What is "Web3"?

1.0 The Word That Means Everything (And Nothing)

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

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

As Digital Archaeologists, it is our job to excavate the original meaning from beneath the rubble of hype. The idea of "Web3" isn't new, and it's not nearly as complicated as its proponents have made it seem. It's the logical third step in a story that's been unfolding for thirty years.

To understand "Web3," we have to dig up its ancestors: Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The story of the internet is a three-act play, and we are currently living through the turbulent climax of Act Two.

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

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

To understand Web 1.0, you have to remember 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 It was built on simple, rugged technologies like HTML (the "bricks"), HTTP (the "roads"), and URLs (the "addresses").

The human experience of this web was one of discovery. You couldn't "Google" it; you "surfed" it. You followed hyperlinks from one "homepage" to the next, tumbling down rabbit holes of personal passion projects. You navigated 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. It 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. It was a world built by hobbyists and academics.

The Fatal Flaw: A One-Way Conversation

The problem with Web 1.0 was that it was a "Read-Only" medium. It was a digital library, not a town square. Power was in the hands of the few "webmasters" who knew how to write HTML and configure a server. For the average person, the web was a one-way conversation. You could read content, but you couldn't easily create it, and you certainly couldn't 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."

3.0 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 wasn't 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 we all signed without reading. We were given free tools to create and connect, but in exchange, we 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 the truth that had been hiding in plain sight: we weren't homesteaders; we were tenants.

As we explored in our "Beyond the 'JPEG'" Cornerstone, we became "digital tenants in digital malls."⁵ We built our homes (profiles), our social graphs (friend lists), and our businesses on land we didn't own. The platforms (Facebook, Google, etc.) are "landlords" who provide the "land" for free. In this model, you are not the customer. You are the product. Your data, your attention, your identity, and your content are the resources being harvested and sold to the real customers: the advertisers.

This business model leads directly to what Cory Doctorow famously calls "enshittification."⁶ Every platform follows the same inevitable lifecycle:

1. First, they are good to users (you) to lock you in.
2. Then, they 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 world we live in now. A world of "digital serfdom," where we are tied to the land of the digital lords who own our identity, our data, and our digital lives.

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

This brings us to "Web3." The term was first coined in 2014 by Gavin Wood, a co-founder of Ethereum.⁷ His vision was for a "post-Snowden" web—an internet that wasn't reliant on a few massive, centralized companies that could be spied on, controlled, or "enshittified."

This gives us our 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 you should own your digital life.

It's an attempt to fix the "Original Sin" of Web 2.0. It's a collection of technologies designed to do one thing: move you 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"

This is where the jargon usually begins, but the concepts are simple if we use the right metaphors.

• The Digital Deed (NFT): This is the "title" to your unique digital assets. In Web 2.0, Twitter owns your username and profile. In Web3, you would own the "Digital Deed" to your profile. You could move it to another platform, sell it, or pass it down. No landlord can take it from you.
• The Digital Receipt (FT): This is your interchangeable digital value. In Web 2.0, your in-game items or airline miles are trapped in one platform's silo. In Web3, you own 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's a secure, private application (not owned by a platform) where you store your deeds and receipts.
• The Blockchain: This is the "Public Notary's Book." It's a global, distributed, and unchangeable public ledger. When you buy a "Digital Deed," the transaction is recorded in this public book for everyone to see. This is what proves your ownership without needing to trust a central company.
• The Smart Contract: This is a "Digital Vending Machine" or "Self-Executing Agreement." It's 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's a group of people who agree to follow the rules of a "Smart Contract" and vote with "Digital Receipts" to make decisions. It's a way to govern a project or a community without a CEO or board of directors.

That's it. That's the whole idea. Web3 is the concept of an internet where you own your "stuff," and these are the tools that make that ownership verifiable.

5.0 A Day in the Life on the Owned Web

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

You wake up and read an article from a writer you support directly, your "Digital Receipt" of patronage having already granted you access.

Later, you apply for a new apartment. Instead of emailing insecure PDFs of your pay stubs and bank statements, you grant the landlord temporary, verifiable access to a single "Digital Deed" of your employment, proving your income without revealing your entire financial history.

In the evening, you finish a creative project and mint the "Digital Deed" for it yourself, embedding a smart contract that ensures you get a piece of every future sale.

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

6.0 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.

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

As we always do, we must 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 is a more equitable, creative, and human-centric internet. The reality is that it currently fails on several key promises:

• The "Centralization Paradox": The dirty secret of Web3 is that it's 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.⁸ We have, in many cases, just traded 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 your "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 your identity" to "watching your 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.⁹ 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.

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

So why do we talk about it? Why dedicate a lexicon to it?

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

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

Our job at Web3 Words is to ignore the noise of speculation and excavate the simple, powerful, human-centric idea at the bottom of it all. We must separate the failed execution from the sound architecture.

"Web3" is not a stock to trade. It's a blueprint for a digital world where you are an owner, not a tenant. It's a map to the "Owned Web."

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

Sources

1. McCracken, G. (1997). "Plenitude: Culture by Consumers." In Plenitude. ↑
2. Berners-Lee, T. (1999). Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. ↑
3. Warner Bros. (1996). "Space Jam Official Website." Warner Bros. ↑
4. CNN. (2009). "Yahoo shutting down GeoCities." CNN.com. ↑
5. web3words.org. (2025). "Cornerstone: Beyond the 'JPEG'." Web3 Words. ↑
6. Doctorow, C. (2023). "Why the Internet is a Fading-Fast Shit-Heap (And How to Fix It)." Wired. ↑
7. Wood, G. (2014). "D-Apps: What They Are and What They're For." Gav's Blog (Wayback Machine). ↑
8. Narayanan, A. (2023). "Why Decentralization Isn't the Point." Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. ↑
9. University of Cambridge Judge Business School. (2023). "Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index." ↑