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May 8, 2022
Does web3 exist without Twitter?
It’s a question that’s been on my mind since Elon Musk’s $44B Twitter takeover filing a 13-D to take the public company private. This may not be the question to ask, but it is where I started in my reflection. So let’s dive in here and see where it takes us.
First, what’s going on with Twitter and ultimately Elon’s vision?
Elon laid out his plans for Twitter in a recent board meeting on Friday. NYT kindly summarized some of the key points here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/06/technology/elon-musk-twitter-pitch-deck.html
Elon secured $7.1B from almost two dozen investors including Binance, a16z, Sequoia, and his close pal Larry Ellison to help him with this endeavor + reducing his bank loans by half. Full details below. TY TechCrunch.
At the heart of these investment decisions was the belief in Elon + Jack’s vision of what Twitter could be as Elon elaborated in his recent interview with Chris Anderson @TED2022 in Vancouver this past April. You can rewatch here.
After listening to the interview and its entirety, one would realize Elon has been no ordinary CEO for Tesla. He was on the brink of bankruptcy from 2017-2019, some of the toughest years of his life. He learned, in intricate detail, the process of how every piece of Tesla’s 17 components was manufactured and produced. During those years he was boots on ground… living, breathing, and solving problems with his team staying far from the ivory tower. His vision was not simply to evolve our world through the production of an EV, but create a sustainable system, a start to finish operation at scale.
Now for Twitter, his mission is simple. He wants free speech. He wants those same principles our Founding Fathers envisioned for our country, to exist today in all facets of life, including our digital presence.
Pausing quickly on this thought, lets elaborate on what exactly is web3. If you already have a basic understand feel free to skim through.
To understand web3, we have to understand how it evolved starting at web1.
web1 (Read):~1990-2000, The days of dial up internet. There was no option for communicating back and forth. Users had the ability to gather information, but not add or modify information. Pre-wikipedia days. My earliest memory…5th grade computer class, playing “learning to type” games.
web2 (Read, Write): ~2000-2010, Welcome to broadband. Websites now allowed people to change content and interact with one another, it became social. I wasn’t allowed to have a myspace account in high school, but if I was that’s where kids those days started to communicate and express their own individuality.
The dominators of web2: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon. They controlled how digital platforms evolved and with that control, users had less privacy and security of their own digital footprint.
Brief interlude on Amazon... Jeff began Cadabra, later incorporated as Amazon, in 1994, as an online bookstore. By 1998, Amazon was selling music and video games and by the mid 2000s they were expanding into a tech company with E2C and S3 technologies, just fancy ways to describe how data is stored and what was coined as “cloud computing.” Instead of uploading documents on a disk, we now had access to documents on the internet.
web2.5 (Read, Write (Advanced)): ~2010- Present. Although not officially a coined phase of the internet... people prefer round numbers. What started as a period of mass adoption has quickly turned into a period of transition from centralization to decentralization. In 2010, there were nearly 2B internet users. By 2012, 1B users were on Facebook. Welcome PAAS, or Platforms-as-a-service. Developers created applications, put them on the cloud, users could now access them anytime and anywhere. We all took our first selfies in 2016 thanks mostly to IG.
Still in web2.5… let’s elaborate on this period being a time of transition. Nearly 5B internet users to date rely on centralized networks to keep their personal data secure. BUT as a result we have not always kept this network secure.
Top 10 Data Breaches:
Yahoo, 2013 Target, 2013 MySpace, 2013 Adobe, 2013 US Office of Personal Management, 2015 Adult FriendFinder Networks, 2016 Equifax, 2017 Marriott International, 2018 First American Financial Corp, 2019 Facebook, 2019 SolarWinds, 2020 https://www.secureworld.io/industry-news/top-10-data-breaches-of-all-time
Technology has since developed away from these centralized networks and into decentralized networks, through the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and decentralized protocols, where users can now own their own data thereby keeping it more secure.
Artificial Intelligence: computer doing human tasks IE: Apple’s Siri (2010)/ Amazon Alex (2014)
Machine Learning: Type of AI for software that uses algorithms based on historical data to make predictions for future data IE: Facial Recognition
Decentralized Protocols: separated networks of computers with no central hub IE: Blockchain
web3 (Read, Write, Own): ~Present to Future. Blockchain, the technology used to decentralize the virtual world and allow users to collaborate and interact intelligently without fear of their data being compromised. Transparency + Openness... the two major goals for web3.
