What is "Web3"?

The Word That Means Everything (And Nothing)

"Web3" is a terrible piece of branding. It is a vague, abstract, and hopelessly co-opted term. Depending on who is asked, it represents either a venture-capitalist buzzword, a utopian dream of a decentralized internet, or a confusing label for anything involving cryptocurrency.

It has become, like the term "NFT" before it, a term that creates more confusion than clarity. For most people, it remains noise.

For the Digital Archaeologist, the job is to excavate the original meaning from beneath the rubble of hype. The idea of "Web3" is not new, nor is it as complicated as its proponents have made it seem. It is the logical third step in a story that has been unfolding for thirty years.

Understanding "Web3" requires digging up its ancestors: Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The story of the internet is a three-act play, and Act Two is currently unfolding in a turbulent climax.

Act I: Web 1.0, The "Read-Only" Frontier (Approx. 1991-2004)

The Metaphor: The "Read-Only" Web, or The Digital Frontier

Understanding Web 1.0 requires remembering the sound of a dial-up modem: a screeching, digital handshake that was the price of admission to a new world. This was the "hand-built" web, the digital equivalent of the American West. It was vast, sparsely populated, and wonderfully weird. ¹

The guiding philosophy, championed by its inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was one of open protocols and universal access. ² Simple, rugged technologies like HTML (the "bricks"), HTTP (the "roads"), and URLs (the "addresses") formed its foundation.

The human experience of this web centered on discovery. One could not "Google" it; one "surfed" it. Users followed hyperlinks from one "homepage" to the next, tumbling down rabbit holes of personal passion projects. Navigation happened through directories like Yahoo!, which were less like search engines and more like a global card catalog, hand-curated by human librarians.

Culturally, this web was a digital museum of quirks. This era gave us the "Dancing Baby" GIF, the "Hamster Dance," and the still-functional 1996 "Space Jam" website.³ It was the era of "under construction" banners, guestbooks, and pixelated, 8-bit graphics. Hobbyists and academics built this world.

The Fatal Flaw: A One-Way Conversation

The problem with Web 1.0 was its "Read-Only" medium. It was a digital library, not a town square. Power resided with the few "webmasters" who knew how to write HTML and configure a server. For the average person, the web was a one-way conversation. An individual could read content, but could not easily create it, and certainly could not interact with it.

This friction created a massive, pent-up demand for a simpler way to participate. The world was waiting for a web that was "Read-Write."

Act II: Web 2.0, The "Read-Write" Mall (Approx. 2004-Present)

The Metaphor: The "Read-Write" Web, or The "Tenant" Web

Web 2.0 was not a single invention. It was a cultural shift powered by a new generation of technologies (like AJAX, RSS, and modern JavaScript) that made websites feel fast, interactive, and "alive." This shift was captured by a new mantra: User-Generated Content (UGC).

Suddenly, the "webmasters" were obsolete. New platforms emerged that provided simple, free tools for anyone to become a creator:

• Blogger & WordPress (c. 2003): Gave everyone a printing press. The "blogosphere" was born.
• MySpace & Friendster (c. 2003): Gave everyone a social "homepage."
• Flickr (2004) & YouTube (2005): Gave everyone a photo album and a television station.
• Facebook (2004) & Twitter (2006): Gave everyone a global megaphone.

This was the "Read-Write" revolution. The web was no longer a library; it was a global, 24/7 conversation. It was a triumph of usability and human-centric design. And it was all free.

The Faustian Bargain: The "Original Sin" of Web 2.0

This revolution came with a hidden cost, a "Faustian bargain" that everyone signed without reading. Users were given free tools to create and connect, but in exchange, users gave up ownership. This is the "Original Sin" of Web 2.0.

The cultural "Digital Alexandria" event was the 2009 shutdown of GeoCities. ⁴ Yahoo, its landlord, decided the project was no longer profitable and demolished it, erasing millions of "digital homes" and an irreplaceable archive of early internet culture. This event proved a truth hidden in plain sight: users were not homesteaders; they were tenants.

