On a gloomy Thursday morning in Newcastle, UK, I sit with my laptop open playing a game. But I am not, I will admit, having much fun. Besides the occasional pixelated images of a space hero, it is mostly a text-based, multiple-choice offering, with prompts encouraging me to imagine that I am on the planet Veles and asking where I would like to mine next. The experience isn’t enhanced by the fact that I have had to spend 20 minutes linking a cryptocurrency wallet to the game in order to get this far.
Why am I putting myself through this? Because, believe it or not, this game is supposed to be the future of the internet, or at least part of it. It is one of the world’s top-rated distributed apps, a manifestation of what some see as a shiny new phase of the online realm called web3.
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While my adventures on Veles are amusingly awful, there is a serious side to my foray into the wilds of web3. There is a chorus of voices calling for a new iteration of the internet. And it isn’t hard to see why: the tech giants that currently control our online world are wracked by scandals, and don’t seem equipped to solve the problems of online misinformation and hate. So what is web3, how does it work and can it really offer a better digital future?
The idea of a connected set of computers – the internet – goes back many decades. But the world wide web, the shared set of websites that we can view online via those connected computers, was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. Even in the early days, he had big plans for the web’s future (see “The semantic web” below). In the first generation, known as web 1.0, users hosted their own websites and email on home or institutional servers. It was an idyll for hobbyists, full of promise and revolutionary zeal.
It couldn’t last. Users had to manage their own affairs, keeping computers running constantly to host their own web pages and inboxes. It was too taxing for all but the most dedicated enthusiasts. So, during the late 1990s, companies stepped in. There was GeoCities, for instance, which hosted your web pages so you didn’t have to. Hotmail and Yahoo did something similar for email.
The phrase web 2.0 was coined in 1999 as we began to move to those convenient, centralised providers. It really became popular in 2004 with the arrival of the Web 2.0 Conference, held annually in California for almost the next decade. This era saw the launch of several companies that would exert an increasing grip on our lives: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more.
On the one hand, the rise of these titans brought huge benefits. Web 2.0 broke down barriers to the online world. We could log onto most websites with a Google account and pay for items online with PayPal. It was all so easy.
But on the other hand, a succession of more recent scandals showed us that web 2.0 has serious downsides. One of the highest-profile examples came in 2018, when it emerged that the company Cambridge Analytica had harvested the personal data of millions of Facebook users, built profiles of them and then sent them politically polarising adverts on their feeds. The company did work for Donald Trump’s campaign for US president in 2016.
In 2021, whistle-blower Frances Haugen, an ex-employee of Facebook (since rebranded as Meta), released a tranche of documents that she claimed showed that the firm prioritised its growth above safeguards to protect young people from potentially damaging content.
Most recently, in autumn 2022, Elon Musk completed his takeover of the social network Twitter. Within days, he had gutted its staff and aired the idea of charging users for verification. He has also said he is a “free speech absolutist” in the past. For many users who had invested time in building their profile on Twitter, it felt like time to leave.
In short, the rose-tinted spectacles have come off. The view is that tech giants are too powerful and untrustworthy. “We’re seeing the impact of big tech on our lives,” says at Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. “And people have growing concerns about how tech is taking over.”
This malaise is part of what is fuelling the talk of web3. You can’t get far in the tech sphere without coming across it. You may have heard the hype about non-fungible tokens (NFTs), cryptographic assets often associated with ownership of digital art that are commonly spoken of in the same breath as web3. There is a deluge of news articles asking if web3 is the next big thing, venture capitalists extol its virtues and the management consultancy firm McKinsey put out in September 2022 saying that web3 could have “potentially transformative effects”.
If you find yourself hazy on how to define web3, you aren’t alone. It tends to be spoken of in vague terms and comes mixed with unfamiliar concepts like those NFTs. The crucial thing to get your head around is the blockchain. This is a digital ledger, a set of computerised records divided into blocks, each of which is stamped using cryptographic keys to provide a cast-iron assurance of its authenticity. Think of it like a super-secure digital equivalent of keeping the receipts from your shopping. Even more important is the decentralised blockchain. The first was created by a person or persons calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. The twist was that the ledger is stored in a distributed fashion across a large number of computers. Not only was it as trustworthy as a regular blockchain, it couldn’t be controlled by any one person.
Nakamoto’s creation would go on to form the basis of the first cryptocurrency, bitcoin, in which each block was like a unit of money. In 2015, along came Ethereum, another blockchain platform that has been used in all sorts of ways, including as the basis of another cryptocurrency, Ether, and as a way to implement smart contracts, where the terms of an online deal or purchase are written into a blockchain and self-execute when certain conditions are met. Most crucially, Ethereum provided, for the first time, a way to build apps that weren’t hosted by an individual company, but on a decentralised blockchain.
The promise of web3
Web3 draws heavily on these distributed apps (dapps) to avoid the problems of centralised control. For Gavin Wood, a co-founder of Ethereum who coined the term web3 in 2014, there are several potential advantages. First, because dapps are decentralised, they are in a sense hosted by everyone rather than one company – Wood has spoken of this as being more “democratic”. Second, we no longer have to trust that companies will provide services online – the guarantee can be built into the underlying blockchain. Third, verifying who people are could be more robust on a decentralised web. People could still remain anonymous, but their activity over time could be reliably tracked, thanks, again, to the blockchain record.
