WEB3 DOESN'T DESERVE ITS NAME
[IN CRYPTO | Tuesday 9th December, 2025]
The naming wasn’t an accident. Web3 was supposed to be an upgrade — a direct response to everything Web 2.0 had become. Not a parallel financial system. Not a 24/7 casino. Not a speculative playground for degens and day traders. An overwrite.
Chris Dixon framed it succinctly: Read, Write, Own. The first era of the web gave us the digitisation of information and cyberspace — suddenly all knowledge could flow freely across borders and devices. The second era, Web 2.0, gave us the digitisation of social interaction, with platforms like Facebook and Twitter transforming how we connect, share, and argue with strangers. But neither era tackled the digitisation of value. Neither gave us any true sense of ownership.
Web3 was supposed to complete the trilogy. Provide the much-needed ownership layer. The thing that would finally let us inhabit our digital worlds in the same way we inhabit our physical ones — as sovereign individuals, with agency.
It hasn’t delivered. What we got instead was Pump Fun, DeFi yield farming, NFT profile pictures, prediction markets and financial engineering dressed up as revolution. None of which I object to per se. But the original promise — and the reason for the name — has gone almost entirely unaddressed.
That promise was the distribution and democratisation of value, as opposed to its extraction. Web 2.0 extracts. Web3 was supposed to return the power — including digital property rights and sovereignty — back to the people. By that measure, Web3 doesn’t deserve its name. Not yet, at any rate. Maybe not ever — unless something fundamental changes…
THE EXTRACTION MACHINE
To understand the failure, you have to understand what needed fixing in the first place.
When we started talking about “Web 2.0” in the mid-2000s, it meant something hopeful. User-generated content. Participation replacing passive consumption — it was even referred to by some as the participatory web. The read-write web. Everyone’s a publisher. The democratisation of reach. Access to the means of production — global digital media publishing.
And to be fair, something did change. The means of production genuinely democratised the landscape, at a time when everything was going ‘digital-first’. Joe Rogan built an audience that dwarfs most traditional media properties. Substack writers command readerships that newspaper columnists would envy. The podcast explosion, the YouTube creators, the TikTok stars — these aren’t nothing. The gatekeepers of the broadcast era lost their monopoly on distribution — and ‘one-to-many’ gave way to ‘many-to-many’.
But look closer. How many creators actually get meaningful reach? There’s a very long tail of people publishing into the void, algorithmically invisible, howling at the moon. The monopoly board changed; but the game remained the same. A handful win big, most win nothing, and “going viral” became the new Willy Wonka golden ticket — for most people, a spectator sport. And even the winners? Joe Rogan signed to Spotify. MrBeast negotiates with the big platforms. The leverage always flows upward eventually.
“The platform is the barrel. We are the fish. And the advertisers are the ones holding the shotguns.”
Two decades later, we know what Web 2.0 actually delivered beneath the surface. Shoshana Zuboff called it “surveillance capitalism”: an economic system that treats human experience as free raw material for extraction and prediction. You are not the customer. You are the product. And products don’t own things — they get owned.
The platform giants built walled gardens and locked us all inside. Centralised chokepoints where a handful of companies control the flow of human communication. Your content lives on their servers. Your audience exists at their discretion. Your identity is a row in their database.
The platform is the barrel. We are the fish. And the advertisers are the ones holding the shotguns.
The consequences compound. Algorithms optimised for engagement learn that outrage outperforms nuance. Dopamine pathways get hijacked. Clickbait drowns substance. Filter bubbles calcify into tribal fortifications. Divisiveness isn’t a bug; in the attention economy, it’s the business model. Mental health statistics, especially among the young, tell a story the platforms would rather we didn’t stop scrolling to ponder.
And then the terminal phase — what Cory Doctorow named enshittification. First the platforms are good to you, to capture you. Then they squeeze you to serve advertisers. Then they degrade everything to extract maximum value before the edifice collapses. Shadow banning. Algorithmic suppression. Arbitrary enforcement. Pay to play (bribe the algorithm to boost your dwindling reach). Cancellation without appeal.
You built something real on these platforms — a following, a professional identity, a commercial presence, years of work. But you built it on land you don’t own. And the landlord owes you nothing.
THE QUIET DREAD
Anyone who’s built something meaningful on social media knows the feeling. The quiet dread that sits somewhere beneath conscious thought. What happens if I just get... cancelled? Not for credible cause. Just erased. A terms of service update. A policy shift. An inconvenient truth. A content moderation algorithm having a bad day. A billionaire’s mood-swing.
Last week X terminated the European Commission’s advertising account. Days after the EU fined them €120 million for transparency violations, a corporation punished a regulatory body for enforcing its own laws — with Musk calling the EU the “Fourth Reich” for good measure.
Do I care about the EU losing an ad account? Not particularly. Maybe they deserved it.
But here’s what should unsettle everyone: if X would go to war with a sovereign government over a fine, what protection do you imagine you have? There is no floor. Your years of work, your professional network, your audience, your content — all of it exists entirely at the pleasure of a handful of tech bro billionaires.
