Noting the Appearance of Chris Dixon's Book "Read, Write, Own": Am I Still Allowed to Believe in Web3?

Or will I only be putting yet another "kick me" sign on my back when I once again express hope & enthusiasm for web3 technologies?...

Or will I only be putting yet another "kick me" sign on my back when I once again express hope & enthusiasm for web3 technologies...

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I am of the Web3 Old Guard. 

I think platforms picking up the memory of our likes and interactions and then appropriating them to lock us in so that they can manipulate and rent our attention is a substantial evil. 

I believe in the one and eternal RSS protocol. Google Reader died for our sins. I think that we should own the tracks we leave on the internet. Wehould be able to change, scrub, and tune them. I believe that we should control access to our tracks, and let others have access only to the extent that we see them as good stewards of our attention, and when we give them the keys.

Thus I am predisposed to be a huge fan of Chris Dixon’s brand-new Read, Write, Own<https://cdixon.org/2023/06/22/read-write-own>, which carries this torch forward. And if he is an inadequate missionary? And if his book is an inadequate gospel? I am strongly predisposed to resort to that declaration of the most Whiggish of Whig historians, C.V. Wedgwood <https://archive.org/details/williamsilent0000cvwe>: “When a torch is all but extinguished, it is poor policy to complain because its flame is smoky and smells of pitch…”

But…

My view: If Dixon wants to be taken seriously as more than talking his book for new rounds of crypto pump-and-dump, he needs to tax his partners at a16z to establish a real lavishly financed Web3 foundation to get the software infrastructure done and build genuine scalable Web3 use cases. Revert to being long-term investors in exploring technological capabilities rather than carnival bubble hawkers shouting “BITCOIN!” at the top of their lungs.

If not, I am going to start questioning whether this is even a torch at all…

Molly White of “Web3 Is Going Great!” <https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/> complains eloquently that the flame is smoky and smells of pitch <https://www.citationneeded.news/review-read-write-own-by-chris-dixon/>. She is right. But it is, at least, a torch. How to make it burn brighter—and less smelly?

Molly White really, really, really does not like the book! She says:

• The web has become increasingly monopolized by… “Big Tech”…. The role [Dixon’s’] own company played in that particular shift is a large and completely unmentioned elephant in the room throughout [the] book…. We’re all trying to find the guy who did this.…

• It’s profoundly weird to read RSS’s obituary as a person who checks her very-much-still-alive feed reader several times a day….

• [If Dixon] believes that “community consensus” will somehow always reflect the desires of each member of the community… a brief look at some community-governed blockchain projects over the past few years should be enough to disabuse anyone of that misapprehension…

• “Part Four: Here and Now”… perhaps lay[ing] out a list of blockchain projects that are currently successfully solving real problems…. Part Four is precisely four and a half pages long….

• Dixon instead spends his few pages excoriating the “casino” projects that he says have given crypto a bad rap…

• [Dixon’s] one project that “got further than anyone else”: Helium… was pulling in somewhere around $1,150 in usage fees a month despite the company being valued at $1.2 billion… had widely lied to the public about its supposed big-name clients… its executives have been accused of hoarding the project’s token to enrich themselves. But hey, a16z sunk millions into Helium (a fact Dixon never mentions), so might as well try to drum up some new interest!…

But at the end she does concede that there is some good in the book:

Dixon occasionally makes some compelling, although hardly new, points about ways in which the internet has trended towards a commercialized, capitalist hellscape… makes credible arguments for things that I agree could help to push back… more investment in open source software… in protocols that can form the foundations for new platforms… maybe… we ought to re-evaluate how web projects are funded… [but] then unceremoniously veers away from the topic lest he enter dangerous territory for a venture capitalist…. These small glimmers are few and far between, perhaps amounting to a blog post worth reading but certainly not a 300+ page book…

It is, as I said, a torch.

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I want to believe.

Byron Gilliam <https://mail.blockworks.com/p/read-write-newsletter-book-review-part-one> describes Read, Write, Own as “The World’s Longest Blog Post:.. It is Chris Dixon’s gasp—is it a last gasp?—as a true believer that ”blockchain networks are a new construction material for building a better internet".

I really do want to believe. 

But I really wish Dixon had written “Web3 technologies” rather than “blockchain networks”. And “blockchain” and “crypto” seem to me to be poisonous words now—words poisoned, in substantial part, by Chris Dixon’s firm a16z. Did any firm play a larger role in convincing people what “Web3” = “blockchain”? And then that “blockchain” = “crypto assets”? And then that “crypto assets” = “bitcoin”? I do not think so.