In an idealised future, web3 could challenge the tech giants’ monopolies and make it far easier to root out automated fake accounts, or bots, spewing hate speech. It could also, in principle, allow users to move their profiles and data between online services more simply, because their data would be stored on a shared blockchain rather than squirreled away on a company’s private servers.
In 2017, Wood and others founded the to help fund and develop ideas that could enable this new online environment. “The fundamental point is decentralisation,” says Alistair Stewart, lead researcher at the foundation. “We don’t want to trust individual corporations, or even individual individuals. It’s more likely we would like to trust a wide group of people.”
All this is what prompted me to try out web3 myself. So on that gloomy Thursday, I opened up an ordinary internet browser and searched for lists of popular dapps. Eschewing the hordes of finance apps, I went for the most popular dapp game, called Alien Worlds. It sounded fun, exotic. I clicked through and a tempting opening screen appeared.
It was quickly replaced by a pop-up asking me to sign up for a special kind of cryptowallet and to link this to a cryptocurrency account. Being a tech journalist, I already had the latter, but this was still a lengthy, tricky process. When I finally got into the game, it was a disappointment. The basic idea seemed to be to mine resources, but honestly it hardly hung together and was pretty boring. Every time I wanted to do anything, a pop-up appeared asking me to approve a transaction on the blockchain. The whole experience was glitchy and frustrating.
My travails with something as simple as a space exploration game highlight the first challenge of web3. Unless you are tech savvy, the process isn’t exactly frictionless. At present, web3 rebuilds some of the barriers that the prior generation of the web broke down. “There’s a huge hurdle in user experience for any decentralised solution,” says Stewart. “I don’t think people have quite got it yet.”
This technical complexity has created a second problem that might feel like history repeating. Because web3 relies on users implementing complex digital technology, companies are springing up to do it for them. Just as Google and other giants sprang up because web 1.0 was a bit of a pain, new companies, such as Ethereum and Coinbase, are becoming the gatekeepers to web3. “It’s all centralised in terms of the people that have the technical expertise and money to develop and put out this stuff in the first place,” says at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, who studies computing and social responsibility.
Given all this, you might be wondering how many people are using web3. Not many. According to a survey by market research company Opinium, 67 per cent of people say they have never heard of web3. Stewart admits that, at present, the web3 holdouts are “almost everybody, and almost everything they do”.
How many people use web3?
The success of web3 also hinges on an equation: how annoyed are people with web 2.0 and how does that weigh against the difficulty of using web3? “Most people just want to be able to do their work without having to faff about, and it’s not going to solve that problem for them,” says Flick. While users may lament that Google or Meta gets to learn more about them every time they log onto a third-party website using their Gmail or Facebook accounts, they appreciate the convenience.
And that is the inherent paradox of web3. Keep it strictly decentralised and it will be too complex for most people to use; relax this requirement and you put off its staunchest backers. While some might think that a few gatekeepers wouldn’t do any harm, not least because they would be less powerful than the big tech titans they are trying to replace, those who currently dictate the future of web3 see that as a step too far. Instead, their approach is: build it and they will come.
I never did manage to mine my rocky coastline on Veles, by the way. In the end, Alien Worlds began to throw up the same error message time and time again. It wasn’t that I was digging myself into a hole. More that I could barely get my metaphorical shovel into the ground.
The semantic web
An associated but distinct concept to web3 is the semantic web. First proposed in 2001 by the web’s founder, Tim Berners-Lee, alongside computer scientists James Hendler and Ora Lassila, the idea is that we should develop the web so that all its content is machine-readable – in other words, it can be “understood” by any computer. The goal was to make life more convenient for us all as the world moved online. “The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users,” Berners-Lee and his co-authors wrote.
What this means is that the semantic web requires websites to provide metadata that can then be analysed by software, apps and services. Every element on a web page would be labelled to aid computer comprehension. For instance, the phrase “Chris Stokel-Walker lives in Newcastle” would be labelled with invisible markers that told computers “Chris Stokel-Walker” was a name and “Newcastle” was a location.
The benefits of labelling all the web’s content like this could be huge. In a world where AI is increasingly intelligent and pervasive, improving its ability to decipher our online repository of knowledge could help make it even smarter and, crucially, more effective at interacting with the human world. In his original vision of the semantic web, Berners-Lee imagined a situation where a web browser could pull treatment requirements for a patient from a doctor’s website, then find pharmacies that stock the relevant medicine and services that can provide, for instance, physiotherapy. Any appointments could be seamlessly booked by cross-checking availability at a physiotherapist’s office with the patient’s calendar.
However, labelling the internet’s data in this way is a labour-intensive task: only a minuscule fraction of the world’s web pages contain semantic information. Adding it requires trawling through the contents of a website and its underlying computer code, then classifying the information based on its relevance. Those dedicated to this task do it because they see the promise of the semantic web. Every year, researchers hold the International Semantic Web Conference; the most recent iteration, hosted virtually by China, concluded in late October. But while the academic meetings continue, the semantic web isn’t – as yet – something most users would recognise.