This is digital serfdom. And it’s the problem Web3 was named for.
ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION
So where’s the fix? Farcaster. Lens. Bluesky. Mastodon. These are genuine attempts by genuine builders. Real traction in certain circles. But they’ve all hit a ceiling.
Why?
The charitable reading is that they’re building protocols, not platforms. Farcaster lets anyone build a client; Warpcast is just one interface, the way Gmail is one interface for email. Bluesky’s AT Protocol is designed for federation. In theory, they’re the open infrastructure — and the apps are just windows into it.
But look at the incentive structures. These are venture-backed entities racing for network effects. They measure success by user acquisition, engagement metrics, growth curves — the same scoreboard the incumbents use. Except they’re competing with a technological handicap: the optimal architecture for chasing platform metrics is centralised control, not distributed systems running on blockchains. They’ve chosen the wrong tools for the game they’re playing. They’re building protocols with platform economics. The funding demands returns. The returns demand capture. And capture is precisely what protocols aren’t supposed to do.
Nobody built “decentralised email” to beat Gmail. Email just works across providers because the protocol layer is public infrastructure. Gmail dominates market share, but it doesn’t have lock-in. If Google banned you tomorrow, you could move to Fastmail or Proton or your own server and keep receiving mail — especially if you control your own domain. The relationships survive because they don’t live inside Gmail’s walled garden.
“Why are we still renting baskets when we could own the loom?”
The current strategic advice is to not put all of your eggs in one basket — to make sure that, if one platform pulls the plug on you, you can survive based on having sufficient traction on another. If TikTok shuts you down, you have Instagram. If LinkedIn clips your wings, you have X.
But why are we still renting baskets when we could own the loom?
Every Web3 social project that tries to be “the decentralised version of X” has already accepted the wrong framing. They’re competing for users, trying to achieve network effects, hoping to displace incumbents with better values and worse UX. That’s not how infrastructure wins. That’s how you build another platform with extra steps that make it less likely to succeed.
THE RSS COUNTERFACTUAL
There’s a bitter irony here worth pausing on. Evan Williams co-founded Blogger in 1999 — one of the platforms that helped define the RSS era. Every Blogger site came with an RSS feed baked in. Distributed publishing, portable subscriptions, the open web. Then Williams co-founded Twitter. And early Twitter had native RSS support too; you could subscribe to any user’s timeline without even having an account. The philosophy seemed intact.
But Twitter progressively closed the gates. In 2011, they quietly removed RSS links from user profiles. By March 2013, they killed RSS, XML, and Atom support entirely — forcing everyone into their proprietary API and walled garden. The man who built on RSS-era openness went on to build the thing that killed it.
Chris Dixon saw it coming. In 2009 — years before he wrote Read Write Own — he published a piece titled “Twitter killed RSS (and that’s a bad thing).” He wrote: “Twitter isn’t an open protocol. It’s a private company with a profit motive... I know that many people have been calling for an open alternative to Twitter for a long time. I support them, but I’m afraid it’s too late. The network effects of Twitter’s social graph are just too strong.”
With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps we can say that this was the inflection point — the moment the open web lost to the closed business model we now call surveillance capitalism.
Dixon makes a point that’s easy to miss: RSS was the open web’s greatest missed opportunity.
Distributed feeds. Portable subscriptions. No algorithmic gatekeepers deciding what you see. You subscribed directly to sources, they published to an open format, and any reader could display them. It was the architecture of an open social web, hiding in plain sight.
In a different universe, RSS could have become the backbone of social. Instead of platforms owning the feed, the feed would have been a protocol — like email, like HTTP. Apps would compete on experience, not on lock-in. Your subscriptions would be yours to take anywhere.
It didn’t happen. RSS withered on the vine. Not because it was technically inferior, but because it didn’t have a business model, or venture capital. Surveillance capitalism filled the vacuum with algorithmic feeds that could be optimised for engagement, for advertising, for extraction.
The lesson everyone internalised: openness loses to economics. To compete, you need to capture value.
“We tried to fix the economics and broke the mission.”
Hence tokens. Hence “tokenomics.” Hence the financialisation of every Web3 project. If RSS failed because it couldn’t sustain itself economically, then surely the answer is to embed economic incentives into the protocol. Give people tokens for participation. Let them stake, earn, trade.
But this recreates platform logic with extra steps. The token becomes the capture mechanism. Growth hacking replaces advertising, but the fundamental dynamic — extract value from users to reward stakeholders — remains intact. Web3 social projects end up competing on speculation rather than utility — attracting mercenary capital rather than genuine communities.
We tried to fix the economics and broke the mission.
THE SHAPE OF WHAT’S MISSING
What would it actually take to make platform lock-in technically impossible?
Not a platform. Not a product. Not a token with clever economics. Infrastructure. Public infrastructure. The boring plumbing that nobody owns and everybody builds on.
The building blocks aren’t mysterious:
Portable identity. You are not your @handle. Your identity exists independent of any platform — verifiable, self-sovereign, composable. If Twitter suspends you, your identity persists. Your cryptographic keys, your attestations, your history travel with you.
