When the internet was created, only the most visionary could imagine the size and, above all, the kind of change it would bring about in society as a whole. Even what may now seem obvious was not at all easy to anticipate in the heat of events. At that time, it was not even clear that there would be commercial and financial transactions over the Internet, for example.
It is worth mentioning that the applications that populated hearts and minds when the Internet was created were not exactly the commercial ones. Those brave pioneers dreamed of building the World Wide Web, whose acronym www, still now pollutes so many websites URLs. The WWW would be the global web formed by what at the time we called hypertexts and the links that interlinked them. This web, when produced on a world scale, would allows us to "navigate" a sea of information from side to side, without frontiers. It was a dreamlike realization at a time when all you had were books, encyclopedias, and local radios and TVs. It is worth remembering that the name of one of the main protocols that form the Internet is HTTP, acronym for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. That is, the whole thing was totally created to navigate in hypertexts ...
Today, we still type 'http: // www ...' into a 'browser', and although all these references to the above ideas, they are like fossils of that time, to which we pay homage, even if what we want to do has nothing to do with "surfing", nor with hypertext (word that has fallen into disuse) or with any global web. Today, you enter Amazon to make a purchase or your Internet banking to move a checking account and bye, bye… That’s all. One company only; for all intents and purposes, a single page ... But, the fossils are there, looking at you.
The Power of Information
Nevertheless, in a long-term perspective, buying on Amazon over the Internet may not be as transformative as the democratization of information provided by the WWW. Information is power. And history proves this ...
A very common parallel when thinking about the Internet and information revolution is the invention of the press by Gutenberg, around 1430. Previously, books were handwritten, letter-by-letter, in a slow and costly process that ended up restricting to very few the access to sophisticated knowledge, usually to clergymen and nobles. After the creation of the press, the fall in the cost of reproduction of written material allowed ideas to spread with unprecedented speed, reaching far more people than before. Already in the period of discoveries, the stories of navigators were animatedly shared by a previously unthinkable number of individuals through books, tracts, maps, and all sorts of written material. A revolution, like the Protestant one, based on the 95 theses of Martin Luther, whose leaflets spread from hand to hand, probably would not have been possible before Gutenberg's innovation. Or at least it would take a few more centuries ...
This new dynamic in the information circulation was among the foundations of the Enlightenment era itself and of all its consequences, including the increase in the proportion of literate people. All this resulted in the loss of the power of kings and popes, which is no small thing.
However, even after the creation of the press, the production and distribution of information has remained very expensive for the average citizen for centuries. In spite of the increase in the volume of readers (and subsequently of listeners and viewers, with the advent of radio and TV), the group of content producers remained very restricted until the doors of the 21st century.
Nowadays, however, most people publish and share texts, audios and videos, in a sort of belated continuation of the changes introduced by Gutenberg. The effects of this we already see in events such as the Arab Spring, the American elections of both Obama and Trump, the demonstrations of 2013 in Brazil and so on. What is coming?
True Change Takes Time ...
The transformations generated from Gutenberg took centuries. Of course at that time everything was very, very slow. In the present times everything is much faster, right? Yes, but calm down ...
It turns out that the universalization of content producers also did not occur early in the Internet. So much so that this everyone-is-a-publisher Internet has received the name of Web 2.0. Some of its best examples, such as Wikipedia and the first far-reaching social networks, only appeared near the turn of the 21st century, when the creation and popularization of the Internet could already be measured in decades.
In the "The Truth About Blockchain" article in the prestigious Harvard Business Review (https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-truth-about-blockchain), the authors classify technologies like TCP / IP (the geek Internet name) as foundational technologies. According to the authors, in order to reach all their transforming potential, a foundational technology must overcome two types of barriers: the technical difficulties, which are typical of an innovative solution; and the difficulties of co-ordination between the various actors in a solution. This happens because real transformation always involves a myriad of different actors, such as companies, institutions, clients, and so on. It is not possible to overcome all this simultaneously. The technology has to skip each barrier at a time, in a sequence of phases that is described by the article.
And this is not fast, even in the age of the Internet ...
The Wiki Economy: Not Fulfilled Promise?
The promise that the Internet would usher in a form of distributed production of value, where the average people could be not only protagonists but also the main beneficiaries of the advent of the big net, was one of the most interesting visions that animated the advent of Web 2.0. In this idyllic setting, large corporations would not be able to compete with self-organized crowds whose ability to innovate and solve problems would be insurmountable. Thus, these Internet companies, in addition to generating better solutions for consumers, would also change the fate of the income generated by the activities developed on the Internet, which would not follow the typical pattern of concentration in few hands of large corporation owners. It would spread more equally by all those who contributed to the supply of these products and services.
One of the best-known books of the time was entitled Wikinomics. It generated great hope that the Internet would lead the world to a more distributed, egalitarian economy with opportunities for all. In the book, the author describes a myriad of endless possible Internet-enabled business models. The same author also released another book called Macro Wikinomics, where he extended his reasoning to global problems that, in his vision, only the Internet was able to solve. Climatic change, for example.
Yet the future, this cunning destroyer of brilliant foresight, was far more sage than his naive observers imagined. Large corporations were very agile and competent, having been able to produce viable business models in the jungle of the Internet. This was a big challenge in a world of services for free rule. Some of these companies, like Google and Facebook, have adopted similar characteristics to Wiki ideas and have come to extract value from the information domain, the touchstone of the new millennium. We even came to companies that called themselves of sharing economy ones, like AirBnB and Uber, which are basically just super powerful intermediaries leveraged by competently applied technology.
Anyway, that whole dream did not materialize. Or was it just postponed? ...
Back to the track
It should come as no surprise, then, that the author of Wikinomics, the great Web 2.0 and the wiki economy propagandist, is the same author of Blockchain Revolution, Don Tapscott (together with his son Alex, which is symptomatic, by the way). Yes, Don Tapscott, a lecturer and enthusiast of the wiki economy, is back again with full force in this book, which (again!) describes a number of blockchain applications and business models. Don also led a study of the World Economic Forum which, in my opinion, put the blockchain issue in the minds and mouths of many world leaders, primarily corporate ones. In my view, although I have never spoken to Mr Tapscott, all this movement seems a sort of rematch because of the relative failure of Wikinomics' vision.
In this sense, you should even expect Blockchain Revolution to be filled with proposals of disintermediation and sharing that point in the direction of hampering the concentration of income and power. And that's exactly what you'll find.
But, if it did not work sooner, what's new? Obvious: a blockchain!
What Tapscott and other scholars have realized is that the blockchain contains new features that can forge the imagined wiki world that has been run over by Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber and other giants. The ability to represent values and assets in a digital and distributed way, to create smart contracts that build trust between parties that have never seen each other, to reduce transaction costs to the point of enabling true distributed and autonomous organizations (such DAOs) among others, are among the attributes that reinvigorated these old fighters.
No wonder most of those involved with public blockchains declare in all letters that they are building nothing less than a Web 3.0, capable of making unfulfilled promises of its predecessor, the 2.0. It is not only curious that the library's main JavaScript class name for access to the public blockchain Ethereum is Web3! Those guys are not just for kidding…
When considering the entire scenario in perspective, it is clear how a huge project this is… There will be titanic battles whose next chapters none of us can lose. Until then...