… While web3 apps like NFTs, DAOs, and DeFi are gaining popularity, we’re still interacting with web3 through web2 interfaces. If history is a guide, we’re going to need new web3-native interfaces and spaces to bring hundreds of millions of people into the ecosystem. 

It’s early, but there are clues of what new interfaces might look like. New digital spaces are springing up around the internet and evolving every day. Wallets like MetaMask, Phantom, and Rainbow are changing how we log in, and what we bring with us when we do. Web3 worlds like Decentraland, Somnium Space, The Sandbox, and Cyber are reimagining how we experience and interact online. They’re early components of the Metaverse, sure, but this isn’t necessarily a Metaverse piece. It’s a piece about the evolution of the way that we interact with, and on, the internet.

We’ve spent most of 2021 over here at Not Boring HQ exploring web3, and hopefully we all understand what’s happening a little bit better because of it, but it’s still hard to feel the potential impact of web3 in our bones while we’re still using web2 interfaces. For web3 to become a part of our daily life in the way that the internet or mobile is will require new spaces and interfaces.  Read More

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications are now much more common than you might think. In a recent McKinsey survey, 50% of respondents said that their companies use AI for at least one business function. A Deloitte report found that 40% of enterprises have an organisation-wide AI strategy in place.

In consumer-facing applications too, AI now plays a major role via facial recognition, natural language processing (NLP), faster computing, and all sorts of other under-the-hood processes.  

It was only a matter of time until AI was applied to augmented and virtual reality to build smarter immersive worlds.  

AI has the potential to parse huge volumes of data at lightning speed to generate insights and drive action. Users can either leverage AI for decision-making (which is the case for most enterprise applications), or link AI with automation for low touch processes.

The metaverse will use augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) in combination with artificial intelligence and blockchain to create scalable and accurate virtual worlds.   Read More

Intel made its first statement on the metaverse on Tuesday — its first public acknowledgement of that sometimes-nebulous future of computing which promises an always connected virtual world that exists in parallel with our physical one. But while the chip company is bullish on the possibilities of the metaverse in abstract, Intel raises a key issue with realizing any metaverse ambitions: there’s not nearly enough processing power to go around.

The metaverse may be the next major platform in computing after the world wide web and mobile,” an editorial begins from Raja Koduri, a senior vice president and head of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group. But Koduri quickly pours cold water on the idea that the metaverse is right around the corner: “our computing, storage and networking infrastructure today is simply not enough to enable this vision,” he writes. Crucially, Koduri doesn’t even think we’re close. He says that a 1,000x increase in power is needed over our current collective computing capacity. Read More

Some people are excited to see realistic avatars that look like them. Others worry it might make body image issues even worse.

In Facebook’s vision of the metaverse, we will all interact in a mashup of the digital and physical worlds. Digital representations of ourselves will eat, talk, date, shop, and more. That’s the picture Mark Zuckerberg painted as he rebranded his company Meta a couple of weeks ago.

The Facebook founder’s typically awkward presentation used a cartoon avatar of himself doing things like scuba diving or conducting meetings. But Zuckerberg ultimately expects the metaverse to include lifelike avatars whose features would be much more realistic, and which would engage in many of the same activities we do in the real world—just digitally.

“The goal here is to have both realistic and stylized avatars that create a deep feeling that we’re present with people,” Zuckerberg said at the rebranding. Read More

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

If you read tech journalism you’ll probably hear the fuzzy term web3 bandied about in the press. Sprinkled around all these articles are all manner of idealistic and utopian ideas about how we can rebuild the internet to reflect our aspirations of a more humane and egalitarian society. However the journalists never quite drill down into the details on the mechanisms of how the internet will be remade. Because after all tech writers are in the storytelling business and a myth about the rebirth of cyberspace makes for a ripping yarn far more than mundane skepticism of a hyped technology.

Yet when those of us who are in the chips, bits and packets business look into alleged engineering details they’re always either complete hand wavy woo woo or dreams overleveraged on perpetually-over-the-horizon blockchain tech searching for tomorrow’s problem to justify an investment today. Just buy my token today to secure your stake in a better tomorrow. It’s the age-old pitch of charlatans and snake oil salesmen, except this time around it’s being pushed by world’s largest investors who have deep bags of tokens to dump.

At its core web3 is a vapid marketing campaign that attempts to reframe the public’s negative associations of crypto assets into a false narrative about disruption of legacy tech company hegemony. It is a distraction in the pursuit of selling more coins and continuing the gravy train of evading securities regulation. We see this manifest in the circularity in which the crypto and web3 movement talks about itself. It’s not about solving real consumer problems. The only problem to be solved by web3 is how to post-hoc rationalize its own existence. Read More

Over the past few years, our industry has endured a remarkable amount of change. IMHO, compared to what the next five years will bring, 2021 is going to seem calm.

That’s because we are on the verge of a tectonic shift in how the fundamentals of our business operate.

This shift toward “Web 3.0” promises to be as profound a change as we saw more than 20 years ago, when the consumer internet exploded and the digital marketing and media businesses were born. Read More

The metaverse is coming. It was once a science-fiction fantasy, most notably in Neal Stephenson’s novel “Snow Crash,” of an all-encompassing virtual universe that would exist alongside the physical one. But technological advances have brought this transformation of human society close enough to reality to demand that we consider its consequences.

In the metaverse, a user might curate a digital avatar, like a character in a video game. Through the eyes of their avatar, they would experience a digital reality as active and engaging as the physical one. Some futurists believe that soon we might attend doctor’s appointments or class there.

But while the metaverse could revolutionize work and play, it is essential to remain wary of the dangers that will emerge if it subsumes daily life. Read More

Gavin Wood, who coined the term Web3 in 2014, believes decentralized technologies are the only hope of preserving liberal democracy.

Do you ever find yourself wondering, “What is Web3?” You’re not alone. The idea is having a moment, whether you’re measuring by VC funding, lobbying blitzes, or incomprehensible corporate announcements. But it can be hard to tell what all the hype is about.

…At the most basic level, Web3 refers to a decentralized online ecosystem based on the blockchain. Platforms and apps built on Web3 won’t be owned by a central gatekeeper, but rather by users, who will earn their ownership stake by helping to develop and maintain those services. Read More

A well-funded and intensely motivated chunk of tech’s hive mind is finding common cause in a vast new project: rebuilding the web on a foundation of cryptocurrency and blockchain tech. They call it “Web3.”

The big picture: Developers, investors and early adopters imagine a future in which the technologies that enable Bitcoin and Ethereum will break up the concentrated power today’s tech giants wield and usher in a golden age of individual empowerment and entrepreneurial freedom. Read More