New report: Web3 and the global challenges
Over the last few months Careful Industries has been working with the Frontier Tech Hub to understand how — and, indeed, if — Web3 might be deployed to help solve some of the world’s greatest challenges.
Read the report Foreword below, or the the full report here [PDF].
Understanding the Potential of Web3
Whether you love it, hate it, or are simply confused by it, Web3 is a hot topic in technology circles right now. This paper is an attempt to cut through that noise and consider how these new technologies might be used to achieve the greatest global challenges.
Over the last twenty years, the Web has succumbed to centralisation. Platforms and walled gardens have been built where networks once flourished, and a small number of companies have become dominant infrastructure players, some achieving power and influence equivalent to that of nation states.
Globally, many governments are mitigating this by taking regulatory and legal steps — but that is far from the only response. In assembling this report, we have witnessed a powerful shift towards decentralisation taking place in many parts of the world, both online and off. For some, this is a response to the real and perceived failure of existing technical, political, and social infrastructures; for others, a response to climate injustice, deepening poverty, and financial exclusion. Peeling back the layers of hype around Web3, we see the rapid adoption of these technologies as a part of this response — powered by an urge to decentralise and reorganise established norms and organisations in more equitable ways.
In gathering our research, we have broken Web3 down into two categories: governance and technology.
Writing in the second half of 2022, we have seen in real-time that the Web3 technology stack is in flux. Section 2 includes a set of working definitions for Web3 technologies, but it seems unlikely that the current artefacts are close to their final form. We recommend that any application of these technologies to the global challenges should be done with care, and propose a set of practical anticipatory governance measures to help manage and shape this.
Web3 early adopters are also experimenting with decentralised governance. In this paper, we understand the use of blockchain to form collective structures as part of a bigger social shift to new forms of institution making. Testing and reconfiguring the borders of and limits of how we gather is a fundamental form of social innovation, and we suggest this is an early indicator of much bigger social and political shifts to come — ones that are likely to be critical to the achievement of the global challenges.
Overall, we have four recommendations. Together these form the basis of an anticipatory governance model. As well as practical, short-term measures to maximise positive outcomes and limit harm, our research indicates a need for a co-ordinated effort to understand the impacts of decentralised technologies in the round, powered by early stage data gathering and iterative standards setting:
Develop Web3 sandboxes modelled on the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. This will enable innovative “testing and learning” to happen in a safe environment.
Build risk and feasibility models: analyse the outputs from sandboxed experiments to better understand the potential impacts and infrastructural requirements of Web3 deployments
Establish standards. Start by convening members of the Digital Public Goods Charter to determine whether the existing indicators and requirements are sufficient to cover Web3 deployment and use cases.
Understand global impact. Start by forming a Decentralised Governance Observatory under the aegis of an existing multilateral organisation and pool political, economic, social, and technical observations and weak signals to develop a collective view of the global impact.
While it might seem too early for bodies engaged with international development and diplomacy to intervene in Web3 technologies, the imperative to do so is significant. The recent history of digital technologies shows that the demands of the market are one of the strongest animating forces for technical innovation — but allowing investors and entrepreneurs to be the only ones that shape technologies does not represent the whole of humanities’ needs. Investor return is not the only kind of value needed for achievement of the global challenges, and balancing forces must be present early on in the development and growth of new technologies.
As you read this paper, it is also worth remembering that Web3 is one type of decentralised technology. As we make the final edits, serial entrepreneur Elon Musk is finalising the privatisation of Twitter, leading many thousands of users to land on the decentralised social network Mastodon. Founded in 2016, Mastodon is not a Web3 technology, but a member of the Fediverse, “an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing”. Subject to much less hype and investor speculation, Mastodon is one of the many decentralised technologies that are gaining traction, beyond the mantle of Web3.
Overall, we find that the blockchain is a single expression of a growing social movement to decentralise. While understanding it and galvanising its uses for public good is necessary, it should be understood as part of a bigger political, economic, and social revolution that we suspect will come to fruition as the twenty-first century develops.
As such, our overall recommendation is that any strategy to tackle the global challenges must look beyond blockchain and seek to understand decentralised governance in its broadest social context. While it seems probable that Web3 technologies will facilitate and popularise decentralisation, the real changes (and achievements) will be created by people. To this end, we propose putting the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance at the heart of any future strategy for achieving the global challenges. This will help ensure that power sharing and decentralised governance are the true products of further innovation.
4 November 2022
Careful Industries worked in partnership with Phas3 and Pluriversa to deliver this programme. Companion reports from our project partners are available at Frontier Tech Hub.