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In their article ‘Expansive and extractive networks of Web3’ Jathan Sadowski and Kaitlin Beegle critically observe that blockchain advocates propose not simply “the democratization of data ownership – since that is a very Web 2.0 premise”, but “the creation of entirely new kinds of assets, infrastructures, markets, organizations, and social relations with decentralization at their core, which will replace their nondecentralized versions.” (Sadowski & Beegle, 2023: 4-5). Indeed, the point they’re making here, and when they wryly suggest that “it is conceptually impossible to disentangle Web3 and decentralization” (Ibid.: 5), is that Web3 players acclaim the notion of a disruption of existing structures of Internet governance and oligopoly practices as a mandatory ideological stance, a cliché which ultimately bolsters ‘extractive’ strategies. The distinction they make between ‘expansive’ and ‘extractive’ networks is a significant proposal, and will be addressed more thoroughly in due time; meanwhile it’s important to consider both how Web3 players attempt to make sense of their own commitment to the disruption of central entities and intermediaries, and how they actively ‘navigate’ the blockchain space, in their actual practices and relations, with their peers and/or the users of their applications.

Although none of our interviewees were unaware of Web3’s claim of taking power from central authorities and providing greater agency to end-users, a significant minority were surprisingly unversed in either the technological specificities which serve to define blockchains as decentralised mechanisms in the first place, or somewhat indifferent to the political inspirations for ‘trustless’ and ‘immutable’ and ‘anonymous’ data management systems. Some participants amply made up for this, such as one New York based entrepreneur who escorted me on a historical evocation of the beginnings of the world wide web. He explained in particular how blockchain technology effectively represented a “fix” for the early coding shortcomings of the web and thus corrected the “original sin” of monetary transactions (and value creation) not having been designed into the initial protocol – given that researchers at the publicly funded CERN didn't have to worry about this all important question, the implication went:

“From the early days, I think in 83 or something, the early inventors of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee and others were thinking, ‘Hey, we need to actually think about monetization for this web protocol at the core, at the protocol level, rather than higher in the stack’. (…) But basically at the time they said: ‘Hey, we have no idea how payment is going to work on the Internet. Let's do that later. It's too complicated’.” (i29)

For this player, embedding transactions at “the protocol level” constituted the essence of blockchain’s disruption, a drive moreover wholly inspired by grass-roots initiatives, as inferred by the following statement, from an Amsterdam based crypto asset management entrepreneur:

“It’s very community driven, (...) retail driven. The development is very much pushed by retail, by developers, by enthusiasts and that’s the first time we see this in any asset class. If we look at commodities like gold, real estate (...), stocks, bonds, dividends, whatever: it’s all institutionally driven. Everything is done by governments and this is a brand new asset class that’s there and it’s driven by retail.” (i59)

In this account, the inherent tokenisation linked to blockchain technology provides the initial disruptive condition, allowing for a spread of democratisation to the masses – financial and otherwise. A Web3 advocate interviewed in Switzerland spoke with starry-eyed delight at the prospect of young people passionately organising referenda on blockchain governance issues:

“Sociologically, you know, we see there’s been (...) a decline in, like, third party groupings, you know, things that are not just your family and your work, but like bowling clubs and (...) community associations, especially for young people. So this is something else: if they can own a Milady, now they’re part of the Milady group. Or even here, in [name of blockchain], there are some people that are really invested in the open gov. There’s a show called [name]. Several times a week like one to two hours, it’s on YouTube. (…) These people will, you know, argue back and forth and they really understand governance. And they’re talking, but they’re not paid anything. And it's just, like, they’re part of the group. They have (…) a real feeling for governance and, you know, they feel responsibility for safeguarding the treasury and for making good decisions.” (i52).

If such initiatives, including decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), are frequently portrayed as enactments of Web3 disruption, most players are content to deploy a somewhat cruder discourse, echoing Henry Jenkins-esque paeans on participatory culture, albeit confined to the entrepreneurial realm: “If it creates value where now someone, you know, out of their garage or, in their parents house (…) can go ahead and create a business where they own their own distribution channel and they’re able to do that much more easily on a website rather than having to use a bunch of software and learn these things, it removes that barrier to entry.” (i18).

