Defining Web3: A Guide to the New Cultural Economy: Volume 89

The class of technology variously referred to as Web3 or crypto has been heralded as a democratizing force for economics and governance. This chapter argues that, to the extent such hype is justified, it is only partly due to the affordances of the technology itself. Perhaps more important is the amnesia it has induced, as an innovative paradigm whose novelty inclines people to neglect once-stable norms. In both economics and governance, crypto offers opportunities for greater democracy, but following through on them is guaranteed by neither the technology nor the amnesia it invites.

“Web3” is a practice in participatory digital infrastructures through the ability to read, write, and control own digital assets. Web3 is hailed as the alternative to the failings of big tech, offering a participatory mode of digital organization and shared ownership of digital infrastructure through algorithmic governance. This paper offers an introductory playbook to researchers entering the field of Web3 by providing an analytical lens to approach the emergent field of Web3 as “infrastructuring.” It argues that Web3 can be understood as a collective, community exploration of “how to infrastructure.” Drawing on qualitative examples derived from digital ethnographic methods, the study reveals that play, politics, and prefiguration are fundamental qualities underpinning Web3’s vision of offering an “exit” from established institutional infrastructures. Therefore, a primary challenge Web3 faces in its governance experiments centers around the question of how to effectively build and manage infrastructure.

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) promise to be an incubator for a regenerative, mutualist, and democratic economy. But if business is no longer done in firms and workers are neither employed nor managed – what else? This paper argues that a new production architecture inevitably involves an uncomfortable look at the idea of “business” itself, requiring us to reconsider deeply ingrained ideas of scale, ownership, and control. Here, you will find three provocations to institutionally reimagine DAOs for a planetary-conscious future. Bear with me.

This paper critically evaluates the political economy of Web3 and offers a neo-institutional model to explain qualitative observations of contemporary digital social movements. By starting to develop a sociological model of Web3 rooted in micro-organizational practices, including trust mediation and social coproduction, this paper re-evaluates assumptions of scarcity, economic value, and social belonging. It concludes by introducing a novel research program to study digital polycentric governance that focuses on community self-governance of digital common pool resources (DCPRs) and looks forward to empirical research using on-chain datasets from decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

Like an online carnival, Web3 aims to turn the internet’s social order upside down. Unlike a carnival, Web3 wants to be more than a weeklong party and morph into a legitimate substitute for the internet’s status quo. Web3’s secret sauce for upheaval is decentralized, permissionless technologies, in particular blockchain technologies. In this exploratory paper, we draw on the concept of institutional isomorphism to muse about Web3’s future and to highlight the inherent tension between striving to be different from Web2 yet wanting to become more legitimate. We argue that technical merits are hardly enough to realize Web3’s high aspirations. Regulatory pressures, rampant uncertainty, and the professional norms of Web3 participants drive the space to adopt many of the organizational structures and practices that it aims to displace. To maintain divergence from Web2, despite isomorphic pressures, we suggest that it is important to increase the overall diversity of people in Web3, to double down on the value of decentralization, and to reaffirm Web3’s commitment to creatively re-imagine various institutional arrangements.

A Web3 lifeworld consists of an imaginary and a shared commons. A Web3 imaginary is shown to include most, if not all, of the following: (i) the stated goal or purpose of the community, (ii) the behavioral norms, (iii) the lore or history, and (iv) what is opposed. A typical Web3 commons is shown to involve three elements: hash (technical), bash (social) and cash (finance). When changes come in Web3, the response is enacted using an available lever from the hash, bash, cash model of decentralized organization, but the response must not be in friction with the community’s imaginary, or it will most likely grind to a halt. Effective response to change becomes part of the Web3 lifeworld’s toolkit.

This paper explores the rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their impact on the art world. By examining the esthetics and political economy of crypto art and its relationship to online pop culture, it questions the value of NFTs and whether they truly represent a source of income for artists or simply contribute to the speculative nature of crypto investments. This paper concludes by asserting that the world of crypto art is dominated by right-wing libertarians and black box algorithms, and that a radical redistribution of wealth is necessary to address the issues of power, race, and gender within the industry.

