When we refer to web3 we have to mention one guy, which he is Mark Zuckerberg.
Here’s some of what he had to say
“THE NEXT FRONTIER IN SOCIAL CONNECTION”
Mark:
“The metaverse to me today feels like the next frontier in social connection in much the same way that social networking did when I was getting started back in 2004. That’s a big reason why we wanted to change the brand of the company…Today I think that most people think about us as a social media company, but in our DNA, we’re a technology company that builds all kinds of different technology to help people connect and tries to advance human connection. Of course, social media is one important part of that, but I think increasingly, it’s gonna be about building platforms and experiences that deliver this sense of presence like you’re right there with another person.”
WHAT WAS BEHIND HIS INTEREST IN THE SPACE?
Mark:
“Well, a lot of it is just that we spend most of our days building social apps that you use on a little phone. As powerful as that is — you have your phone with you all the time — it’s also pretty limiting. You’re not delivering an experience where you can really feel like you’re with another person and in a lot of ways, that’s sort of the ultimate dream of building these digital social experiences — actually being able to make it so that people can feel like they’re there together and doing something together and collaborating, and just no technology that we have today can deliver that.
So, we’ve seen this progression where, when I started the company, the internet was primarily about text into a computer. Then we got phones that had cameras so the internet became a lot more visual and mobile. And over the last few years, internet connections have gotten a lot better for everyone, so now video is really the primary way that we share experiences. So, you have this progression from text to photos to videos; connection and expressing ourselves keeps on getting more natural and immersive, but that’s not the end of the line. There’s gonna be something after video, and it’s gonna be much more immersive and it’s gonna be something that we can do throughout the day.”
Just like NFTs, Web3 and Metaverse platforms are the next natural progression in how we interact, relate, and communicate with each other.
HOW META PLANS TO FACTOR INTO THE WEB3 / METAVERSE SPACE
Similar to me with NFTs, Mark’s intentions to build within the Metaverse have become a strong focal point of his enterprise and internal operations. We talked a bit about just how major his plans are to lead the pack in this new direction.
Mark:
“We’ve been talking about this internally for many years. We’ve been working on these VR devices for seven years. We’ve just sort of steadily ramped up the investment to the point where now, in 2021, we’re investing more than $10 billion in this. It’s still not the biggest part of what we do, but it’s very meaningful. I think that you’d be hard pressed to find any other organization that cares as much about this and is putting as much energy into building all these different parts of the future. And what I think you get for that is that Meta has become the premiere place that, if you care about these problems, you want to go work on them.”
First, Zuckerberg sensed an opportunity from fragmentation to lay online railroad tracks — an “organizing principle” that would apply universally to the internet, and perhaps even to all computers. We can say that the internet still operates in an economy equivalent to agriculture, because where the most precious digital commodity — data — is entrusted to the various platforms: Spotify, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok and, of course, Facebook. Zuckerberg sees the virtual world as a railroad between these local economies, allowing them to exchange data with user permission. Powerful users don’t mean they have a financial advantage. After all, Zuckerberg’s online railroad track construction is also a price.
Second, while Zuckerberg wants to lay the track so that data can be transmitted universally across platforms, he also wants to make data collection, control, and communication more decentralized. Zuckerberg suggests that the foundation of the new internet is a kind of storage box stuffed with forgotten sweaters and discarded posters of our favorite bands: “Your identity, your stuff, your digital products, your Networking.” Zuckerberg understands that in Web3, fragmentation is inevitable as users start owning and managing their data and metaverse data management — even in the world of Meta, they don’t do it well with Monetization. After all, people still need to manage their own data, not only for the continuous transmission of data from one platform to another, but also to experience a virtual world tailored to individual tastes, skills, and social network tendencies. Zuckerberg suggested that our experience of the virtual world must be personalized to the individual.
But note Zuckerberg’s keywords: The real purpose of both is seamless movement from device to device and world to world. To move seamlessly within our own private virtual world, we need a common catalog of all available experiences, giving us personalized options. In other words, the principles of a universal internet and a fragmented internet are completely interdependent. For Each (which is a type of control flow statement in computer programming languages commonly used to loop through elements in an array or collection) is based on the same premise that when aggregating and passing data, individuals replace platforms, each other, and platforms itself.
