Building the digital landscape: innovation, interaction and blockchain

Niall Ferguson, in his book "The Square and the Tower", tells us that the internet is simply the public square of the modern age. In fact, talking about social media these days inevitably means associating platforms, interaction, creation, technology and, of course, the internet. Being online, it has never been easier to create content, talk and share with anyone, anywhere, precisely because of social networks, which allow us to live in the age of social interaction.

But for every story, there is a past, and the truth is that the concept of social networking has always existed, as it does, offline, and the story of moving this interaction offline to online is, itself, a long and continuous technological journey that marks the different eras and through which the internet takes us.?

In the 1990s, the first websites appeared with the very basic purpose of "taking" things that were offline and putting them online, such as newspapers and magazines. For this reason, web pages at the time were referred to as static, as if we were simply reading a newspaper or magazine through a screen. A skeuomorphic scenario, according to Chris Dixon (Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and founder of its crypto division, a16z crypto), i.e. the recreation of something graphically similar to reality.

With read-only web pages and no interactivity, web 1 was the era of the web where users were considered to be mere consumers of information, and this is also the time when the first search engines, such as Google, appeared.?

It would seem paradoxical that, with the intention of putting things online that were offline, they removed interactivity which, as we've alluded to, was the skeuomorphic setting for our interaction, in other words, the "public square". This is what, in the 2000s, some entrepreneurs saw when they realized that users should not be inert or mere consumers of information, but also providers of information; that, for this, computers (and the web) would be used not only to view or read, but also to write, interact, create content: the era of social interaction, of web 2, which we are still experiencing today. So the first social networks emerged, such as MySpace or Hi5, where Facebook later emerged with a combination of features from both, adding the "Like" button as an indelible and distinctive mark of interaction.

In the age of social interaction, by providing information, we are also providing our data: in the age of giving up our privacy, we are also giving up control and ownership. With the technology boom and social networks, it was only natural that smartphones should support everything that was done on computers, which means that the so-called Big Tech, such as Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter, have a near-monopoly situation, in a truly dominant position on a centralized web. To back this up, excluding China, Apple and Google account for 95% of the mobile app market. The top 1% of social networks is home to 95% of social media traffic and 86% of social media apps, and the top 1% of search engines is home to 97% of search traffic. It is, in Chris Dixon's words, as if we were going back to a time when we only had four television channels to choose from.

With Big Tech now dominating practically the entire web space, in parallel, in the financial world, in the 2000s, a centralized financial system, where banks, particularly investment banks, as superb intermediaries, with new complex financial products and a broth of deregulation, political and regulatory collusion, triggered the failed financial crisis of 2007. Surrounded by an environment of mistrust and insecurity with intermediaries and public authorities, the paper entitled "Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System" appeared, published under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, which addressed for the first time the concept of a decentralized virtual currency (cryptocurrency) and the inseparable concepts of bitcoin and blockchain - thus setting the tone for web 3.

In the upcoming era - web 3 - it's precisely the notion of control that presides: the idea or perception of control over our data, over our privacy, over our money, where decentralization is the key, the regulator takes on a new role and the intermediary will have to adapt so he doesn't evaporate. Blockchain, as an inseparable concept from bitcoin, consists in a decentralized, public and distributed record of transactions on a peer-to-peer network, while bitcoin is a decentralized virtual currency. It is transmitted via blockchain technology, which has a multitude of applications, allowing transactions not only of virtual currencies, but also of information, digital assets or property rights. And it's all done through tokens, which are nothing more than fragments, digital representations of a real asset, through blockchain, the technology where, if certain conditions are met in advance, a transaction takes place automatically, without intermediaries, with transparency and immutability. The potential is, of course, endless: through smart contracts (supported by the famous Ethereum), from a rental contract, which can be signed directly between the parties and automatically executed after validating the conditions previously defined in the smart contract contained therein, to buying a house using cryptocurrencies, an insurance policy or simply locking your car remotely using the blockchain. All of this, of course, without the need for intermediaries.

In metaphorical terms, it is the digital representation of a symbolic gentleman's agreement, where the conditions verbalized by both represent the tokens to be transacted and the handshake symbolizes the transaction automatically made on the blockchain, witnessed and validated by the peers, with the same efficiency as our ancestry's.

The internet manages to be the public square of the modern era - and web 3 promises to represent the nostalgic time of proximity.