In “Finite and Infinite Games,” James Carse illuminates the profound distinction between strength and power.
Power is concerned with what already happened. Strength is what is yet to happen. Power is finite in amount. Strength cannon be measures, because it is an opening and not a closing act.
Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by intiating their own.
Power is limiting and controlling, whereas strength embodies the expansive, transformative essence of infinite games—those endeavors aimed not at winning within set boundaries but at perpetuating the play itself, evolving and reshaping the game.
This paradigm is especially relevant in the evolution of blockchain technology, where each iteration of decentralization, aimed at equitably distributing strength, often encounters centralizing forces. These forces, driven by entities desiring control, manifest power in its finite aspect, revealing a societal pattern where the promise of egalitarianism confronts the tendency towards consolidation.
The ethos of “information wants to be free” traces back to the early days of computer clubs and open-source development, embodying the community’s drive for accessibility and knowledge sharing. This principle was famously encapsulated in a conversation between Stewart Brand and Steve Wozniak, underscoring the tension between the free flow of information and the proprietary nature of technology. This ethos predated even Vint Cerf’s development of TCP/IP—a military technology repurposed for open, global communication—and Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of The Web, which was founded on freely accessible protocols like HTTP and HTML. These historical milestones reflect a persistent belief in the power of open access to information, guiding the development of internet technologies towards inclusivity and user empowerment.
Before delving further, it’s essential to address the role of venture capital (VC) funding in the web’s evolution . The growth imperative associated with VC investments has propelled companies towards models not just favoring advertising revenue, but of consolidated control. It’s through achieving monopolies, gating access and productising users that venture capital makes its returns. Though this dynamic significantly influenced the Web’s development in all it’s phases, it was not its defining force. Decentralization and democratization were at the heart of major web developments, with each wave—WWW, Web 2.0, and Web3—starting with bursts of decentralizing innovation followed by centralization through economic strategies.
The VC firms that were behind Web2’s shift towards centarlisation (largely advertising models), such as a16z and USV, now champion Web3 under a decentralized guise. Yet, there’s a disconnect. Their investments centralize Web3 around monopolistic APIs and platforms, contradicting decentralization ideals.
Whether or not we beleive this Rockerfellerian strategy of horizontal integration is right or wrong, it is certainly centralising. Allowing their false narrative to go unchallenged threatens to replicate Web2’s centralization in Web3 as well.
“I believe we can do something quite counter-intuitive: We can lock the Web open.” - Brewster Kahle, founder of Archive.org
Contrary to the current notion that Web 1.0 was ‘read-only’, Web 2 was ‘read-write’ and Web3 is ‘read-write-own’, each of these waves of web technology started with a technological shifts that enabled voices and distributed ownership to the many.
The World Wide Web revolutionized publishing, enabling unprecedented content creation and distribution. Far from being a “read-only” era, it was a period of vibrant creativity, where individuals freely expressed and shared knowledge. This era saw the birth of blogs, personal websites, and online forums, all of which allowed a diverse range of voices to be heard in constrast to the tight control newpaper, magazine and book publishing companies had at the time. Characterising this as static overlooks its pivotal role in democratizing both information access, and the revolutary change in enabling anyone to create their own webpage and communicate directly to their own audience.
Today’s IndieWeb movement characterizes the same ethos as this time, side-stepping centralised platforms in favour of the genuine relationships formed around personally-run blogs and forums.
The wave of The Web was started with a ground-breaking ability: that everyone could own and control their own means of publishing. That meant that publishing and commerce would be “disintermediated”, allowing people to interact without middlemen. The centralisation that curbed that wave was to host websites, allowing users to trade their control for convenience, and in doing so enabling the siloing of their information by platforms.
Web 2.0, is often associated with user participation and social media. While this is true, it’s not the whole story. Web 2.0 was also about data interchange and opening functionality between sites. It introduced APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that allowed different websites and applications to interact and share data. This led to a more integrated and interactive web, where content could be easily shared and disseminated across platforms. It also led to the rise of big tech companies that leveraged user data for targeted advertising, leading to concerns about privacy and data ownership.
Contrary to narratives that Web 2.0 was itself about centralization, Web 2.0 broke down information silos, promoting user participation and an open web ecosystem. Open data access allowed a great deal of decentralisation, in the form of web applications that work with each other, unlocking user data and profiles from single sites, and enabling programmers to permissionlessly build functionality on other platforms,
The wave of The Web was started with another ground-breaking ability: that siloed web systems could open their data and allow interoperability between themselves and a plethora of new tools for users. This was moment of the Web API. The centralisation that curbed that wave was to buy API providers and shutdown or pay-gate their access.
