Dapps and DAOs seem to pop up overnight, each exclaiming they will “change the world” by setting up creator economies, making social media ownable, or building new carbon markets. Yet what’s really different about the slew of sleek interfaces that kick laptop fans into high gear and metaphors of space exploration not-so-subtly hinting toward a new era of conquest? Under its shroud of novelty and complexity, Web3 sets out to hard-code the Internet with free-market economics, which has proven time and time again to exacerbate social and ecological injustices. Only, this next metastasis of hyperfinancialized global coordination under the guise of “decentralization” enables the technocratic elite to recentralize wealth and power while further abstracting themselves from the many layers of negative externalities that they are responsible for.

every once in a while, let’s drop the term web3, and focus on the web as a whole. when learning about how to support our community structures on the web, what is the cultural history of the web, where did we go wrong, what have we done right so far, how has the web's relationship with the physical world been? how has the web been hurting our physical world? how has the structures of the physical world affected the way the web is built, and who has had access and power to build and contribute to the web? how does deepening our intimacy in our irl relationships feed into the way we build (and want to build) intimacy into our digital world, and vice versa? how is the web influencing our mental well-being, and how do we stay tethered to our mindfulness in a digital space that can take us into infinite worlds?