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I suspect the blockchain nonsense (which I refuse to let have the "Web3" title) will win out because there's so much commercial incentive and if there's one thi

I suspect the blockchain nonsense (which I refuse to let have the "Web3" title) will win out because there's so much commercial incentive and if there's one thing we've seen from the internet's history, it's that money and commercial interest accelerates adoption even when maybe it shouldn't. I also think federation has the Google conditioning of the mainstream working against it. The mainstream's been conditioned to think of the internet in terms of global platforms. Switching to interacting with smaller nodes is a paradigm shift that I don't believe most users are willing to make, especially given the benefits (like use of personal data and human-scale moderation) don't seem to matter to the majority given the apathy towards Facebook's and Google's business practices. That said, much like gopher still exists in parallel with HTTP, IMO it doesn't really matter which wins because the mainstream using one is not mutually exclusive with some of us using the other.

littlestymaar 5y ago
> I suspect the blockchain nonsense (which I refuse to let have the "Web3" title) will win out because there's so much commercial incentive and if there's one thing we've seen from the internet's history, it's that money and commercial interest accelerates adoption even when maybe it shouldn't. Blockchain has already “won”: it's now a mainstream investment item, with investment firms bullish. But it also completely failed its goal of decentralization (almost every token holder uses a centralized exchange) and also isn't a competitor to the web at all: you can't connect to a blockchain with a web browser, and every “totally-not-web”3 platform out there is in fact built on top of the Web.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  It's not too late for the bubble to burst. When investors realize they put millions of dollars into a system which can process under 100 requests per second they may have a stroke and the whole thing could collapse like the .net bubble burst in the 90s and took away much of the landscape with it.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    The issue is that the entire financial market is a bubble now, not only crypto, but stocks, credit (mortgage, student loans, all private debt really), real estate, etc. And as we've seen with the 2008 crisis response and the coronavirus response, politics in the Western World (that is: not China) are willing to do as much they can to keep this bubble from exploding. And as we've seen from how Japan dealt with the Asian Crisis, you can pretty much keep such a bubble alive forever (despite Japan being crippled by its demographic decline). Maybe not forever forever mind you, but my point is that if/when it collapses it's likely to collapse when the entire financial system does (and, as much as I hate the current state of affairs, I don't think there will a positive outcome if it happened). Edit: just to be clear, I wish this stack of turd would disappear, but I don't believe it.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      > The issue is that the entire financial market is a bubble now, not only crypto, but stocks, credit (mortgage, student loans, all private debt really), real estate, etc. That's correct. But that's nothing new. Major economic crises are a feature (not a bug) of the capitalist system and were already quite common in past centuries (plural). Remember when 1929 was supposed to be the very last crisis? I agree with you it may have dire consequences but it all depends on the scenario. Economics (money + private property) is just a lousy/leaky abstraction to extract value from certain people are redirect it into other pockets, but if the entire system collapses, housing will not tear itself apart and fields won't stop growing. If we as popular classes (those who produce value for the system to waste) are ready to organize without higher management and without greed (and without transnational supply chains who may be harder or undesirable to keep flowing), we may all well be better off in the medium term. On a micro level, the VioMe factory in Greece is a good example of a destructive industry run for profit turning into a "greener" (all things considered) self-organized factory after the 2008 crisis. On a macro level, the spanish revolution of 1936 also showcases the power of the proletariat and what Graeber calls the "caring classes" (see CCC talk) to operate a radically-different society in a situation of crisis (in that case, a fascist coup d'état in some parts of the country). So i agree with you we're in a bad place, as our dependence on fucked-up/polluting centralized processes and abstractions, and repression against autonomous/struggling communities have only increased in the past decades... but that's a cultural bias and there's in absolute no reason humanity (and the rest of the planet) can't fare much better without industrial capitalism, given a painful transition period. It's also interesting to realize just how fucked up we are if we keep going in the same direction. "End:Civ" is an interesting documentary in this regard, although it's starting to be dated and the climate change situation has definitely gotten even worse since then. In that sense, and given that collapsing the entire economic apparatus looks more and more to be the only way to save literally millions of species, i think not all hope is lost if we were to crash the whole system.

littlestymaar 5y ago

> I suspect the blockchain nonsense (which I refuse to let have the "Web3" title) will win out because there's so much commercial incentive and if there's one thing we've seen from the internet's history, it's that money and commercial interest accelerates adoption even when maybe it shouldn't. Blockchain has already “won”: it's now a mainstream investment item, with investment firms bullish. But it also completely failed its goal of decentralization (almost every token holder uses a centralized exchange) and also isn't a competitor to the web at all: you can't connect to a blockchain with a web browser, and every “totally-not-web”3 platform out there is in fact built on top of the Web.

southerntofu 5y ago
It's not too late for the bubble to burst. When investors realize they put millions of dollars into a system which can process under 100 requests per second they may have a stroke and the whole thing could collapse like the .net bubble burst in the 90s and took away much of the landscape with it.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  The issue is that the entire financial market is a bubble now, not only crypto, but stocks, credit (mortgage, student loans, all private debt really), real estate, etc. And as we've seen with the 2008 crisis response and the coronavirus response, politics in the Western World (that is: not China) are willing to do as much they can to keep this bubble from exploding. And as we've seen from how Japan dealt with the Asian Crisis, you can pretty much keep such a bubble alive forever (despite Japan being crippled by its demographic decline). Maybe not forever forever mind you, but my point is that if/when it collapses it's likely to collapse when the entire financial system does (and, as much as I hate the current state of affairs, I don't think there will a positive outcome if it happened). Edit: just to be clear, I wish this stack of turd would disappear, but I don't believe it.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > The issue is that the entire financial market is a bubble now, not only crypto, but stocks, credit (mortgage, student loans, all private debt really), real estate, etc. That's correct. But that's nothing new. Major economic crises are a feature (not a bug) of the capitalist system and were already quite common in past centuries (plural). Remember when 1929 was supposed to be the very last crisis? I agree with you it may have dire consequences but it all depends on the scenario. Economics (money + private property) is just a lousy/leaky abstraction to extract value from certain people are redirect it into other pockets, but if the entire system collapses, housing will not tear itself apart and fields won't stop growing. If we as popular classes (those who produce value for the system to waste) are ready to organize without higher management and without greed (and without transnational supply chains who may be harder or undesirable to keep flowing), we may all well be better off in the medium term. On a micro level, the VioMe factory in Greece is a good example of a destructive industry run for profit turning into a "greener" (all things considered) self-organized factory after the 2008 crisis. On a macro level, the spanish revolution of 1936 also showcases the power of the proletariat and what Graeber calls the "caring classes" (see CCC talk) to operate a radically-different society in a situation of crisis (in that case, a fascist coup d'état in some parts of the country). So i agree with you we're in a bad place, as our dependence on fucked-up/polluting centralized processes and abstractions, and repression against autonomous/struggling communities have only increased in the past decades... but that's a cultural bias and there's in absolute no reason humanity (and the rest of the planet) can't fare much better without industrial capitalism, given a painful transition period. It's also interesting to realize just how fucked up we are if we keep going in the same direction. "End:Civ" is an interesting documentary in this regard, although it's starting to be dated and the climate change situation has definitely gotten even worse since then. In that sense, and given that collapsing the entire economic apparatus looks more and more to be the only way to save literally millions of species, i think not all hope is lost if we were to crash the whole system.