Sovereign graph. Your relationships are yours. Not a corporate asset. Not locked in a database you can’t export. Your social graph lives somewhere you control, readable by any application you authorise. My graph, my rules.
Content addressing. Your posts exist at permanent addresses, not platform URLs. When you publish something, it gets a content-based address that doesn’t depend on any particular server staying online or any particular company remaining benevolent. IPFS, Arweave, whatever — the point is the pointer is yours.
Interoperability standard. The boring glue. A protocol that any client can implement, like SMTP for email. You choose your interface, your experience, your algorithms. The underlying social layer is shared infrastructure.
Notice what’s absent from this picture: a centre. No headquarters. No server farm you could walk into. No company whose CEO could wake up one morning and decide you don’t exist. What we’re describing is non-local — everywhere and nowhere at once. Not “the thing” but the substrate beneath “all the things”.
These pieces exist. DIDs for identity. IPFS for content addressing. ActivityPub for federation. RSS never actually died. The components are scattered across different projects, different standards bodies, different ideological camps.
Outside a handful of protocol idealists and underfunded non-profits, nobody’s stitching them into coherent public infrastructure. Why? Because everyone who understands the problem well enough to solve it is busy trying to capture value from it. And nobody will do that better than Meta, than Alphabet, than Microsoft, than ByteDance.
THE HARD PART
This is not a manifesto pretending the problem is easy. If it were easy, we’d be living in a different world already.
The hard part is this: social infrastructure at scale requires resources. Text and hyperlinks are cheap to host — Tim Berners-Lee could give away HTTP because serving web pages costs almost nothing. Social media is different. Video. Images. Massive social graphs. Real-time messaging. The storage and bandwidth aren’t free. Someone has to pay for the servers.
The token solutions — Filecoin, Arweave — try to solve this by creating economic incentives for decentralised storage. But as we’ve seen, the moment you introduce tokens, you introduce speculation, and speculation distorts everything.
There’s no silver bullet here. The protocol layer can be free and unowned — like SMTP — but the infrastructure that it runs on costs money. Perhaps the answer is hybrid: open protocols with commercial services competing on top, the way email actually works. Perhaps it’s public funding, the way roads work. Or open source, as with Wikipedia. Perhaps it’s something we haven’t figured out yet.
But acknowledging difficulty is not the same as accepting impossibility. We should do this not because it’s easy, but because it’s necessary.
And it is. Verging on existential.
THE TBL QUESTION
Tim Berners-Lee didn’t need a token launch to create the web. He didn’t pitch VCs. He didn’t design incentive mechanisms to bootstrap adoption.
He was one person at CERN who saw a problem — researchers couldn’t share documents across incompatible systems — built a solution, and gave it away via the permissionless architecture of the original internet. No capture. No monetisation. Just: here’s a useful thing, it’s open, build on it if you want.
The web became the most transformative infrastructure of the modern era not despite being given away, but because of it. HTTP won because nobody owned it. Anyone could build on it without permission, without rent-seeking intermediaries, without worrying that the protocol owner would change the rules to extract more value.
What’s stopping the same thing from happening with social?
Maybe nothing. Except that the landscape is crowded with people trying to build the next platform. It’s not crowded with people trying to give away plumbing.
The barrier isn’t technical. It isn’t funding — TBL didn’t have funding, other than a green light from CERN to follow his nose for a while. And it isn’t coordination — he didn’t need a DAO.
The barrier is indifference to profit. The protocol layer for social needs a builder who wants to give something away, not own it. Someone who looks at the Web 2.0 extraction machine and feels something closer to disgust than opportunity. Someone who’d rather be useful than rich.
THE STAKES
We got email right. Mostly by accident, through a combination of academic culture, government funding, and pre-commercial naivety. SMTP emerged before anyone figured out how to monetise it; and by the time they did, it was too late to capture. The protocol was already public infrastructure.
We got social catastrophically wrong. It emerged in the commercial internet era, funded by venture capital expecting returns, competing for users through engagement optimisation, converging inevitably on the business model of surveillance capitalism because that’s what the economics demanded.
Web3 was supposed to be the course correction. The ownership layer. The thing that would finally wrest control back from the platforms and return it to the people who truly create the value.
“A casino masquerading as a revolution. A land grab dressed up as liberation.”
So far, it’s been a distraction. A casino masquerading as a revolution. A land grab dressed up as liberation.
But the window isn’t closed. The pieces exist. The problem is legible — we can define its contours. The extraction machine grows more extractive by the day, more capricious, more willing to go to war with governments and erase individuals alike when they become inconvenient.
What’s missing isn’t technology or funding or even coordination. What’s missing is the gift. Someone willing to stitch the pieces together and give them away for free. Someone with the technical skill, the credibility, and the indifference to profit that made the original web possible.
This isn’t a white paper. It’s a call to action. A channel opened for dialogue. Because the alternative — accepting digital serfdom as permanent, accepting that our professional identities and creative work and human connections will forever exist at the pleasure of corporations — is not acceptable.
Social media needs its “Satoshi Nakamoto” moment.