TY - JOUR
T1 - Expansive and extractive networks of Web3
AU - Sadowski, Jathan
AU - Beegle, Kaitlin
N1 - Funding Information:
First, we would like to thank Matt Zook and three anonymous reviewers for their close, critical, and constructive engagement with this article. Their comments made this a greatly improved piece of work. JS would like to thank Ed Ongweso Jr. and Jereme Brown for regular (often recorded) conversations about Web3, as well as all the many people who he had spoken with on and off mic about these topics. They have significantly shaped his thinking about this subject. JS also acknowledge that this work was funded, in part, by the Australian Research Council—grant number DE220100417. KB would like to thank the many colleagues and friends she has met in the decentralized tech space for informing (and challenging) her thinking about many of these topics. She would also like to thank the faculty at Technical University of Munich—particularly Dr. Robert Csehi—for supporting her initial research into the politics of Web3. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (grant number DE220100417).
Funding Information:
First, we would like to thank Matt Zook and three anonymous reviewers for their close, critical, and constructive engagement with this article. Their comments made this a greatly improved piece of work. JS would like to thank Ed Ongweso Jr. and Jereme Brown for regular (often recorded) conversations about Web3, as well as all the many people who he had spoken with on and off mic about these topics. They have significantly shaped his thinking about this subject. JS also acknowledge that this work was funded, in part, by the Australian Research Council—grant number DE220100417. KB would like to thank the many colleagues and friends she has met in the decentralized tech space for informing (and challenging) her thinking about many of these topics. She would also like to thank the faculty at Technical University of Munich—particularly Dr. Robert Csehi—for supporting her initial research into the politics of Web3.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2023.
PY - 2023/1
Y1 - 2023/1
N2 - The self-proclaimed usurper of Web 2.0, Web3 quickly became the center of attention. Not long ago, the public discourse was saturated with projects, promises, and peculiarities of Web3. Now the spotlight has swung around to focus on the many faults, failures, and frauds of Web3. The cycles of technological trends and investment bubbles seem to be accelerating in such a way as to escape any attempt at observing them in motion before they crash, and then everybody moves on to the next thing. Importantly, Web3 was not an anomaly or curiosity in the broader tech industry. It articulates patterns that existed before Web3 and will exist after. Web3 should be understood as a case study of innovation within the dominant model of Silicon Valley venture capitalism. Our focus in this article is on understanding how the movement around Web3 formed through an interplay between (1) normative concepts and contestations related to ideas of “decentralization” and (2) political economic interests and operations related to the dynamics of fictitious capital. By offering a critical analysis of Web3, our goal is also to show how any even potentially progressive (or as we call them “expansive”) forms of Web3 development struggle for success, recognition, and attention due to the wild excesses of hype and investment devoted to “extractive” forms of Web3. In the process, they provide us a better view of how different arrangements of technopolitics can exist at the same time, side-by-side, in complicated ways.
AB - The self-proclaimed usurper of Web 2.0, Web3 quickly became the center of attention. Not long ago, the public discourse was saturated with projects, promises, and peculiarities of Web3. Now the spotlight has swung around to focus on the many faults, failures, and frauds of Web3. The cycles of technological trends and investment bubbles seem to be accelerating in such a way as to escape any attempt at observing them in motion before they crash, and then everybody moves on to the next thing. Importantly, Web3 was not an anomaly or curiosity in the broader tech industry. It articulates patterns that existed before Web3 and will exist after. Web3 should be understood as a case study of innovation within the dominant model of Silicon Valley venture capitalism. Our focus in this article is on understanding how the movement around Web3 formed through an interplay between (1) normative concepts and contestations related to ideas of “decentralization” and (2) political economic interests and operations related to the dynamics of fictitious capital. By offering a critical analysis of Web3, our goal is also to show how any even potentially progressive (or as we call them “expansive”) forms of Web3 development struggle for success, recognition, and attention due to the wild excesses of hype and investment devoted to “extractive” forms of Web3. In the process, they provide us a better view of how different arrangements of technopolitics can exist at the same time, side-by-side, in complicated ways.
KW - blockchain
KW - decentralization
KW - fictitious capital
KW - political economy
KW - venture capital
KW - Web3
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85149267301
U2 - 10.1177/20539517231159629
DO - 10.1177/20539517231159629
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85149267301
SN - 2053-9517
VL - 10
JO - Big Data and Society
JF - Big Data and Society
IS - 1
ER -