The promise of universal ‘ownership’ is no doubt just as deeply entangled with Web3 as ‘decentralisation’, as we observe from these interview excerpts – even if the following occurrence, voiced by an enthusiastic San Francisco based video streaming platform representative, shouldn’t be taken literally: “I got really excited when I understood Web3 provides return on investment infrastructure and it properly allows the media company to own their audience for the first time.” (i23). Here, a partnership agent at a Web3 software development platform opposes exploitation to the fundamentally disruptive character of ownership:

“We all contribute a whole lot of data to networks that then use that to generate value. We see none of it. So you can imagine a world where all the things we’re doing – you wake up, you check your phone, that's going to generate some value for some platform... If you're able to own a piece of that platform... And being in the space, people would prefer to own something rather than not, rather than be exploited.” (i31)

The disruption afforded by blockchain technology is thus equated with an improvement of the existing economic system, as confusingly expressed by this Swiss Web3 ‘builder’: “I think you have to you have to perfect the system first, to after disrupt completely” (i50), or somewhat more candidly by this NFT artist: “I want to believe that it will like somehow, like, steer capitalism in a more like conscious direction” (i20). Some of the most notable ‘innovations’ of the Internet of blockchains may however be unfolding in a direction that has little to do with consciousness, as illustrated by the development of what several of our interviewees refer to as ‘Web 2.5’. This refers to services that incorporate elements of blockchain technology, offering a user-experience akin to Web 2.0 platforms yet dropping the so-called ‘self-custodial’ functionalities which enable users to bypass trusted intermediaries:

“There are a lot of things that people in an ideal mathematical world think work when it comes to crypto, but to me it literally is like, if you go to the movie theatre or you go to the grocery store or you go to a restaurant where normal people go and normal people hang out, and if you pointed someone random in one of those places, that is who you should be building for. And those people don’t care about data ownership. Those people don’t care about privacy in the same way. They care about it when something happens, but they don’t care about it enough to add friction to their lives on a daily basis.” (i26)

This view is further compounded by the founder of a Switzerland based Web3 marketing agency:

“You don’t want to know what is inside [your smartphone]. You don’t care. The only thing you need to know is the green light, the red light, the apps, when you want to download something, when you want to take a picture. But what is inside is not that important. And for the blockchain it’s exactly the same. (…) How you do this and which blockchain you’re using, what layer, what level of layer and so and so, we don’t care at all. Make it good, make it useful, make it relevant, make it efficient, that’s all I need to know.” (i55)

Moreover, proponents of ‘Web 2.5’ applications clearly see user unconsciousness as going hand in hand with the incorporation of blockchain technology – and many of its players – within dispositifs of the existing web oligopoly:

“In the long term, you know, Web3 technologies will just be embedded in Google, products that we use on a daily basis, and most people won’t pay attention to what’s running underneath in the same way as you don’t really pay attention to all the protocols that are powering your email or your web browser. It just happens in the background.” (i48)

Our research provided further examples of Web3 services designed for a broad public to “use cryptography and also blockchain without even knowing it” (i50), offering functions “that we can use on behalf of the user” (i44), as another entrepreneur uncannily put it, and indeed targeting Big Tech companies, traditional brands and advertisers, as clients and commercial partners. A partnerships officer for a Web3 crowdfunding platform enthusiastically spoke of his collaboration with global energy company Shell, deals with the Gates Foundation and Schmidt Futures, ongoing discussions with Mackenzie Scott… NFT gamification features and reward-based incentives were presented as opportunities for external players “to create an engagement with people that (...) know nothing about crypto” (i43), all for the benefit of increased and ‘securitised’ consumption (i.e. tracking users that had already redeemed a free gift in order to prevent multiple discount claims). One such player found pride in his platform finding a solution to the “problem” that people who attend a musical event “don’t care that Coca Cola was the sponsor of the concert”. Developing a blockchain-based QR-code service which allowed concert-goers to collect virtual ‘assets’, his venture solved the mystery of “how to take this user and understand this user and then bring to Coca-Cola this kind of user” (i41).

Besides white-label intermediation services, offering reasonable user-experience in order for brands and partner companies to ‘engage’ with mainstream consumers, this pseudo disruptive augmentation of capitalist relations is epitomised by the teeming of niche, blockchain-enabled machine learning and artificial agent services. Presented as a shift away from the vertically controlled and concentrated AI of Big Tech, such players claim to offer a decentralised, consensus-based and highly participatory tool, “giving everyone an agent that they fully own rather than, one that is owned by OpenAI” (i53). One of the key features of a specific service consisted of a content producing agent that contributes to one’s ‘narrative’, rates users’ financial popularity, and awards points that can be redeemed within the player’s captive, crypto ‘ecosystem’; “It's more like a perk system”, the interviewee admitted, also using a familiar tone: “it needs to be packaged in such a way that the end user actually, like, can access it without having to have a PhD.” Again, we observe a classic intermediation position: developing agents and protocols that run in coordination (even if users nominally own their agent) and raking in a percentage of “fees” generated by network usage.