In summary…
Where we are heading…
So why exactly was I asking myself whether web3 can exist without Twitter? I was asking myself this question because I found all that I knew about web3 on Twitter. Now that Twitter was top of mind for many people, I thought…what if Twitter spontaneously detonates, are we left picking up the fragmentation of web3? Well, the laws of physics exist for a reason and explosive material doesn’t spontaneous detonate without an ignition source; therefore, it is unlikely that Twitter will just completely go away.
The better question to ask ourselves is not whether web3 and Twitter are dependent on one another, but rather how do we actually use Twitter today and how do we propel concepts of web3 forward? Have we seen a variation of “Twitter” in the past as a way to recognize a pattern in what we may anticipate for its future?
I was home with my mom this weekend and we were chatting about her childhood. How did she find out about what was going on in the world? What medium did she use? What did her parents use?
Her parents listened to the radio and she remembers from an early age having a TV. There were no cable subscriptions back then. She seldom watched TV, but when she did she would watch cowboy movies with her dad in the evening and sometimes during the day she would watch Pop Eye… mostly cartoons. Her parents would watch the news, but admits she often didn’t watch it… she was a kid remember. Her dad mostly read the newspaper, while her mom, who wasn’t as literate, would listen to the radio or talk to her friends. My mom remembers having to present to the class a current event every week. Each student would cut out a newspaper article and summarize the article they read to the class, as newspapers were very common back then.
When my mom was in college, she relied on the library for information sources. Her college campus had a tv room where students, like herself, would gather to watch movies and programs socially. By the time she married my Dad, however, TVs were everywhere. They had a TV, but watched it infrequently as they were both busy working. She started her first job without a computer. Before they had my sister and I, most of the news they received was through watching TV, when they had time, or through word of mouth or phone.
When I was growing up, we would watch the Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. Every morning we would either listen to the Today Show before school or KYW News Radio 1016… I can still remember it's jingle. My dad read the NYT and Philadelphia Inquirer every morning. In 4th grade, I remember we bought our first computer because my AOL screen name was tapdancer91. I grew up loving Frank Sinatra so naturally was taking tap dancing classes at the time. 91 represented the year I was born. I remember in 7th grade when I got a new email address, which was daretobeccentric@verizon.net. At the time, I had just learned what eccentric meant and I wanted to be different! The internet was not used for reading the news, but rather a replacement for the volumes of encyclopedias aka world books my grandparents owned and communicating with other people.
Today my mom’s soul source of news is from TV. She uses the computer for email communication or looking up information. Rarely she reads the newspaper. I, however, never watch TV, unless socially, and consume my news and interact with others through my phone or computer. I still receive the paper edition of the WSJ, but it’s merely for the sentimental value and pleasure of reading a physical paper.
So why am I telling you all this? Well, my mom made a really interesting point. When she was in junior high she remembers being brought into a school wide assembly to find out that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Fast track to 9/11, as a teacher at a local high school, she remembers seeing the plane towers fly into the twin towers on TV. There were no TVs in the classrooms at the time, but she remembers one of her colleagues pulling her aside to witness this awful moment in our history.
Radio, TV, newspapers, and now phones + computers exist today as tools and access for connecting with the world. What the TV is for my mom today is what the Internet is for me. My mom watches the Nightly News, I read a post on Twitter.
Twitter, today, is a depository of information for people and a way to be connected with each other. For me, it has been my main source of information about web3. Society, as a whole, continues to evolve and we develop new methods for finding out information. We may have grown up consuming information + connecting with others one way, but over time, as society and technology evolves, we learn new ways, new processes of receiving + sharing information. Hence our patterns, our habits change over time…some faster than others. What we are witnessing, in the here and now, is part of our change and our evolution. Are computers replacing TVs? Is Twitter replacing cable? Are discords replacing websites? Are NFTs replacing the physical elements of society? The exchange of information is changing in web3 so the question I leave you with is how will you change your ways, your patterns to evolve with technology?
Next week I’ll outline some of the ways I’m using Twitter to learn about web3. Till next week, give this some thought, but don’t forget to keep it real.
