle: how in English the term ‘accounts’ could refer to crafted tales of events, or to lines of sums in a marble-paper bound ledger; how a ‘token’ could mean a keepsake, an emblem, or a stamped piece of metal, a medium of exchange. Since the days of researching my Master’s degree dissertation, I’d been familiar with Theodor Adorno’s notion of use-value (of works of art) being gobbled up and eradicated by exchange-value, that in the cells of kulturindustrie this is all we jailbirds have left to adore. This postulate was a cornerstone of my doctoral research – written in the immediate aftermath of the Napster-era downloading frenzy – five hundred odd pages which could be boiled down to a single question: what are we really doing with all this music that we purport to listen to, and to share?

How I pursued these fancies all the way to the ‘Internet of blockchains’ mainly rested upon one hypothesis – that “the generation of economic value in this field is accompanied by a qualitatively specific ideological production, of a far more ‘vital’ nature than within the existing processes of valorisation in the culture and communication industries”. The second part of this book does a good job of tearing to pieces any such notion of inherently singular ideological forms emanating from the toilers of blockchain and crypto, although it’s hard to deny that they’re a particularly busy bunch, when it comes to communicative labour, cultural production. Admittedly, I’d spun this idea from the first draft of an article noting how “crypto communities produce value for initial coin offerings” via their online interactions; intense hype-building alongside actual investments, “creating a spiral effect in which the two are almost indistinguishable” (Arvidsson et al., unforthcoming). In sum, I set out to see whether Web3 might offer evidence of the ultimate merging of symbolic and financial value, and thus provide a key to unravel the mystery hidden within this term.

To get anywhere near answering these questions first required securing a research grant, as I wanted to get out to the places where this activity was taking place and meet in the flesh the people who were ‘living the dream’. This wasn’t easy; by summer 2022, colleagues on public research funding committees appeared to be either blatantly ignorant, or highly suspicious, of anything to do with blockchains. Investigating AI based applications for media and culture industries would undoubtedly have yielded swifter returns. My first bid was rejected but I persisted, and by February 2023, was finally entrusted with a pernickety sackful of kopecks. Now leading an informal team of six researchers, I began eighteen months of fieldwork with them¹. On paper, we were to investigate what Web3 was doing to the culture and communication industries: Could it be more than a mere hiccup of the so-called the ‘collaborative web’? Was there any substance to the bold claims of ‘disruption of the oligopoly’ made by many blockchain adepts, and to the notion that Web3 practices might somehow be ‘prefigurative’ of fairer economic relations and decentralised decision making, in this field and beyond? Or was this merely a passing niche phenomenon, a costly hobby for a solace searching minority? Who were these new players, anyhow, and where had they sprung from? Finally, what common material basis might we possibly uncover beneath the nebulous of Web3 – which appeared to blend commons-based rhetoric, visions of ubiquitous ownership, the starry-eyed cult of all-empowering tokenisation and the plain cynicism of crypto-Ponzi hustling?

In Austin, Paris, San Francisco, Montreal, New York, Milan, London, Geneva, Zürich, Zug and Amsterdam, we met and interviewed over sixty Web3 players, not to mention the hundreds of public or more shadowy figures and fleeting silhouettes that we followed, read of, observed and listened to in myriad memes, videos, posts, and pitches at public gatherings. Not all of these people actually considered themselves ‘Web3 players’ but this is indeed what we name, in our academic spiel, project founders, activists, masters and students of this new lore, entrepreneurs, financiers and other such stakeholders. And as you’ll see, ‘player’ is particularly fitting in the realm of Web3. We asked them questions, sometimes embarrassing questions, as this is what some academics do. Questions about their desire and the consequences of their desire, and how their desire dissolves or coagulates with narrow ambition or broad utopia. We quizzed them on their backgrounds and trajectories, their political beliefs, the tasks they perform, with whom they toil and under whose command. Answers abounded as we played with them, interview after interview, coaxing them often, offering what they might have taken for appreciation, compassion, even love. There appears to be a lot of love flung about the Web3 ‘space’, and quite a bit of suffering, though not much space for the end of the night. Isn’t it falsely, garishly, lively?

What comes now, in the first part of the book, is essentially an account of my wanderings among these ‘regular’ Web3 ideologues – however sharply they might reel from such a denomination (and I too will gradually raise my own objections to the use of this term, but by no means to suggest that these folks aren’t deeply stuck and steeped in ideology). Readers acquainted with the arcane workings and equivocal discourses of digital frontiersmen may glean some momentary entertainment and uplift from my composition, perhaps a fleeting feeling of ideas placed in a satisfactory order. As for those very frontiersmen (and women, more seldomly), may they too be tickled by the rub of love, in anticipation of more compelling tremors in the later sections of this book. Left-leaning Western intellectuals should find it easily digestible reading. Yes, you whose dishevelled chapels still cling to some of the basic tenets of Marxism – worn-out relics that perhaps only a few are still able to decipher, or is it rather that scarce inscriptions can actually be deciphered? Even if the characters, their little schemes, their drives and whims, aren’t immediately familiar to the reader of, say: an intellectual journal founded in 1939 by physicist Paul Langevin, she ought implicitly to have some sense of the deeper forces that animate my blockchain agitators. She might hope that this account sheds light over recesses of the thick veil of darkness that she feels looming over our Western world in the present period – this age of “authoritarian finance” if we follow Marlène Benquet and Théo Bourgeron (2021).

Let’s begin with that, then: an analysis of the key cultural forms – ideological forms, if you will – produced and conveyed by players of the Internet of blockchains, a deconstruction of their apparent paradoxes.

But this will not do. No this will never do. There are continents & shores which beseech our understanding. Seldom have we been so slow. Seldom have we been so far.

James Douglas Morrison, ‘Soldiers’s Wife’s Letter’, c. 1970

¹: Although there were officially a few more people involved, I write six as these were, besides myself, the members of the ‘Platblock’ research group (funded by Labex ICCA), taking part in research design, fieldwork and analysis: Athina Karatzogianni, Katia Morales-Gaitan, Alan Ouakrat, George Patsiaouras, Vincent Rouzé and Jeremy Vachet. It goes without saying that I warmly thank them for their participation, and that this does not in any way commit them – nor the funding body – to any of the contents of this book.