A simplistic way of looking at the ‘Web3 space’ is that it is divided between two groups. On the one hand, there might be those who genuinely believe in, and create, alternative modes of production and value accrual (often from positions that are at first glance difficult to describe as socio-economically dominating), those who seek alternatives to contemporary capitalism. They appear to hold strong hopes that Web3 practices can be further extended, in particular through DAOs, in order to bring upon financial democratisation, in some cases with a sense of looming social and ecological catastrophe (yet without any idea of collective action beyond small groups). On the other hand, there would seemingly be a larger group, who believe – albeit more lightly – in introducing blockchain technology as indeed a wonderful thing, to be added to Capital, to “perfect the system”, spreading this technology into the everyday lives of all consumers without them having to bother, for instance, with the troublesome usage of a self-custodial wallet. We may recognise here the potential for greater socio-economic administration of the population than ever before. This apparent contradiction can unfold in various ways, as seen here in the words of a partnership agent at a New York based Web3 software development platform:

“In some senses it’s extremely capitalistic because you’re imbuing ownership and oftentimes assigning value to a huge number of things (…). All of a sudden, there’s a dollar symbol next to this photo I minted. At the same time, I think it’s borderline socialist in some instances because, (...) if you effectively use the social networking example, a bunch of users who own the network (...), it’s a form of socialism (...). I think it’s very much capitalist, but it’s less shareholder capitalism, more stakeholder capitalism.” (i31)

Whatever the preferred attributive noun, Web3 disruption is a perpetuation of capitalism – as summed up by the co-founder of a San Francisco based NFT marketing platform: “If you can create industry and you can create businesses that provide good and utility to people, wherever you lie on the spectrum regarding capitalism, I think people can agree that that’s ultimately good.” (i18) Beyond the urge to collaborate with existing powers, we observe another striking manifestation of this in the simultaneous admiration and humanisation of key figures of contemporary capitalism. Tech entrepreneurial icons are frequently referenced, the object of a mix of irreverence and attraction:

“If I send some bitcoin to you, it is cryptographically provable that I sent it, or rather that someone with my private key sent it, and it is cryptographically provable that you have it. So much of life, and so much of software in the current web is not like that. So if I... to use Elon Musk again, and I have nothing against him, he just keeps coming up (laughter). Let’s say Elon Musk doesn't like me, or, whatever her name is, the CEO of Twitter / X, she can remove my tweets or maybe edit them (….) On Web 2, you’re trusting them.” (i52)

Beyond such glaringly evident observations, we encounter what appears to be a sincere belief that established oligarchs will naturally ‘come over’ to Web3:

Adam Mosseri who leads Instagram, which, you know, arguably is probably half of what Meta is these days, did a TED lecture, a very interesting presentation about what Web3 could mean for Instagram. (...) And what's interesting in there is that he talks about a creator led Internet built by blockchains and he actually describes what [name of interviewee’s platform] is, by accident, in many ways.” (i29)

Asked if he thought that either Adam Mosseri or the CEO of Meta, for that matter, might actually be prepared to give up business models based on centralised means of communication and data extraction, this interviewee laconically responded: “I don't know him well, so I wouldn't be able to [comment], but maybe, maybe he would.” Elon Musk is another such object of dizzy narratives, which evade political questions and attempt to strip away the larger-than-life aura of star entrepreneurs, reducing them to relatable, fallible peers. Responding to a question on whether his experience of Twitter had changed following Musk’s take-over, one independent Montreal-based entrepreneur declared:

“I think the mainstream media over-blew it. (…) TV or newspapers, they’re trying to politicise the whole situation, like, ‘Oh, Twitter's become some ultra right group’, but it’s not like that (…). I talk mostly about technology, I post a lot of memes, Pepe memes (laughter).” (i7)

This assertion illustrates a certain indulgence, if not outright fascination for the figure of Musk – who, as I write these lines, just posted on X a photograph supposedly showing his DOGE office, with, in full view beyond the mandatory desktop MAGA cap, a framed portrait of Pepe the Frog on the wall.