I am less upset about Dixon’s potted history about the internet. In Dixon’s telling, before Tim Berners-Lee different information providers were busy trying to construct their individual Walled Gardens. Berners-Lee’s http://www. in the 1990s and RSS in the 2000s fueled a period in which immense network effects accrued to a decentralized community of builders and users. Those wanting to construct walled-garden monopolies and extract money in the form of taxes and fees from one and all were forced to bend to the hurricane, and hang on for the ride. That was web1. 

But the walled-garden makers struck back. The internet “got intermediated”, as large companies rewrote the rules of the game, and “leveraged the power of permission to thwart competition, desolate markets and extract rents.” That was web2. As Dixon puts it:

Small group of big companies wrenched control away. Today the top 1 percent of social networks account for 95 percent of social web traffic and 86 percent of social mobile app use. The top 1 percent of search engines account for 97 percent of search traffic, and the top 1 percent of e-commerce sites account for 57 percent of e-commerce traffic…. Startups and creative people increasingly depend on networks run by megacorporations…. The internet got intermediated, in other words. The network went from permissionless to permissioned…. Big Tech companies’… services come with considerable negative externalities… user surveillance… has made the internet adversarial… [and] power brokers architect their networks to restrict and constrain startups, impose high rents on creators, and disenfranchise users…

They restricted and broke the network in pursuit of their own profit:

Dominant tech businesses leverage the power of permission to thwart competition, desolate markets, and extract rents. And those rents are exorbitant. The combined revenue of the five largest social networks–Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter–is about $150 billion per year… [that] goes to those companies instead of the users, creators, and entrepreneurs who contribute, build on top, and create value for all…

And then there was supposed to come web3. 

Trusted world-readable databases of what about their attention identity users wanted to reveal to the world were supposed to undermine the permission structure that supported the walls around the walled gardens. People were supposed to build useful databases and contract structures that would restore global permissionless network connection, and do so while building network infrastructures that would allow users–rather than megkacorportions–to control and disseminate their own attention-identities. 

So I want to cheer loudly when Dixon writes something like:

Blockchains… mak[ing]… strong commitments about how they will behave in the future… can connect people in social networks while empowering users over corporate interests…. They can incentivize innovation, reduce taxes on creators, and let the people who contribute… share in decision making and upside…. “What problems do blockchains solve?” is like… “What problems does steel solve over, say, wood?”… Software developers get open access, creators get direct relationships with their audiences, fees are guaranteed to stay low, and users get valuable economic and governance rights…

Except… it’s not “Web3” he writes about, it’s “blockchain”. It should be “Web3’, shouldn’t it? And what are these “valuable economic and governance rights”? They are crypto assets. And it was a16z’s Marc Andreessen <https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/why-bitcoin-matters/> whose 2014 New York Times piece did, in my estimation, more than anything else to identify Web3 with bitcoin, and so launch the casino side of things that Chris Dixon scorns—but from which his firm a16z has profited massively. Andreessen’s piece is, I think, best summarized via this excerpt:

Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoins… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin… Bitcoin…

That is right. 83 mentions of “bitcoin” in 3000 words. No mention of “Web3”. One mention of “blockchain”. One mention of the “Byzantine Generals’ Problem”. No mention of alternative databases save to denigrate them as overwhelmingly likely to be swamped by bitcoin’s “four-sided network effect”.

So there is, as Molly White said, a serious case of we’re all trying to find the guy who did this here…

My view: Dixon needs to heavily tax his a16z partners, and use the money to go all-in on a serious web3 utility and infrastructure service foundation. Not a pump-and-dump. And not intended as a moneymaker. It should be set up as a service provider, with the view that it will do all the things that are technologically interesting and of great potential utility to users, leaving the question of whether and how any money will come to some later date. They should revert to being long-term investors in exploring technological capabilities rather than carnival bubble hawkers shouting “BITCOIN!” at the top of their lungs.

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References:

• Dixon, Chris. 2023. Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet. New York: Random House. <https://cdixon.org/2023/06/22/read-write-own>

• Wedgwood, Cicely Veronica. 1944. William the Silent: William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, 1533–1584. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. <https://archive.org/details/williamsilent0000cvwe>.

• White, Molly. 2024. “Review: Chris Dixon’s Read Write Own”. Citation Needed, February 7. <https://www.citationneeded.news/review-read-write-own-by-chris-dixon/>.