Freedom from Limits: Why the Metaverse Looks Like Web2

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The future of the internet is a priority for many technologists these days – from rabid discussions about the possibilities of a blockchain-based “Web3” to speculation about how it might come to life via worlds virtual interconnected forming the "metaverse". “On both topics, discussions around Web3 have been particularly difficult lately. Given the overtly financialized nature of Web3 and its foundation in blockchain technologies, the Web3 ecosystem has been awash with bad press from a cryptocurrency bear market, various high-profile scams or crashes, and... wider interest in applications such as NFTs. Partly because of these disruptions, Web3 proponents are increasingly looking to the metaverse as a credible route to bring blockchain to the mainstream. However, the current state of the metaverse looks much more like Web2 than Web3.

Such a result would freeze the blood of Web3 enthusiasts, but without a change of direction, it is inevitable. To contextualize this statement, there are two important points to clarify.

First, Web3 and the metaverse are not the same concept, nor dependent on each other: they are ideas about respectively a way to build the architecture of the web and a way to access it .

Second, although much of Web3 can be seen as a direct rebuke to Web2 and the extent to which powerful platforms such as Google, Meta or others capitalize on large amounts of personal data (and revenue through the extraction of value from that data, much of it in the form of advertising), we tend to ignore what these platforms have done well and therefore why usage has become centralized. Web2's superpower was not centralization in the abstract. Centralization around platforms was a byproduct of the more fundamental value provided by Web2: convenient services for users.

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The rise of social media and other forms of user-generated content defined Web2, as the successful technology companies of that era made things on the internet very easy. Put simply, Web2 gained a lot of value because it served basic human needs (contact, expression, creation, etc.) with an understanding that most humans aren't terribly technical, or at least tend to favor convenience and ease. Wealth in Web2 is the result of this solution, in Web3 wealth is the product always looking for a solution.

It's pretty easy to lose sight of this if you're a technical person, because accessing and creating things on the...