Podcast 390: Web3 won’t save us
If we tear up the rules and build a new internet, how can we avoid making the same mistakes?
Ben Popper
Director of Content
Not to get too meta, but there is a lot of buzz in the tech world and among software developers about the advent of Web3 and the opportunity blockchains provide to write new rules for a future internet. In today’s episode, we discuss what these emerging tools and platforms might bring. Cassidy and Ceora throw a much needed glass of cold realism on Ben’s sunny techno-optimism, and old man Ryan shouts at a cloud.
What is Web3? The Decentralized Internet of the Future
Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Tadeck, for showing us how to design a Function for Factorial in Python
Tags: crypto, the stack overflow podcast, web3
12 Comments
I’m curious why you decided to open the episode with culture war politics. Making the web accessible to non-majority users is an important topic, but it’s at most tangentially related to the subject at hand. There’s a lot of interesting conversation in this episode that is more relevant than telling the majority of your listeners that they need to check their privilege if they’re enthusiastic about technology.
Your dismissal of the experiences of women and people of color as “culture war politics” is exactly the reason we should be talking about this more often.
This was very disappointing. Ben you did a great job of trying to keep the conversation neutral. But this was supposed to be about web 3 and then just landed up slagging off the tech industry for its diversity issues.
Also the obvious thing to discuss would have been how anonymity/avatars could help remove the biases we have.
It would have been much more beneficial to have someone on the pod who actually knew about Web 3.0.
I strongly agree. Nothing discussed in this podcast was even controversial. It’s an honest discussion about how different people experience technology. This is foundational to the topic of whether or not web3 is going to save us. Yes, I would have liked to hear more discussion about misinformation, divisive propaganda and accountability which I believe are also among the biggest issues that could be exacerbated by web3. But, if you’re going to discuss how new technologies are going to affect culture, you can’t ignore the impact of the tech culture itself.
Thank you for this discussion! We tech people often make the mistake of getting excited about the possibilities of new technology without considering how its use will inevitably be influenced by existing cultural problems. Reflective conversations like this are essential.
To clarify. I strongly agree with Ryan. The placement of my comment makes that unclear.
Feel like I’ve been click baited with this title
Inclusivity is foundational, but feels like more of an industry topic rather than a tech stack one. I didn’t learn anything valuable to DAOs or Web3 in this podcast, so maybe rename it to what was actually discussed?
I agree with Sarah, I was expecting more deep dive into pros and cons about this topic and informed opinions about the current technologies on this field 🙁
Web 1.0 was fine.
Web 2.0 was my baptism by fire
I like the anonymity. Anonymity from government and big corporations. Decentralization from amazon, facebook, google, etc. Not everything has to be anonymous. I don’t care for the NFT scams.
About Mastadon. The verification can come at the server level and your able to block back acting servers.