May 8, 2022
Does web3 exist without Twitter?
It’s a question that’s been on my mind since Elon Musk’s $44B Twitter takeover filing a 13-D to take the public company private. This may not be the question to ask, but it is where I started in my reflection. So let’s dive in here and see where it takes us.
First, what’s going on with Twitter and ultimately Elon’s vision?
Elon laid out his plans for Twitter in a recent board meeting on Friday. NYT kindly summarized some of the key points here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/06/technology/elon-musk-twitter-pitch-deck.html
Elon secured $7.1B from almost two dozen investors including Binance, a16z, Sequoia, and his close pal Larry Ellison to help him with this endeavor + reducing his bank loans by half. Full details below. TY TechCrunch.
At the heart of these investment decisions was the belief in Elon + Jack’s vision of what Twitter could be as Elon elaborated in his recent interview with Chris Anderson @TED2022 in Vancouver this past April. You can rewatch here.
After listening to the interview and its entirety, one would realize Elon has been no ordinary CEO for Tesla. He was on the brink of bankruptcy from 2017-2019, some of the toughest years of his life. He learned, in intricate detail, the process of how every piece of Tesla’s 17 components was manufactured and produced. During those years he was boots on ground… living, breathing, and solving problems with his team staying far from the ivory tower. His vision was not simply to evolve our world through the production of an EV, but create a sustainable system, a start to finish operation at scale.
Now for Twitter, his mission is simple. He wants free speech. He wants those same principles our Founding Fathers envisioned for our country, to exist today in all facets of life, including our digital presence.
Pausing quickly on this thought, lets elaborate on what exactly is web3. If you already have a basic understand feel free to skim through.
To understand web3, we have to understand how it evolved starting at web1.
web1 (Read):~1990-2000, The days of dial up internet. There was no option for communicating back and forth. Users had the ability to gather information, but not add or modify information. Pre-wikipedia days. My earliest memory…5th grade computer class, playing “learning to type” games.
web2 (Read, Write): ~2000-2010, Welcome to broadband. Websites now allowed people to change content and interact with one another, it became social. I wasn’t allowed to have a myspace account in high school, but if I was that’s where kids those days started to communicate and express their own individuality.
The dominators of web2: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon. They controlled how digital platforms evolved and with that control, users had less privacy and security of their own digital footprint.
Brief interlude on Amazon... Jeff began Cadabra, later incorporated as Amazon, in 1994, as an online bookstore. By 1998, Amazon was selling music and video games and by the mid 2000s they were expanding into a tech company with E2C and S3 technologies, just fancy ways to describe how data is stored and what was coined as “cloud computing.” Instead of uploading documents on a disk, we now had access to documents on the internet.
web2.5 (Read, Write (Advanced)): ~2010- Present. Although not officially a coined phase of the internet... people prefer round numbers. What started as a period of mass adoption has quickly turned into a period of transition from centralization to decentralization. In 2010, there were nearly 2B internet users. By 2012, 1B users were on Facebook. Welcome PAAS, or Platforms-as-a-service. Developers created applications, put them on the cloud, users could now access them anytime and anywhere. We all took our first selfies in 2016 thanks mostly to IG.
Still in web2.5… let’s elaborate on this period being a time of transition. Nearly 5B internet users to date rely on centralized networks to keep their personal data secure. BUT as a result we have not always kept this network secure.
Top 10 Data Breaches:
Yahoo, 2013 Target, 2013 MySpace, 2013 Adobe, 2013 US Office of Personal Management, 2015 Adult FriendFinder Networks, 2016 Equifax, 2017 Marriott International, 2018 First American Financial Corp, 2019 Facebook, 2019 SolarWinds, 2020 https://www.secureworld.io/industry-news/top-10-data-breaches-of-all-time
Technology has since developed away from these centralized networks and into decentralized networks, through the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and decentralized protocols, where users can now own their own data thereby keeping it more secure.
Artificial Intelligence: computer doing human tasks IE: Apple’s Siri (2010)/ Amazon Alex (2014)
Machine Learning: Type of AI for software that uses algorithms based on historical data to make predictions for future data IE: Facial Recognition
Decentralized Protocols: separated networks of computers with no central hub IE: Blockchain
web3 (Read, Write, Own): ~Present to Future. Blockchain, the technology used to decentralize the virtual world and allow users to collaborate and interact intelligently without fear of their data being compromised. Transparency + Openness... the two major goals for web3.
