Chronic. It’s the madness of the moment in Silicon Valley. A controversy that has taken aspects of “Religious war”, in the words of journalist Casey Newton, a technology specialist. The subject ? The “Web 3”, or project of new architecture of the Internet, a concept which exploded in 2021. The boiling point is not without recalling the beginnings of the Net. Remember. Web 1 was the circulation of information (Google, Wikipedia, e-mail, online press). Web 2.0: the circulation of content through social networks (Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram). Here is Web 3: the new frontier of the Internet.
Define Web 3? Let’s not even try. The concept is quite nebulous – the stakeholders themselves agree. It borrows from notions, based on the blockchain, which remain largely esoteric for the common people of the Net: bitcoins, “non-fungible tokens” (or NFT for “Non-fungible tokens”) and other barbarisms that appeared in 2021 such as “DAO”, for “decentralized autonomous organization”, or “DeFi”, for “decentralized finance”… Even Elon Musk, a cryptocurrency virtuoso, is perplexed. “I may be too old”, did he consider in a interview at Babylon Bee, a conservative Christian satirical site. Unless Web 3 borrows “More to marketing “, he suspected, that ” reality “.
Web 3 enthusiasts hold out the vision of a decentralized Internet, where users could transport their data from one site to another without being held to ransom by the tech giants. They would no longer have to deliver passwords to digital snitches, but would log in using an encrypted wallet. Target of decentralizers: the supremacy of large platforms, these Gafam (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) who control most of our activities. Rather than waiting for Congress to intervene, they want to give power back to the small digital people.
In mid-November, the rebels tried a coup: buy one of the thirteen original copies of the American Constitution of 1787, on sale at Sotheby’s. Their group, called ConstitutionDAO, has collected more than 40 million dollars (35.2 million euros) – in cryptocurrencies – from 17,400 amateurs. At the last minute, the founder of a hedge fund put 43 million on the table to save the sacred text of the sans-culottes from Web 3 …
Seeming idealism
In mid-December, another incident greatly amused the Valley. Jack Dorsey – who lets off steam on Twitter now that he’s no longer its CEO – has been blocked – on his own network! – by Marc Andreessen, the star of venture capitalists, for having dared to question the purity of the latter’s decentralizing intentions. Elon Musk quipped: “Does anyone know where Web 3 is?” I can not find it. “ Jack Dorsey had resumed on the fly: “He is somewhere between a and z” – a16z designates the firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz -, implying that finance is already getting its hands on the new generation of the Web. Jack Dorsey is not wrong: the venture capital firm has already invested $ 3 billion in “3” start-ups.
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