WIDE WEB

A Map & User's Guide For Web3

Happy Monday War & Peaceniks! Welcome to Web3.

MAP OF WEB3 - LARGER VERSION BELOW

Do you remember when AOL bought Time Warner? Or when TiVo was going to destroy the Television Business? Or when Nokia released a QWERTY keyboard for something called “text messaging?”

Today, AOL is lost somewhere inside the couch cushions at Apollo Management, TiVo no longer makes consumer products and Nokia… honestly, I lost track after Microsoft bought their phone business.

BUT despite all challengers to their tech, AOL’s main innovations – email and messaging –remain at the core of global communication. TiVo’s product literally changed how everyone on earth watches TV, giving complete command and control the consumer. And Nokia drew our eyes to our phones for something other than calls, and we haven’t looked away since.

The first time technologies infiltrate the lives of humans, humans always freak out. We typically overact in three different directions – one group decries the new tech as the end of humanity or the dumbest thing since the pet rock; the second worships it like a savior, foreswearing everything that came before; and the rest ignore it because the first two groups are so annoying.

That is precisely where we are right now with all things Blockchain-Metaverse-NFT-Web3.

Almost all new tech has an inevitable early stage “correction.” Truly successful new tech finds an organic place in the lives of humans via the network effect (texting, email, social media, time shifted viewing), and a value exchange between commerce and consumers (SMS as part of a cell contract, email as part of a suite of digital products, ads in exchange for free platforms). That tech then becomes “just normal,” even “plain.”

Who gets excited about email as tech? Does anyone still marvel at the pause button on TV? When was the last time you ever heard anyone say, “how amazing is texting?” They are all now so accepted, they’re boring. Meanwhile their launchpads – AOL, TiVo, Nokia – have disappeared from our consciousness.

We need to stop confusing next generations of tech with the stupidest things on them. Blockchain is not a toy. Each blockchain network platform is a massive, shared piece of decentralized tech. NFTs are not GIFs. They are intellectual property, protected by programs called smart contracts running on the blockchain platforms.

Right now, you are only reading this because a series of computers and satellites around the world let you. You likely have a credit card connected to an app and/or wallet on your smartphone (for which you likely did not read the terms and conditions), which enables you to charge things in real life or across the planet in just seconds. In each case, you probably don’t spend too much time thinking about who controls those connection points and portals; it is an increasingly and frighteningly small number of corporations and people, especially considering their depth of control and insight over your wealth and information.

Blockchains are designed to decentralize control of business, information and commerce. They have already enabled the creation of projects, products, services and IP worth billions of dollars. Smart contracts written on these platforms maintain themselves, protecting deals and IP automatically – without the need for the middlemen-gatekeeper-tax-taker-hanger-on-beaurocratic-corporate-thirty-percent-off-the-top-industrial-complex. Which is PRECISELY why so many in that complex poo-pooed it so hard at first.

Given recent market conditions, big gains have given way to even louder poo-pooing about all things crypto. In many cases, for good reason. Like every era’s Gold Rush, the last year has seen a lot of fools. The volume and frenzy of NFT mania was so obviously unsustainable. The same could be said for DAOs and cryptocurrencies. However, the same could be said for every single stock market in the last two years. For Peloton. For SVOD. No?

It's a cycle. And we’ve seen it before. New tech gets hyped. People go nuts. The market crashes… Then things stabilize and we see what comes out as normal. That is where Web3 is today.

Just with previous eras, if you ignore the importance of these new technologies, you do it at your own peril. They are here, and they are not going away. Most importantly, not only are they not a threat to you or your businesses, for those of us in the business of making media, the blockchain and smart contracts will likely be the most important new technology since moveable type.

I do not know what will be invented on the blockchain. I am not a coder, nor a technologist. I also know that a good number of the companies and projects hyped by the last Gold Rush will fade into funny after-thoughts in Web3 2.0. But I didn’t need to understand video compression to know that streaming was going to win, nor to believe in AOL to know that email was going to last.

The hype era of crypto seems to be abating, at least temporarily. The market is realizing that GIFs and jpegs are merch, not IP, and that Web3 is a technology - like Web2, Web1, Color TV, Radio, The Telegraph and Paint on Cave Walls before it. And if you dismiss this new tech because today’s uses make you afraid or chortle – you will regret it.

Many companies, publishers and creators jumped on the crypto bandwagon during the last hype-cycle. Now many are either scared off or scratching their heads about what to do next. But with exceptions, however, media, artists and publishers have done very little to test the true long-term value of blockchain networks and smart contracts to their IP. Content owners have almost uniformly avoided the ultimate functionality of this technology – direct sales of IP to their most avid community of fans, who want to own the content and invest directly in the creators and publishers themselves.

When it comes to creating value from new tech and existing IP, many of the most important lessons come from our own past. When music labels re-issued albums on CD, they got the entire fanbase to re-purchase their entire libraries and made hundreds of billions. SEE: Film and DVDs. Since then, nearly all these publishers have allowed intermediaries like Spotify, Netflix and Apple to step in the middle, shift consumers from owning to renting, and take complete control of relationships with fans.

Blockchains, smart contracts, exchanges and wallets offer creators and publishers the ultimate D2C business – selling content directly to consumers, who are automatically joined into a community to support it. But to take advantage of it, we must understand the technology, what it can do and how to use it. Then we must free our minds to imagine all the possibilities… before we start eliminating any.

AOL bought Time Warner in 2000. It was not that long ago, but in tech terms, it feels like a millennium. Looking back, we can see that moment not as the main story, but a prologue. The Hobbit to Web2’s Lord of The Rings. And that’s where we find ourselves, right now: On the edge of a new technology and staring at the horizon of a new era.

So, for this moment, to help us all navigate, we’ve created Web3 101 Guide for and Map of the current Web3 Cosmos.