The "Beyond the 'JPEG'" cornerstone essay observes this shift: users became "digital tenants in digital malls."⁵ Users built their homes (profiles), their social graphs (friend lists), and their businesses on land they did not own. The platforms (Facebook, Google, etc.) are "landlords" who provide the "land" for free. In this model, the user is not the customer. The user is the product. User data, attention, identity, and content are the resources being harvested and sold to the real customers: the advertisers.⁶

This business model leads directly to what Cory Doctorow famously calls "enshittification."⁷ Every platform follows the same inevitable lifecycle:

1. First, platforms are good to users to lock them in.
2. Then, platforms are good to businesses (advertisers) to lock them in.
3. Finally, when both are locked in, the platform abuses both to extract all remaining value for itself.

This is the current world. A world of "digital serfdom," where users are tied to the land of the digital lords who own their identity, their data, and their digital lives.

Act III: Web3, The "Read-Write-Own" Uprising

This leads to "Web3." The term was first coined in 2014 by Gavin Wood, a co-founder of Ethereum.⁸ His vision was for a "post-Snowden" web—an internet that was not reliant on a few massive, centralized companies that could be spied on, controlled, or "enshittified."

This provides a simple, human-centric definition:

• The Metaphor: The "Read-Write-Own" Web.
• The Grounded Translation: The "Owned Web" or The "Post-Landlord Internet."

Web3 is the simple, radical idea that individuals should own their digital lives.

It is an attempt to fix the "Original Sin" of Web 2.0. It is a collection of technologies designed to do one thing: move individuals from being a "digital tenant" to a "digital owner." The concept is the "Owned Web." The technologies are the plumbing that makes it possible.

The Plumbing of the "Owned Web"

Jargon usually begins here, but the concepts are simple when framed with the right metaphors.

• The Digital Deed (NFT): This is the "title" to unique digital assets. In Web 2.0, Twitter owns a user's username and profile. In Web3, the user would own the "Digital Deed" to their profile. The user could move it to another platform, sell it, or pass it down. No landlord can take it away.
• The Digital Receipt (FT): This is interchangeable digital value. In Web 2.0, a user's in-game items or airline miles are trapped in one platform's silo. In Web3, the user owns that value as a "Digital Receipt" and can trade it, sell it, or move it freely.
• The Wallet: This is simply the "Digital Deed Box." It is a secure, private application (not owned by a platform) where users store their deeds and receipts.
• The Blockchain: This is the "Public Notary's Book." It is a global, distributed, and unchangeable public ledger. When a "Digital Deed" is purchased, the transaction is recorded in this public book for everyone to see. This is what proves ownership without needing to trust a central company.
• The Smart Contract: This is a "Digital Vending Machine" or "Self-Executing Agreement." It is code, written into the blockchain, that automatically runs when certain conditions are met. For example, an artist's "Digital Deed" can have a smart contract that says, "If this deed is ever resold, automatically send 10% of the sale price back to the artist."
• The DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization): This is a "Digital Co-op." It is a group of people who agree to follow the rules of a "Smart Contract" and vote with "Digital Receipts" to make decisions. It is a way to govern a project or a community without a CEO or board of directors.

This is the whole idea. Web3 is the concept of an internet where individuals own their "stuff," and these are the tools that make that ownership verifiable.

A Day in the Life on the Owned Web

What does this mean for a regular person? Consider a day without digital landlords.

A person wakes up and reads an article from a writer they support directly, their "Digital Receipt" of patronage having already granted access.

Later, that person applies for a new apartment. Instead of emailing insecure PDFs of pay stubs and bank statements, the person grants the landlord temporary, verifiable access to a single "Digital Deed" of employment, proving income without revealing an entire financial history.

In the evening, the person finishes a creative project and mints the "Digital Deed" for it, embedding a smart contract that ensures the creator gets a piece of every future sale.

