Is web3 bullshit? The hazy vision of new decentralized internet, built on the blockchain, to succeed the “Web 2.0” of Google and Facebook seems to be reaching a threshold of ambient cultural awareness such that non-tech pundits, news-engaged normies, magazine editors, uncles, online attention-seekers etc., feel the need to weigh in on the question.

Here, for example, is Adam Davidson, former host of Planet Money, sometime New Yorker writer, and recent web3 convert, detailing his journey “From contemptuous to indifferent to curious to pretty damn excited” about web3, and then, in response to unnamed “haters,” making a list of “Real world problems that web3 could solve—at least for me.”

…Trying to keep track of this argument — understanding the positions, remembering the people, and zeroing in on the Savvy Take — can be frustrating, especially because if you dip your toe in on Twitter there’s a decent chance you will end up reading, I don’t know, a thread claiming that web3 is the future of the labor movement. Luckily for you if you’re receiving this email, at some point soon I’m going to write an Official Read Max Syllabus and Opinionated Guide to Web3 and Associated Technologies and Personalities for subscribers, since this is a newsletter about the future and web3 appears to be, at the very least, “the short-term future of arguments about tech,” if not the long-term future architecture of the entire internet. 

For now, though, for my benefit as much as readers’, I want to see if I can articulate my general understanding of the discourse around web3 and sketch out what I think is going on. I am not going to answer the question “is web3 bullshit?” definitively here, though I am going to try to ask it in a more productive way. Read More