Web3: it's about trust, not decentralisation

I've had an increasing number of formal and informal discussions about web3 in the past few weeks. There's a lot of hyperbole (just look at the name! most of us barely acknowledged Web2.0!) and a lot of cynicism ("well, crypto tanked so they're all talking up Web3!") and it all seems to be centered around, aha, decentralisation. I think this focuses on the wrong attribute.

Not that decentralisation isn't good (unless you're a big, centralised incumbent!), but it doesn't really convey a benefit to society. Decentralised? So what?

As I study media diets and media nutrition the most common issue I've seen over the past 10-15 years of data, that pervades across the gamut of media, is dispersion of trust. We used to trust our news channels and our newspapers when there were half a dozen of them. We didn't know most of our friends' and colleagues' opinions unless we'd had a direct (and usually polite, unlike online!) discussion with them. We couldn't fact-check dinner table discussions with our phones. There were vast gaps in our knowledge, so we had to learn to trust.

The dispersion of trust

In our present age of information excess and gluttony, we all have access to, and a potential broadcast platform on, the biggest information repository ever: the internet. Who or what should we trust? Typically, we either cling to traditional, seemingly trustworthy institutions or we "do our own research". Most of us seem to do a bit of both. All of us trust our friends to the extent that their online opinions align with our own, or our friendships are strong enough to endure differences of opinion, whether online or not. Trust is, therefore, a personal choice: my level of trust in certain media or publications could be very different to yours, regardless of whether we are friends.

At the core of trust is provenance: who owns what, who knows what, or who said what first. When it comes to provenance, the internet is a hall of mirrors: information bounces and deforms all over the place. The simplest, most annoying example is news channels reporting a "media storm" or a "media controversy" about an event. This is secondhand reporting at its finest/worst. The implication amounts to: "we don't have enough to go on, so we're basically feeding off each other at this point." Gossip, basically. On a news station. We ridicule such antics yet they pervade because they are effective. We cannot resist a bit of juicy gossip, it's like candy.

If only there was a way through this hall of mirrors. A path of provenance to trace back who did what and when. We have them in certain industries: eg. you can usually tell the provenance of your car from the government licensing authority. Deliveries have tracking numbers. But these systems take a lot of coordination and trust to establish, as well as oversight to maintain the trust: consumer advocacy, privacy protection, government watchdogs.

Low trust vs high trust economies

In high-trust economies we can depend on such systems either because they're at a scale where it's competitive to keep them well-maintained and self-governed, or because the rule of law is efficient and incorruptible enough to enforce such standards.

In low-trust economies, where the law is inefficient and corruption is, if not directly evident, then at least assumed, such systems, when attempted, often wither away. For a variety of reasons the trust cannot be sustained. In such economies, trust exists in pockets, in syndicates, where it is hard-earned and can be far-reaching, and so is jealously guarded.

Forging trust with blockchains

What if there was a way to build trust networks without the effort of getting people to trust each other or incur the costs of maintaining such networks? This is what blockchain technology sets out to do. At its core it works like a ledger where each entry is a contract: the contract could be a deed to a property or a share certificate or any other type of asset. By distributing the ledger widely across thousands of nodes, and making it immutable (you can only add to it) you create a mechanism of provenance (who added it & when) and oversight (it's only added if the majority of nodes allow it), as well as distributed cost (whichever nodes contribute the most get the payout). So nobody has to trust anyone else and the cost is distributed throughout the system through a shared incentive mechanism. This solves a lot of problems, particularly for low-trust economies that historically couldn't afford trust structures. It also potentially undermines existing trust networks that cost a lot to build and maintain.

Web3 - trust everywhere?

Web3 is, fundamentally, about blockchaining everything. At the extreme, it could invert the Big Tech paradigm: currently, Big Tech harvests our data and monetises it through a vast ecosystem of media channels. But if we each owned our data, on a blockchain (provenance, remember?), we could exchange it out to the highest bidder. So if you want to market to me, don't just pay Google, pay me too. Naturally, Big Tech is not a big fan. But it could have more mundane uses: if you, me and a friend want to buy a boat together, let's put it on a blockchain; as the value of the asset or the structure of ownership changes, we can record it all on the blockchain.

This is where I see Web3, like Web2.0, disappearing as a term, as it quietly seeps into ubiquity. Talk of decentralisation just scares the centralised institutions. The really important attribute of Web3 is trust: robust, cheap, accessible trust.

Intrigued? I'm writing a book about Media Nutrition that covers this and a plethora of similar topics. Message me if you're interested in a copy.