The treasure that never rusts
Whenever I write anything about "Web3," I am beset with the self-defeating feeling that the concept is impervious to criticism. Not because it is any way defensible — its success will make the world immeasurably worse in every conceivable way, more divided, more unequal, more paranoid, and more unsustainable — but because the concept seems likely to profit from any attention it's given. With every piece written about it, it is made to seem more substantial, more unstoppable, to a degree that seems unlikely to be canceled out by any resistance or skepticism any particular essay might generate.
As Evgeny Morozov argues in a recent essay, it's a map for a territory that crypto investors hope to create. "The business model of most Web 3 ventures is self-referential in the extreme," he writes, "feeding off people’s faith in the inevitable transition from Web2.0 to Web3." And he asks an important question: "How does one criticize a flawed, unrealistic, and extremely partial narrative that is, nonetheless, being rapidly turned into reality?" That is, how can you talk about it without legitimizing it? It's a bit like the related "metaverse" that way; as Will Oremus argues in this Washington Post piece, journalists do the world a disservice by talking about the metaverse as if it is simply exists rather than being a marketing concept for a business model that tech companies are seeking to impose and exploit.
Since Web3 and the metaverse seem like competing ways to talk about the same oppressive future, maybe the best thing to do is let their partisans battle each other to a standstill while ordinary people go about their business. After all, neither is likely to have a meaningful use case for the general public unless conditions in the world become even worse than they are now. While the Web3 and metaverse boosters will no doubt do their best to accomplish that universal immiseration, they may be too greedy to join forces and get the job done properly.
The extremely wealthy people pushing these concepts know that criticism from marginal sources will serve mainly to legitimize them as things to know about. That said, this recent essay on Web3 by Moxie Marlinspike (not a Dragon Quest character but the co-founder of the messaging app Signal) was widely circulated and seemed to bother the Web3 people a bit. This is probably because Marlinspike's critique appears to be grounded not in ideology but in practical concerns with the technology. Thus the Web3 people responded as though Marlinspike was basically sympathetic to their aims and was providing them with a to-do list to expedite their conquest. ("Practical concerns" are taken as proof of ideological consensus, a sign that the key battle has already been won.) But that still came across as spin to deflect his main point, which is that Web3 is fueled entirely by the "gold rush" mentality supplied by speculation in crypto.
Marlinspike writes about how Web3's dynamics don't decentralize the internet but create new centralized platforms like OpenSea that facilitate most users' interactions with blockchains. That is because people generally want the simplicity and standardization that a platform provides, and not to operate in a trustless environment where every action is fraught with risk and one can't even necessarily be sure what the stakes are. "When you think about it," he writes, "OpenSea would actually be much 'better' in the immediate sense if all the web3 parts were gone. It would be faster, cheaper for everyone, and easier to use." But he also notes that there would be no OpenSea if people with crypto fortunes didn't need to create a system to help make their fake money real. "If they had built a platform to buy and sell images that wasn’t nominally based on crypto, I don’t think it would have taken off," Marlinspike writes. NFTs would be about as relevant as the Diablo III marketplace.
The so-called debate around Web3 isn't ultimately about anything practical; it's about whether you think the elites invested in crypto should be able to leverage their already substantial power to legitimatize it and make even more money, or if they should be met with resistance (up to and including expropriation). If there is a point to writing otherwise futile critiques of Web3, it's the same as that for writing the equally futile-seeming critiques of capitalism: to make class struggle more explicit.