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The Web3 movement’s quest to build an Internet that “cannot be evil.”

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Hope resurfaced in the mid-2000s, when new platforms and technologies allowed ordinary users to create and upload content that could reach thousands or even millions of people. If Web 1.0 saw the masses passively consume media created by publishers, in Web 2.0, the masses would be the creators: Wikipedia entries, Amazon product reviews, blog posts, YouTube videos, crowdfunding campaigns. Time captured the spirit of the moment with its 2006 Person of the Year selection: “You.”

But beneath the surface something very different was happening. User-generated content was free labor and the platforms were the masters. The big winners have gobbled up user data and used it, along with old-fashioned mergers and acquisitions, to build competitive moats around their businesses. Today, one company, Meta, owns three of the four largest social apps in the world, in terms of users. The fourth, YouTube, is owned by Google, which also accounts for about 90% of all Internet searches. As these companies increasingly conquered the web, it became clear that the user was not so much a creative partner as a source of raw material to be continually harvested. Escape is difficult. Meta controls access to your Facebook and Instagram photos, as well as your friends lists. Want to ditch Twitter or find a streaming alternative to YouTube? You can’t take your followers with you. And if a platform chooses to suspend or delete your account, you have little recourse.

In hindsight, there is no shortage of explanations as to why Web 2.0 failed to deliver on its early promises. Network effects. The unexpected power of big data. Corporate greed. None of these have gone away. So why should we expect anything new from Web3? For believers, the answer is simple: Blockchain is different.

Gavin Wood, an English computer scientist who helped program Ethereum, coined the term Web3 in 2014, the year Ethereum was launched. (He initially called it Web 3.0, but the decimal issue has since become outdated.) In his view, Web 2.0’s fatal flaw was trust. Everyone had to trust that larger platforms wouldn’t abuse their power as they grew. Few seemed to notice that Google’s famous motto, “Don’t be evil,” implied that being evil was an option. For Wood, Web3 means building systems that don’t rely on trusting people, companies, or governments to make moral choices, but instead make evil choices impossible. Blockchain is the crucial technology to make this happen. Brewster Kahle, the creator of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, described this goal as “blocking the open web.” Or, as Chris Dixon, general partner of Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto fund and one of Web3’s key promoters, puts it: “Can’t be evil > not be evil.”

A blockchain is a database that resides on a computer network rather than on a server. No person or organization owns it. Each computer, or node, stores a complete record of every transaction, so no one can control or destroy the network without first taking over most of the nodes. This makes it impossible for anyone to manipulate the database, for example by assigning themselves more tokens. Every change and transaction is recorded on the chain, for all the world to see. There is no central authority you can trust to enforce the rules.

So how exactly are blockchains supposed to block the web? Currently, platforms like Instagram and TikTok own the data you generate while using it, store it on their servers and make it difficult or impossible to extract. In a Web3 world, the theory goes, your data would live on a blockchain, not on a central server. Instead of owning it via platforms, you could control access to it via a private cryptographic key that only you own. If you get tired of one service, you could move your data to another. And a platform couldn’t change the rules of the game by building walls around its data, because it would never own it in the first place.

Countless Web3 startups are trying to apply this theory by creating blockchain-based alternatives to pretty much any platform you can name: Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, Google Docs. Liberal billionaire Frank McCourt has set aside $25 million to develop a protocol for putting your social graph (the interconnected map of relationships you’ve built over the years but which is likely owned by Facebook) on the blockchain. A company called Sapien claims to build an entire Web3 metaverse.

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