This paper argues that a coordinated network of independent producers is crucial in creating an immersive metaverse. A digital asset layer that is beyond the control of any single counterparty, along with reliable definition and exchange of fungible and non-fungible digital objects, is important for individual digital creative expression to flourish. Non-fungible digital objects are essential in creating an asset layer for a metaverse that approximates the full range of independent human creative expression. The development of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) alongside cryptocurrencies, governed by distributed and transparent control, can create an intermediation layer that is separate from the control of a platform intermediary.

Web3’s raison d’être is decentralization. Quite problematically, however, few industry analysts can articulate what “decentralization” really entails; whether it differs at all from the notion of “distribution,” and how either construct can be measured with observable data to enable a meaningful analysis of the industry’s core promise. Instead, Web3 is akin to a decentralization theater in which archetypical characters, who resonate with the likes of Hamlet and Godot, enact decentralization based on fictitious narratives. After critically reassessing these narratives about decentralization, this paper offers a fresh perspective to evaluate, less theatrically and hopefully more rigorously, future claims about “being decentralized.” I argue that the crucial issue lurking behind the decentralization narrative is the dispersion of authority within blockchain platforms, which consists of two fundamental dimensions, namely the dispersion of information and of decision-making. The value proposition of Web3 will not be taken seriously until the industry can provide reliable indicators of authority dispersion and demonstrate that the latter affects strategic outcomes for blockchain platforms, including innovation, growth, and value creation.

This paper explores the emergence of cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu in the “crypto-carnival” and their ties to the Trickster archetype. It discusses the concept of tokens and the surge of tokenization in the crypto-summer of 2020–2021. This paper explains how Shiba Inu became a purely recursive token with no external measure of value. It also explores the creation of egregores, which are created intentionally or unintentionally by groups of people who share a common belief or interest. Finally, this paper discusses how digital assets born out of a countermovement may eventually fall prey to the same system they were trying to escape from, using the carnivalesque to trigger the emergence of an egregore that brings monetary value to worthless objects.

In this paper, I discuss the personalities of several representative crypto YouTube celebrities and Bitcoin aficionados, such as George Tung from CryptosRUs, Mike Jenkins (Guy) from Coin Bureau, Lark Davis, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, and Richard Heart. I look closely at their online performances to reveal the character of a trickster, the ambivalent mythological figure that symbolizes chaos, creativity, and disruption. Based on the core literature on the subject, I trace how the figure of a trickster has transformed into the jester in medieval times, and then into the adventurer in the new modern times, and how this transformation is relevant for today. A variety of examples demonstrates that the jester, the trickster, and the adventurer all reveal themselves in different facets of crypto influencers’ performances. However, the most popular YouTubers are also comparatively tame: they produce educational content on cryptocurrencies and blockchain, as compared to “get rich quick” schemes, which are typically presented with a higher degree of tricksteriness. There are also crucial differences and omissions: crypto influencers do not demonstrate queerness, which is inherent to the trickster, and they do not balance praise with abuse, as jesters do. The modern type of an adventurer is more fitting, although it is mostly found in the virtual Wild West of blockchain entrepreneurship, rather than on the most popular YouTube channels.

Web3 reflects and instantiates the “ludic turn” of the last few decades, where identity is increasingly forged through play and games rather than through work. The ludic is especially evident in the Bitcoin ecosystem, where the elements of the carnivalesque – play, anarchy, dissimulation, vulgar language, and excessive consumption – are pervasive. These elements may also be divined in Web3, though they are less ubiquitous, which suggests that Web3 is perhaps best seen as a gentrified carnival.