The digital life is seamless, private, and truly belongs to the individual. The anxiety of the "tenant web" is gone, replaced by the quiet confidence of the owner.

The Post-Landlord Internet: A New Social Contract

The shift from Web 2.0 to the "Owned Web" is a fundamental change in the social contract between users and platforms. It is the difference between being a tenant and being an owner.

The Sobering Reality: The "Owned Web" vs. The "Speculator's Web"

The mandate is to remain "Grounded & Human." The idea of Web3 is revolutionary. The reality (so far) has been a catastrophic failure of both marketing and execution.

The 2021-2022 hype bubble did to "Web3" what it did to "NFTs"—it buried the profound idea of "digital ownership" under an avalanche of financial speculation, scams, and confusing jargon. The "Owned Web" was hijacked and became the "Speculator's Web."

The "best-case scenario" for Web3 envisions a more equitable, creative, and human-centric internet. The reality is a failure on several key promises:

• The "Centralization Paradox": The dirty secret of Web3 is that it is not very decentralized. Most Web3 apps today rely on centralized servers (like Amazon Web Services) and a few centralized "node providers" (like Infura and Alchemy) to function.⁹ In many cases, a simple trade has occurred: visible old landlords (Facebook) for invisible new ones (AWS, Infura).
• The "UX Chasm": The user experience is the single greatest barrier. It is not human-centric; it is human-hostile. Managing seed phrases, paying gas fees (transaction tolls), and living with the constant, irreversible fear that one wrong click could empty a "deed box" is not a consumer-friendly model.
• The "Greed Eclipse": The "Owned Web" quickly became the "Greed Web." The entire conversation shifted from "owning identity" to "watching a token go up." Speculation eclipsed utility. This poisoned the public's perception, perhaps for a decade, and made it infinitely harder to have sober conversations about the underlying purpose of the technology.
• The "Environmental Question": The original "Proof-of-Work" (PoW) system used by Bitcoin and early Ethereum was (and is) an environmental disaster, consuming vast amounts of energy.¹⁰¹¹ While most of Web3 has now moved to the hyper-efficient "Proof-of-Stake" (PoS) model, that initial carbon footprint rightly damaged the technology's reputation.

The Archaeologist's Mandate: Unearthing the "Owned Web"

So why discuss it? Why create an essay series about "just noise"?

Because the promise of Web3—the original 2014 idea—is more important than ever. The digital world is drowning in the "enshittified" world of Web 2.0. Users are surrounded by digital landlords, constant surveillance, and AI-generated "slop." A sense of "grounded" reality online has been lost.

The idea of a "Post-Landlord Internet" is the antidote. The idea of owning one's own identity, creations, and community is the goal.

The job of the digital archaeologist is to ignore the noise of speculation and excavate the simple, powerful, human-centric idea at the bottom of it all. The failed execution must be separated from the sound architecture.

"Web3" is not a stock to trade. It is a blueprint for a digital world where individuals are owners, not tenants. It is a map to the "Owned Web."

The goal is to help build it, starting by giving it a language that humans can understand.

Sources

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2. Berners-Lee, Tim. (1999). Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. New York: HarperCollins. ↑
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6. Zuboff, Shoshana. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs. ↑
7. Doctorow, Cory. (2023). "Tiktok's Enshittification." Pluralistic (blog), January 21. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/ ↑
8. Wood, Gavin. (2014). "D-Apps: What They Are and What They're For." Gav's Blog (Wayback Machine). ↑
9. Narayanan, Arvind. (2023). "Why Decentralization Isn't the Point." Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. ↑
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11. Jones, Benjamin A., Andrew L. Goodkind, and Robert P. Berrens. (2022). "Economic Estimation of Bitcoin Mining's Climate Damages Demonstrates Closer Resemblance to Digital Crude Than Digital Gold." Scientific Reports 12: 14512. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-18686-8 ↑