Web3 has its’ own language, norms, standards, and beliefs. It’s just part of the deal when someone rejects the tradfi machine and makes a bet on the web3 idea.

But web3 mantras — “ownership economy”, “decentralization”, “code is law” — are more than just rallying cries. They’re the bedrock of a social and political philosophy. It’s easy to take for granted that we are attempting to build systems that will change the way we see ourselves and interact with one another on individual to societal levels.

I spent between 2018-2021 researching how certain web2 based platforms like social medias and games have become intertwined in kids lives, and how difficult it is for us all to balance our use. The people who created these technologies — Justin Rosenstein who invented the like button, Aza Raskin who invented the infinite scroll, and others — were just trying to build better products, and did not intend to help build the monstrosities that they did. Don’t get me wrong— social media and games have done a lot of good. But they’ve also done a lot of bad, bad that was avoidable, on multiple levels.

If we wrestle with the potential implications of the technologies we are building while we are building them, it is more likely that we will be able to steer them in the correct direction. Web3 isn’t being built overnight, so we have a bit of time in this building / adoption / narrative building stages to do this. But we can’t take this time for granted either.

Wrestling with these questions is not only a matter of ethical duty. If we approach the building of web3 with a correctly informed understanding of the human, human motivation, human interaction, and the like, then we are more likely to build solutions that humans are more likely to adopt successfully on a large scale.

Thankfully we have a few lenses and strategies in going about this analysis. We can draw on social, political and economic philosophies that goes back hundreds if not thousands of years, as well as more recent experiments and events. If we are right that there is something to web3 that will define the future, we might as well build a future that serves the good of humanity, and not the opposite.

I will note some of my own ideas and learnings about this area of questioning in posts going forward.

Onward and Upward!