In other words, these three things boil down to a much simpler question. When people own their content, including its data and metaverse data, they also own its distribution, they become the new middleman.
People are the new platform Web3
The internet was built as a P2P network of individuals not just to connect with each other, but with each other (hence the early chat rooms). So, with the hegemonic integration of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. in Web2, why does Web3 bring us back to this seemingly outdated model?
So by giving people meaningful ownership of digital content for the first time, Web3 does more than just transfer ownership from the platform to the user. More importantly, it incentivizes users to also become content distributors, the platform itself.
But putting data in our hands, in terms of how we think about it, manage it, own it, and financialize it — it’s still only the first step in Web3, it is opening rhetoric. The next step is not only to provide users with the tools to track information but to develop the information and create their own protocols for contributing and earning rewards on-chain. Uniswap is an example: anyone can become a liquidity provider, replacing traditional market makers and earning most of the value
In other words, the next step is not to provide users with a way to aggregate existing types of data but to fully coordinate and collect new forms of data. Or more simply, the next step is to give users a way to build their own platform.
Web3 allows us to receive better recommendations and find better opportunities by aggregating our online data and sharing the parts we think are relevant, allowing us to bring all of us to the platform without fear of censorship or judgment superior. Web3 enables us to traverse all these spaces and carry that identity in the form of an address with on-chain data while controlling the sharing of those parts of our choosing.
In Web2’s parlance, you can use data from the videos you watch on YouTube to help determine the music you like on Spotify — and you can also choose to share this data with advertising agreements directly from your tastes and needs Earn money from relevant ads, just like social media platforms have always done on your behalf. (Indeed, the benefits of cross-platform data aggregation help explain the success of Google and Facebook, not for any particular product, but for collating products in our professional and personal lives). Adult entertainment platforms are likely to be among the first to take advantage of Web3 governance, not only because decentralization eases user concerns about corporate surveillance, which prevents them from sharing more data, but also because that data can be used to provide more targeted results for different users.
But more importantly, Web3 allows us to go beyond the limited language of existing platforms to create higher-level, living, breathing identities on-chain. Our data doesn’t need to be limited to our music choices or our conversations with strangers on dating apps. It can include our contribution to building a community in the DAO, writing articles that others draw upon and cite, to our success in promoting others around us. For better or worse, it will include more and more biometrics — cortisol levels, blood sugar, heartbeats, how we make eye contact, how we smile, how we walk. Ultimately, it will showcase who we are, not just as consumer taste boxes, but as active creators, contributors, and collaborators — as people.
It turns out that the real promise of owning data is not just that we can store, monetize, and share it ourselves. This is because the motivation to do so will also motivate us to track more advanced and personalized data than ever before. In the short term, this data will allow us to replicate our offline identities on-chain as we showcase our personal skills and achievements. In the long run, as we transform from online participants to online curators, this data will automate our online behaviors, from writing emails to making investments, just to confirm the behaviors we want to self-enforce online.
In the long run, we will be able to create hypermorphic selves online that are no longer our offline selves, but collective creations — perhaps ones that write emails for us based on collective data, or even don’t need it at all E-mail can communicate with each other’s selves. Perhaps, eventually, we will become their creations, as they alter our daily behavior based on data from people similar to us, so we can better optimize our time.
What about in the end? We may end up seeing different versions of ourselves, all kinds of characters in giant online RPGs: job seeker, complimenter-Fisher, critic, flirt. But these versions of us are not restricted to a specific platform. They will be full-fledged creations that allow us to be newcomers both online and offline. Our online identities will become LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter themselves, rather than assuming LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter are pre-formatted identities. These data aggregators derive identities based on the data of those closest to us and Help shape their identity.
So what we end up seeing is a kind of degradation of the Web2 structure: platforms all become protocols, and people create their own networks on top of these new protocols.