This paper explores the influence of financialization in the post-2008 credit crisis, which led to a general mistrust in financial institutions and states. Simultaneously, Web3 and digital finance emerged as a way to navigate this problematic state of affairs, and many individuals were drawn to the agency of machines, code, and algorithms in making a deviation from austerity toward some form of liberation. Taking the form of an oracle reading, this paper uses the “Gambler” archetype to explore the subjective movement of those who engage with digital finance as a strategy to face the generalized climate of austerity and to claim their share of the economy, now that work has ceased to be a lifetime calling.

This paper introduces the concept of a “computable economy” and discusses how it relates to the emergence of Web3 or the new type of economy that has arisen from the integration of digital technologies such as blockchain, smart contracts, and digital identity. A “computable economy” is one where those computational rule systems are integrated into a connected graph, allowing for decentralized cooperation and distributed coordination. This paper traces the trajectory of innovation in the economy from the development of industrial production technologies to the rise of information and communication technology (ICT) and the digital economy. It argues that the shift to a “computable economy” is a consequence of the transformation of analog economic institutions into natively digital institutions. This results in a “full stack” digital economy where all economic actions can be digitally constructed and implemented. This paper concludes by discussing the potential of Web3 to create a new type of economy, that is, “techno-utopian” and characterized by human flourishing, as the incursion of machines and computation leads to a new era of economic growth and transformation.

This paper is an encounter between an artist creating characters for video games and an academic studying how people and things are being financialized. Exchanging about the appearance of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies – technologies associated with Web3 in the video game industry, the academic, and the artist reflect on the place of playfulness, creation, and finance in our society. They observe that most North American and European players resisted NFTs and cryptocurrencies, while more Asian-Pacific ones embraced the latter. They conclude that those reactions were explained by the fact that gamers perceived cryptocurrencies and NFTs as institutional objects associated with a financial logic, whose presence threatened the gaming logic. As pragmatic friends, they nevertheless issued an NFT with this paper, a “Crow Queen.” Time will tell if the Web3 society will praise this new form of digital joint academic/art production.

This paper argues that the concept of “jouissance” can help us understand the popularity of blockchain protocols, meme-coins, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the world of Web3. These technologies act as mirrors to project reflections that allow people to imagine social and personal selves differently. Meme-coins use dark humor to oppose mainstream society, and the popularity of NFTs cannot be fully explained by artistic merit or return on investment. Instead, each collectible NFT allows the collector to explore various possible representations of the self. It is argued that blockchains must be seen as socio-informational-technical systems that participate in the formation of the symbolic social structures giving rise to social and personal identity. By recognizing the personal and social significance of jouissance, we can appreciate the darker, more primal aspects of these phenomena that other theories and approaches cannot fully explain.

Drawing on anthropological perspectives, this paper argues that the fungibility of objects and the ability to exchange them for money is a defining characteristic of capitalist markets. In contrast, other systems of reckoning value emphasize the unique relationships within which objects are embedded and their inability to stand for just any other thing. This paper further highlights the role of slavery in the origins and continued dominance of capitalism and the existence of alternative systems such as cooperativism and sharing that are often overlooked. This paper then examines the Saussurean and Peircean semiotics underlying the concept of money as an abstract sign and argues that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in blockchain technology contradict these theories by emphasizing pure uniqueness and rendering objects non-transformable or inconvertible. This paper concludes by warning against the dangers of a future where fungibility is absent, as it is necessary for life and the generation of new and different possibilities.

“Immediate Gratuitousness” puts cryptocurrency and its sister industries into a history of performances of extravagance, daring, and waste. My assertion is that the people to read at this point in the development of crypto are not Mazzucato or Galbraith, Minsky or Perez (or Hayek and Mises), but Antonin Artaud, playwright of the theater of self-destruction and gratuitous gestures. This account of crypto situates it in a context of value produced through performance and ruinous waste, from burning a million British pounds on the Isle of Jura in 1994 to the production of proof-of-burn minting mechanisms, and explains how to make sense of our carnivalesque moment through the logic of the extravagantly destructive.