The reference is the third book in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, FYI.

It’s traditional at this time of the year to either look back at the best/worst ofs from the year before, or to prognosticate about the year ahead.

This point in the trajectory of tech feels different, as we venture across the threshold of Web 3.0. meaning that there have been two prior iterations:

Web 1.0 held the promise of delivering an information superhighway, where information would readily and easily be available at our fingertips. Facts, news, travel, entertainment and ecommerce in its many forms. Companies spent hundreds of thousands to hire newly minted web development shops to build simple websites that could be done now through freeware. Young developers with no business experience were starting companies and huge amounts of money were being thrown at them. It didn’t matter that they weren’t earning any revenue. At all. This was the New Economy – an age of eyeballs uber alles. With too much money being thrown at too much youth and inexperience, the center could not hold. The bubble burst. But a lot of that youth and inexperience did get rich, without needing to learn basic business, mind you. As a result, meet a good number of the next stage tech investors. And down the slippery slope we go…

Web 2.0 emerged from the ashes and the next iteration was the Age of Social. The promise was to bring people closer together, with users in charge. It was the rise of the global community, and everyone had a voice. Promise delivered, but at what cost? Free, of course, but there’s always a price to pay and at first, that price was the gathering of all of our personal information. Then censoring and deplatforming people whose opinions were contrary to the various talking points/agendas of the keepers of the keys. As a result, the global community was that much less free: in the ubiquitous hands of the tech cabal, ‘free’ came at a very steep cost.

Next up: Web 3.0, a still-hazy term embracing an amorphous amalgam of blockchain-based, decentralized systems and tech that will revitalize the original promise of the internet.  You know the drill re Tony Parisi’s Seven Rules of the Metaverse, including:

Rule #1. There is only one Metaverse.

Rule #2: The Metaverse is for everyone.

Rule #3: Nobody controls the Metaverse.

Rule #4: The Metaverse is open.

Rule #5: The Metaverse is hardware-independent.

Rule #6: The Metaverse is a Network.

Rule #7: The Metaverse is the Internet.

 

We’ve heard all this before. Twice.

Heads up: Jack Dorsey Stirs Uproar by Dismissing Web3 as a Venture Capitalists’ Plaything, said Bloomberg, as Dorsey tweeted:

@Jack

You don’t own “web3.” The VCs and their LPs do. It will never escape their incentives. It’s ultimately a centralized entity with a different label. Know what you’re getting into…… Twitter started as a corporation. It’s had corporate incentives from day 1…”web3″ has the same corporate incentives, but hides it under “decentralization.” It’s literally a different cap table structure.

Read @Jack’s thread and take note as Investors Snap Up Metaverse Real Estate in a Virtual Land Boom.

A caveat worth heeding, considering it comes from the Twitter founder/recently exited CEO, whose platform has long silenced opinions not in lockstep with those espoused by the tech cabal.

 

The last two years have gotten people globally acclimated/relegated to an online existence. The metaverse is simply the next step towards total immersion, and let’s not forget that it has been drilled into us over the last two years that we don’t need to own cars or property or personal belonging – sort of like life in the matrix. Curiously, even as the one percent who espouse this future buy up more and more property et al – and various forms of real estate in the metaverse and other components of Web 3.0 including and not limited to crypto in its various forms, as well as depressed real estate in the now-abandoned former tech hubs.

Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier shared a story “where someone came up to [violinist] Jascha Heifetz and said, “Wow, your violin sounded great,” and he held the violin up to his ear and said, ‘Funny, I don’t hear anything.’” That’s how virtual reality is. It’s not anything by itself. It’s purely how it’s used.”

 

We have long been the consummate optimist and are well aware of the fact that tech has always been the territory of the rebels, the misfits, the troublemakers, the square pegs in the round holes who, even during the tyrannical rein of the second internet age, sought out or forged their own outposts and rebel bases.

As the current internet stands, everything is trackable. All personal information can easily be collected. If the first two iterations of tech taught us nothing but that, where do you think, from the perspective of the tech cabal, Web 3.0 is going? In their walled virtual worlds meant to replace everything you need on terra firma.

On the other side there are the rebels who also see a new frontier, albeit somewhat less dystopian and with more freedom.

 

Now is the time to be circumspect, to proceed at your own risk, and to stop and ponder, as we’re at the precipice of both a new year and a new iteration of tech: is this the point where it may well be that Big Tech will attempt to jump the shark and go just a step 2022 far? Time will tell. Onward and forward.