The hoopla around “Web 3.0”

Christopher Mins writing for WSJ:

These are the questions investors, engineers and more than a few starry-eyed tech dreamers are asking themselves—among them former Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, whose interest in these questions helps explain his sudden departure from Twitter. The answers are taking the form of services and apps that are the first outlines of what their creators hope will someday eat the internet completely: a distributed, democratically ruled “Web 3.0” or “Web3” that will rise like a phoenix of 1990s-era Web 1.0-idealism from out of the ashes of the corporation-controlled Web 2.0 that all of us currently inhabit.

These are perfect vehicles for the “new era” of the web, claimed to have dawned and usher in “decentralisation”. It will represent “no single point of failure”. Decentralisation with cryptocurrency and metaverse- represent the “evolution” of “internet as envisaged by the creators”.

I am merely paraphrased what you will read from the likes of Wired and other Silicon Valley rags. These trends will be accelerated as we end up in 2022 and beyond (in the era of ongoing pandemic). These are fundamental structural issues that often point to a different world order, and the “evolution” will be chaotic. I foresee cartelisation and centralisation of data to target individuals with slow privacy creep and erosion of fundamental values. These are playing out in the open. Just connect the dots.

As again, healthcare is completely unprepared for the oncoming tsunami. The trends towards data balkanisation will be accelerated as VC firms and other technology companies shift and tilt the power balance in their favour.

We need to understand “blockchains” too- I was enthused about reading EMR’s hosted on blockchain. Whether they can serve as a record for the “population” health, it’s hard to say but they are compelling.

Although critics abound.

“The current blockchains are like woefully underpowered computers that can only do a very, very small amount of transactions, and the things they can do are shockingly limited,” says Stephen Diehl, a programmer in London whose frequent essays about the pitfalls of blockchain technology and Web3 have made him one of Web3’s most visible and cogent critics.

I’d be tracking this closely.