Following Web 2.0, the Semantic Web (also called Web 3.0 at the time) sought to make the web’s information more accessible and structured. It was envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee, who invented The Web itself. Instead of sharing data as text alone, the Semantic Web was a set of technologies that enabled the sharing of meaning, by marking up textual data with context. This idea was started by Tim Berners-Lee, and is aimed at making everything interoperable, removing intermediaries and decentralizing the control of information. His approach has been to model ontologies and data so as to connect computers on the machine-readable web.
Although relatively unseccessful, and unrelated to blockchain, its goals align with the current Web3’s ethos: interoperability, automation that enables users control, and the decentralized of information. Some of its goals, like structuring various forms of user data with open standards, are acheived by blockchains through their standards systems and ability to record “state.”
Web3 marks a shift towards integrating blockchain with the web, focusing on accessibility. Current implementations, however, often depend on centralized API providers, contradicting the trustless ethos.
The essence of “Web3” in the blockchain context is not a nebulous notion but a concrete and straightforward concept – make blockchains accessible from the web.
This integration fundamentally involves adapting web browsers to interact directly with blockchain networks, effectively turning them into front-ends for these decentralized systems. In practical terms, this integration manifests through the incorporation of wallet software into browsers, enabling them to hold private keys and track blockchain data associated with the wallet holder’s public key.
Various implementations of this idea have emerged, ranging from browser extensions like Metamask to built-in solutions like Brave Wallet, with evolving techniques such as account abstraction poised to broaden the scope of integration further.
A critical component of this blockchain-web symbiosis is the need for web browsers to communicate with blockchain nodes. Traditionally, this communication has relied on centralized API providers (or RPC providers – RPC is just a type of API), such as Infura, which, while effective, introduces centralization into the ecosystem. The future direction aims to embrace “light clients” or, more precisely, light nodes that allow browsers to act as nodes themselves. This direct participation in the peer-to-peer blockchain network draws parallels to the connectivity seen in Tor and BitTorrent clients, marking a significant step towards a truly decentralized web where information and transactions flow directly between users without intermediary control.
Bitcoin was originally conceived as a protocol built to run separately without needing a browser. An important part of web3 work is to make browsers and blockchains fit meaningfully together: with the express goal of making protocols more accessible to people. The forces of centralisation are observable here, in projects that seek to create choke-points and monopolies on access to blockchains: either through user access with wallets and RPC providers, or through resource-control like staking pools or DAO voting rights.
And here lies the unacheived purpose of Web3. The Web, now the most widely-adopted communication system in the world, is a channel that can give the world meaningful, practical access to blockchains. And yet, it’s still difficult and intuitive to use, fraught with scams, with a difficult learning curve, and with low adoption.
The web’s history reveals a recurring theme: initial decentralization efforts face subsequent centralization. This cycle, evident in the transition from the start of the World Wide Web to Web3, underscores the challenge of maintaining a distributed strength amidst centralizing economic forces.
Considering protocols like TCP/IP and HTTP reveals how design choices influence centralization. TCP/IP’s neutrality contrasts with HTTP’s potential for centralizing control, raising questions about where EVMs and RPC API calls fall within this spectrum. Protocols that inherently require unequal rights or data access tend towards centralization. This insight allows us to be more critical on the true nature of decentralization in Web3. As Lessig describes, the layering of protocols allows for a silent shift towards centralisation, so as builders, we must consider each protocol carefully.
As we navigate the complexities of Web3, it’s crucial to discern between genuinely decentralized innovations and those that merely perpetuate centralization under a new guise. By critically evaluating the layers of current web and blockchain infrastructures, we can better understand the balance between decentralization and control, ensuring that the web remains a space for equitable access and open innovation.
The early internet’s promise of a democratized space has been challenged by the rise of tech giants, illustrating the need for blockchain to learn from history and maintain its decentralizing ethos. The experiences of predecessors like DigiCash remind us of the critical importance of decentralization in the face of centralizing pressures.
Developers face the challenge of ensuring user sovereignty in blockchain applications, balancing ease of use with the empowerment of users. The potential of blockchain to democratize access to the global economy underscores the transformative power of these technologies, provided they remain accessible and user-centered.
Big Questions for Reflection:
Design Decisions at the Protocol Level: How do our design decisions, particularly at the protocol level, influence the centralization or decentralization of power and control? Which virtues, such as the free flow of information, are we prioritizing, and how do they shape the future landscape of the web and blockchain?
Enabling Users While Maintaining Sovereignty: In developing products that leverage blockchain, how can we ensure that we’re not only enabling users through technology but also actively maintaining their sovereignty and agency? How can we design systems that resist the natural tendencies towards centralization, ensuring that the transformative potential of blockchain is realized for the benefit of all?
Reflecting on the virtues elevated by our design decisions allows us to navigate the complex landscape of digital innovation with an eye towards creating a more open, equitable, and decentralized future.