web3

web3 wants to destroy the web. It reminds me of what Baudrillard said Disneyland does: by pretending to decentralize the web, it actually gives the web further into the hands of the Silicon Valley cryptobros. They are always advocating for more and more trust but never want to earn it themselves. This article I read the other day seemed so cool about all of these things before it turned into "Let's decentralize the web!" Of course it should be decentralized, it should be liberalized, but. Ahhhh.

Instead of like. Making a Web3 decentralized thing, we should implement homomorphic encryption on everything and make it so those big companies can't read our traffic. Like---lord!

On the Dead Internet Theory
Why is this not on the internet page? Because the Dead Internet Theory isn't really about the whole internet. I saw a thing on HN that it really is in fact about centralization. The dead bits of the internet are the social media platforms, the low-friction entrypoints to the internet, the things that are easy to scrape and algorithmically consume, process and pump out into tiny little chip bags that are mostly air. And of course sugary cereal. Obesity crisis metaphor? Anyways. The bar for Being Able To Find Actual Content for the internet is getting higher, you need to put in more effort to find good things. You need Xanadu or whatever, you need to be able to find community and find useful space. Like---I think this is a fun site, or whatever, but it is basically impossible to find unless you 1) know me face-to-face, 2) have seen the poetry pages, or 3) are just randomly looking for me online. My cool page has a bunch of artistic and maybe autistic resources, but they're not particularly useful for much, unless you need some textbooks or libraries or to have your attention diverted. A better way to display links is what we need, I think. Maybe for My Browser. WBIB4? That's actually a fun name. (See internet page for more details.) But I've gone off on a tangent; the reason why this is a Web3 problem is that once we can no longer trust the centralized sources, we have like a few options as I see them:

1. create new centralized sources
(how do we defend them from ai?)
2. actually use decentralized sources
(incredibly difficult, necessitates being able to browse the web which most people can't do, necessitates being able to find shit without Google and such: how do we do that? Tor? Wiby and Marginalia? I don't think they can Get It Fast Enough. If the centralized information goes down we are going to lose so much. But infohoarding isn't the solution either!! Ahh! And and and, because it takes knowledge and determination and time to do these things, the internet loses its democratizing status, most people don't do it, we lose the internet??? I dunno, what even is the internet??? does this create new power dynamics? do we have a hackery culty Internet????? do we revive phonebooks? maybe that's a good design inspiration)
or we can, most likely,
3. pretend to use decentralized sources
(web3 maintains power dynamics, maintains the democratization, but places the power into a different oligarchic technocracy...the new startups...legit I think this is what's likely to happen)
or
4. you know the internet is just like destroyed forever.