At the dawn of the Age of Social, tech bros built promised the world  goodness and light – to bring the world closer together; to give everyone a voice – built walled gardens, amassed billions of users, made themselves more or less the only game in town and became a vital part of life. Which made them too big to fail.

Or so we’d been told. Often.

Yet by the end of September, Facebook’s Meta Lost Two-Thirds of Market Cap Value From 2021, NewsMax reported. Mark Zuckerberg Admits He ‘Got It Wrong’ as Meta Lays Off 11,000 Employees. At Least He Signed His Name. Twitter laid off 7500 employees – but at least Zuckerberg signed his name??? Which will no doubt make all the difference, especially once the benefits run out.

Under Musk, now we’re told that Twitter is not too big – or essential – to fail.

We’d often heard that both Facebook and Twitter were vital institutions. Yet we’re shifting to next phase of tech, that might necessarily hold true. Each new phase so far has brought about what we’ll call a techtonic (sic) shift, and that may well be what we’re starting to see.

Yahoo, the once go-to Web 1 search engine, retracted as Web 2’s Google rose to replace it. Spectacularly. Yahoo didn’t disappear off the map, but it’s hardly a dominant tech darling it once was.

 

The FTX Debacle

Zuckerberg was hardly ever one to inspire trust, so graphics aside, how likely is one about to step into his metaverse? But is Web 3 and crypto, to date, inspiring trust, or potentially taking us down an even darker hole? Web 3 has definitely entered the zeitgeist and might have at least started to get its sea legs thanks in no small part of NFTs and the metaverse aside, but now enter FTX which, we learn that FTX Tapped Into Customer Accounts to Fund Risky Bets, Setting Up Its Downfall. According to the Wall Street Journal, FTX’s chief executive told investors this week that an affiliated trading firm owes the crypto exchange about $10 billion – and can’t cover withdrawals that Investors might want to make as the funds aren’t there – and that the ‘affiliated trading firm’ to which until-very-recently FTX Chief Executive Sam Bankman-Fried referred was Alameda, which was also founded by…Bankman-Fried!  Talk about playing it fast and loose…It’s no wonder that ‘crypto’ and ‘Ponzi scheme’ are often used in the same breath.

Between the hacks and this, crypto, one of the foundations of Web 3, is not about to go mainstream any time soon.

Every new iteration of tech brings about special challenges to its creators – and a fair amount of grifters/snake oil salespeople – or arguably, in the case of crypto, money launderers – looking to make a quick buck, aided in no small part by the hype machine aka the tech press and analysts. There’s also a battle currently going on for what that next iteration will look like – and what will power it. Will it be blockchain and crypto? Is it still early days or is crypto still a TBD? We’ve yet to see how Web 3 will shape up.

The Two Web 3s

Which is currently proceeding in two directions, one of which gets little ink: there’s the so-named Web 3 movement (think blockchain and crypto; an approach which has appropriated that term and that gets all of the airplay), and D3, which is also decentralized, but think peer-to-peer re Napster.

And is more difficult for the tech bros to appropriate.

As The Atlantic put it,” the web is now a place where many people feel exploited, manipulated, and tracked; where freedom of speech is being tugged around in a strange culture war; and where the rich get richer… If these problems are intrinsically linked to consolidated tech giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon, why not embrace technologies that decentralize power?”

…Danny O’Brien, a senior fellow at the Filecoin Foundation, a decentralized storage project,) “describes a “dramatic split” between DWeb and Web3 as a recent phenomenon—back in 2019…they had a lot more overlap, but they’ve (been) separating in the past year or so. He attributes this to the growing concern about the ecological impact of Bitcoin, the conspicuous consumption of the NFT craze, and some aesthetic and cultural quibbles: “The traditional decentralized-web community is uncomfortable with the idea of the tech bro,” and with people who “were coming in because of the delicious smell of money.”

 

Early adopters got rich off crypto and NFTs, but as we know, if it looks like it’s too good to be true, it probably is and take heed: what the final iteration of Web 3 will be is still anyone’s guess – and anyone’s ballgame. Tech is a language and an industry based on zeros and ones. Time will tell if crypto will be the literal coin of the realm in the decentralized online world – and if it truly will be decentralized at all, as promised – but as it stands now, tech is still a space dominated by dollars and hopefully this next time around, at least a bit of sense.

Onward and forward.