The luring Decentralised Web
Joining a Discord of a Web3 community can be one of the loneliest experiences. Even when you did your own research, came up with a great idea for engaging with their members, contributed a piece of software or writing, chances are that you are sending it into a void of feedbackless ignorance. Telling people outside of Web3 about it, you get the feeling that you should have expected it, when you applied to a random group of pseudonymous people on the internet. Some of you may have had rewarding experiences when joining a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), however, I know for a fact that I am not alone.
Entering the space
In 2017 at an organic farm, I first heard about Ethereum. It took me three years until I bought my first coins at Binance and until 2020 to finally interact with a smart contract outside the walled gardens of centralised exchanges. I was writing up my bachelor’s thesis and had just started researching neoliberalism. The political stances of liberalism and its purest configuration as libertarianism led me to ‘Bitcoin and beyond’. I started reading whitepapers, blogs, academic literature only to understand what Web3 was all about, but I have not spoken to a single member of the space.
When everyone is just speaking of the space, it suggests that Web3 is one homogeneous mass of individuals. It worsened the feeling of otherness as an outsider and contributed to my understanding of Web3 as a small group of libertarians, who are neither open nor welcoming. Indeed, I just wanted to learn more about communities around cryptocurrencies, because I was interested in their social dynamics. Holding some ‘crypto’ was only the first step and not the reason for me wanting to get involved.
Leaving the mainstream
I have tried to explain my interest to people outside of Web3, but too often I am left with long faces. It might be that I am not doing a great job of abstracting from terms like DAO or token, to convey my interest in new modes of organisation and an all-encompassing digitalised way of life. The truth is, however, describing Web3 to be like an aggregate of cooperatives or being employed in a start up only adds to the confusion. These descriptions do not capture the decentralised web well and remain crude approximations.
After not being able to officially join a DAO, or finding friends in the space, I decided to close in on Web3 through research. A practice that makes me feel comfortable, because I am familiar with it, and it lets me interpret the unknown. When I dedicated my master’s thesis to researching crypto-assets, I finally was able to stick a label on my interest for those outside of Web3. An obscure hobby finally became a legitimate activity because it now was the subject of my studies and a cornerstone to earning a recognised academic award.
Managing Expectations
The point of enrolling in a school or to a university is that you have a journey, a learning curve ahead of you. To get accepted in the first place might be a binary decision based on your past merits and your performance in the motivational letter, but you do not have to submit your final dissertation upon application. Similarly, a hiring manager does not expect you to already perform the job you are applying for. Even in business you build a minimum viable product to gauge the market before you invest in a factory.
Efficiency needs friction
Web3 has a problem, then, because it over gamifies its appearance and loses growth through friction by excluding actors that economically cannot rely on a dominant position. Game theory efficiently limits access, yet, who are DAOs for ,when they cater only to those who are able to found a company instead?
Those with economic capital can invest their time to network or study, which increases their social capital and let them form cultural capital too. Personally, I would have loved to join a DAO to strike a compromise between an academic career and being out in the open, where I would be working freely based on contracts. While Web3 is all about ‘smart’ contracts, it seems ‘builders’ have forgotten that contracts are made ahead of delivery. Economies do not work the other way around.
This article was first published on mirror.xyz and marks the beginning of creating outreach beyond an academic audience. Please bear with me tinkering and experimenting to create content, which matters to you.
