Blockchain is actually a fairly simple technology - or, at least, not any more complicated than anything else about modern computers - but it’s become mystified, because its biggest advocates, the people who present it to the world, aren’t techies.
I’ll have to explain the basics of blockchain before I go on, but this might serve as a good demonstration for our purposes. At its most basic, the ‘blockchain’ is a list. Like a ledger, it’s a big list of things, things like transactions. Everyone has a copy of the list, and they all agree about what’s written on it. When people want to change it, like updating it with new transactions, they have to solve a massive calculation, which takes a lot of processing power. This stops someone from just griefing it, since you have to invest a lot of computing power and electricity. If you lie, and write that someone sent you all their money, everyone else still has their copy of the list and can just ignore you. An ‘NFT’ is just a way of writing something to the list that *isn’t* a transaction - it could be a poem, a http link, or the code of a small file. This is the basis of ‘web3′.
Web3 is the concept of an internet running off of blockchain, off of NFTs. All data would be stored in that list, copied and run by any computer in the network, not just a secret, central server. It’s interesting in theory - but remember that every single update to that list costs an exponentially-increasing amount of processing power, and electricity - costs money. Every post would have a cost, every deletion. It wouldn’t just be a fixed cost either, it’s all crypto: it would vary, be speculated on by investors. Given how much our lives have already moved online, it would be the financialisation of daily life. Every text to a friend would be a microscopic trade of stocks. Your medical records would have a market price, a stock ticker. This is compounded with the fact that only the rich could afford the processing power to solve the calculations - or the storage space to even host the list, terabytes large.
In Postcapitalism, Paul Mason writes that capitalism is pushed to its limits by a means of production - infotech - that fundamentally exceeds capitalist relations of production. With digital information, by virtue of Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V (or, these days, Right Click > Save), the labour cost of a given PDF or MP3 is virtually zero. Every printed book takes labour and a factory to make, but every copied PDF is functionally free. To keep the value of information-goods, ‘intangible assets’, from falling to zero, a prospective “infocapitalism” would have to do more than just enforce strict anti-piracy and DRM, it would have to “take this to its extremes, creating new forms of person-to-person micro-services, paid for using micro-payments, and mainly in the private sector.” Every action would need to be a transaction, “it would have to maximize the capture of externalities by corporations. Every interaction – between producer and consumer, consumer and consumer, friend and friend – would need to be mined for value.”
Web3, the concept of an internet based on blockchain, and a life based on the internet, is the attempt for ‘infocapitalism’. It’s capitalism’s last-ditch effort to tame a technology that’s grown bigger than it. This is why it’s biggest proponents aren’t techies - they’re finance people. They don’t know how a computer works, but they do know that extending finance to the whole internet, turning your life into a stock to be speculated on, would make a lot of money.
jacobvanloon
origamiaround
tangentwithtanner
