For awhile, the concept of society has been mainly 3 Dmensional like the physical world. We gather around shared interests and values, work towards a common purpose and upheld certain standards. This created a sense of belonging for most people and has been instrumental in achieving a sense of purpose, the individuality gives way to the community or society. There's a certain top down hierarchical structure in this form of society and the leaders are the ones that take the steering wheel to direct the path of the society.
Evolution happens and things change. Semi digital societies started popping out. A 3D+ structural hierarchy started evolving, a blend of physical and digital. This gave birth to numerous social media networks, marketplace platforms, information hubs etc. People were transacting both offline and online. In most cases the process started online and finished offline. For example, I saw a product on the internet and bought it which gets delivered on my door step or I saw a person on social media and decide to go out on a date.
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As you can see, the digital is like an add on, the physical is the source, it's where things are completed. However, as things progressed the balance started tipping towards the digital. The digital keeps taking more and more of the process. With digital products, I don't need the product to be delivered on my door step.
Developing Digital Societies
Now, what makes a society? A society has different pillars or sectors. We have the economic sector, governance, value or productivity, management etc. For a society to thrive, there must be a synergy of all the parts. I'm not a much fan of Web 2.0 , but they've managed to build a substantial amount of wealth from a very well put system. Centralization has it's upside too in that from the user's perspective there's nothing much to control, everything is handled from the backend so you can focus on the easy part; building or growing.Quite recently, people had an awakening of how flawed the system is and it's prone to attack vectors. People wanted more control over their privacy and data, the realization that there's a technology available to do just that has been a game changer. Now the whole world has a deep nostalgia for this Web 2.0 mammoths. In less than 20 years, the hero has become the villian. Quite an irony I'll say. Will Web 3.0 be the villian 20 years from now?
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Apart from visionaries, I don't think people still fully understand the power of decentralization. It could usher in a developed society that's far bigger and more powerful than any nation in the world right now. It's no secret that current web 2.0 mammoths are more powerful than many nation states, look at how the former U.S president got banned from Twitter? The president of one of the most powerful countries getting muted for so called bad behavior!
With true Web 3.0, nobody can actually be banned or erased from a platform. Will there be Web 3.0 mammoths? I really think so because there's something beneficial in diversity but each of this mammoths wouldn't be run by a single entity. It'll be run by a group of people with shared interests. I think generalized decentralized networks have a higher chance of being mammoths than niche decentralized networks, we'll see what happens.
Prediction
Most people think that the financial system like banks will be the hardest hit by this new technology. For me, I think it's the governments. They should be the most fearful with this new tech because it carries the biggest threat to them; that of replacing them. I'll go as far as to make a prediction, In the next half of this century, governments might become obsolete. United States, England, Denmark, Ghana, India etc, countries as we know them now will become a relic of the past.What do you think? Is my prediction absurd? How far do you think decentralization will go?
Thanks for reading!
Profile: Young Kedar
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