In summary…
Where we are heading…
So why exactly was I asking myself whether web3 can exist without Twitter? I was asking myself this question because I found all that I knew about web3 on Twitter. Now that Twitter was top of mind for many people, I thought…what if Twitter spontaneously detonates, are we left picking up the fragmentation of web3? Well, the laws of physics exist for a reason and explosive material doesn’t spontaneous detonate without an ignition source; therefore, it is unlikely that Twitter will just completely go away.
The better question to ask ourselves is not whether web3 and Twitter are dependent on one another, but rather how do we actually use Twitter today and how do we propel concepts of web3 forward? Have we seen a variation of “Twitter” in the past as a way to recognize a pattern in what we may anticipate for its future?
I was home with my mom this weekend and we were chatting about her childhood. How did she find out about what was going on in the world? What medium did she use? What did her parents use?
Her parents listened to the radio and she remembers from an early age having a TV. There were no cable subscriptions back then. She seldom watched TV, but when she did she would watch cowboy movies with her dad in the evening and sometimes during the day she would watch Pop Eye… mostly cartoons. Her parents would watch the news, but admits she often didn’t watch it… she was a kid remember. Her dad mostly read the newspaper, while her mom, who wasn’t as literate, would listen to the radio or talk to her friends. My mom remembers having to present to the class a current event every week. Each student would cut out a newspaper article and summarize the article they read to the class, as newspapers were very common back then.
When my mom was in college, she relied on the library for information sources. Her college campus had a tv room where students, like herself, would gather to watch movies and programs socially. By the time she married my Dad, however, TVs were everywhere. They had a TV, but watched it infrequently as they were both busy working. She started her first job without a computer. Before they had my sister and I, most of the news they received was through watching TV, when they had time, or through word of mouth or phone.
When I was growing up, we would watch the Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. Every morning we would either listen to the Today Show before school or KYW News Radio 1016… I can still remember it's jingle. My dad read the NYT and Philadelphia Inquirer every morning. In 4th grade, I remember we bought our first computer because my AOL screen name was tapdancer91. I grew up loving Frank Sinatra so naturally was taking tap dancing classes at the time. 91 represented the year I was born. I remember in 7th grade when I got a new email address, which was daretobeccentric@verizon.net. At the time, I had just learned what eccentric meant and I wanted to be different! The internet was not used for reading the news, but rather a replacement for the volumes of encyclopedias aka world books my grandparents owned and communicating with other people.
Today my mom’s soul source of news is from TV. She uses the computer for email communication or looking up information. Rarely she reads the newspaper. I, however, never watch TV, unless socially, and consume my news and interact with others through my phone or computer. I still receive the paper edition of the WSJ, but it’s merely for the sentimental value and pleasure of reading a physical paper.
So why am I telling you all this? Well, my mom made a really interesting point. When she was in junior high she remembers being brought into a school wide assembly to find out that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Fast track to 9/11, as a teacher at a local high school, she remembers seeing the plane towers fly into the twin towers on TV. There were no TVs in the classrooms at the time, but she remembers one of her colleagues pulling her aside to witness this awful moment in our history.
Radio, TV, newspapers, and now phones + computers exist today as tools and access for connecting with the world. What the TV is for my mom today is what the Internet is for me. My mom watches the Nightly News, I read a post on Twitter.
Twitter, today, is a depository of information for people and a way to be connected with each other. For me, it has been my main source of information about web3. Society, as a whole, continues to evolve and we develop new methods for finding out information. We may have grown up consuming information + connecting with others one way, but over time, as society and technology evolves, we learn new ways, new processes of receiving + sharing information. Hence our patterns, our habits change over time…some faster than others. What we are witnessing, in the here and now, is part of our change and our evolution. Are computers replacing TVs? Is Twitter replacing cable? Are discords replacing websites? Are NFTs replacing the physical elements of society? The exchange of information is changing in web3 so the question I leave you with is how will you change your ways, your patterns to evolve with technology?
Next week I’ll outline some of the ways I’m using Twitter to learn about web3. Till next week, give this some thought, but don’t forget to keep it real.
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