This is part 4 of my series, The Black Purposes of Web3, where I post my undergraduate thesis in sections. Read the series intro.

This post corresponds to the opening section of chapter 4 ("Web3: The Values, the Tech, and the Media"), and is adapted closely from my original writing.

The next iteration of the web proposed to follow Web 2.0 is, naturally, Web 3.0 (in this context stylized "Web3"), and some might suggest that it is already here. Since this technology is still in its early stages of development, Web3 has a bit of a nebulous definition, though it is guided by certain goals and principles. It is currently known as the "decentralized Web," an ecosystem of technologies that do not rely on any single authority to determine their functionality. Due to its lack of a central authority, it aims to return ownership of personal data and assets to users instead of the companies that currently maintain control of large amounts of data.

Simply put, as the Ethereum Foundation describes: "[Web 1.0] was read-only, [Web 2.0] is read-write, Web3 will be read-write-own."

Principles and Goals

To counteract the centralization, data hoarding practices, and privacy concerns of Web 2.0, Web3 finds its primary values in decentralization, data ownership, trustlessness. The success of any society is based on the flexible cooperation of its individuals, particularly in large numbers of people, which requires trust.

In the current era of globalization, where many different types of people are consistently interacting economically and technologically, the dominant form of trust is institutional trust. Institutional trust is a measure of the perceptions that members of a society have about the effectiveness, reliability, and fairness of entities such as the government, financial systems, and other institutions.[1] When these central authorities make questionable decisions or behave in a way that causes participants to doubt their fairness or effectiveness, institutional distrust becomes apparent when people no longer want to rely on those institutions. In terms of Web 2.0, the personal data and user privacy issues have caused some distrust in the institution of Big Tech and its methods of increasing economic gain.

Beyond institutional trust is a distributed form of trust in which there is no single third party that participants in a system need to trust in order for the system to function. In this sort of "trustless" system, "consensus is achieved without participants having to know or trust anything but the system itself."[2] Due to its underlying technologies, Web3 is an example of a trustless system that rejects the current centralization of Web 2.0 sites and applications.

Ethereum, a prominent organization and leader in the Web3 space, provides a coherent outline of the values and principles embedded in Web3:

  • Web3 is decentralized: instead of large swathes of the internet [sic] controlled and owned by centralized entities, ownership gets distributed amongst its builders and users.
  • Web3 is permissionless: everyone has equal access to participate in Web3, and no one gets excluded.
  • Web3 has native payments: it uses cryptocurrency for spending and sending money online instead of relying on the outdated infrastructure of banks and payment processors.
  • Web3 is trustless: it operates using incentives and economic mechanisms instead of relying on trusted third-parties.

These principles sound ambitious. But how does Web3 actually work? In the next post, I'll dive into the technical foundation—blockchain, smart contracts, and decentralized applications—that's supposed to make all of this possible.

References

1. P. J. Zak and S. Knack, "Trust and Growth," The Economic Journal, vol. 111, no. 470, pp. 295-321, 2001.

2. V. Buterin, "The Meaning of Decentralization," Medium, 2017.