The Web3 Explainer for Pastors
Part 1: On the emerging future of the internet and its implications.
Welcome to the Missional Labs journal. Thanks for reading.
We write for church and ministry leaders interested in the macro-trends (innovation, tech, culture, etc) shaping our world on the frontiers, with our analysis on the implications for leadership and mission.
We (try to) send an email every week, with our favorite articles and thinking around a core topic.
Let us know what you think, subscribe, and share!
Tyler Prieb
Missional Labs
Kicking off the Web3 series:
Part of our aim here is to do missiological reflection on what’s happening on the “frontiers” of culture and society, and distill it for ministry leaders, so you can close the gap between comprehension and action.
Few of the emerging cultural conversations seems to have more energy right now than what’s happening on the frontiers of the internet, with the many innovations emerging under the “Web3” label.
I live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and if you took my everyday social life as a signal, you would think that Crypto, Web3, Ethereum, NFT’s, DAO’s, Bored Apes, Crypto Punks, PoolSuite, and OpenSea were the only things anyone was talking about. It’s an entirely new ecosystem, subculture, and language, emerging faster than anyone can keep up.
It’s a true picture of the old William Gibson adage: “The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet.”
So, I’m going to kick off 2022 with a digest over the next few weeks on the best articles and explainers I can find, exploring the various topics related to all things “Web3.” The hope is to give you some language, some mental models, and some handles on this topic.
If you’re in technology or media or entrepreneurship already, some of this is old news for you. But from the Church perspective, I know of almost nobody exploring this space (except for my friends at FaithTech, check them out). I think it’s important to advance the conversation.
Here are the topics we’ll explore in upcoming newsletters:
Web3 and Decentralization (this newsletter).
Understanding Blockchain and Bitcoin.
Ethereum and DeFi (Decentralized Finance).
Exploring NFT’s (Non Fungible Tokens) and the culture/economy around them.
DAO’s (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) and the future of the firm.
The “Metaverse” and what it might look like.
Social Scalability and the implications for communities.
Key Idea:
Web3 is shorthand for an ecosystem of emerging technologies, protocols, networks, and applications that represent a new stage of the evolution of the internet.
As the story goes, first there was Web 1, and we created websites with linked information. This was great, but had limited usefulness - like a great big global encyclopedia that occasionally helped our in-person lives.
Then there was Web 2, and we could like and post and create and share our way into a more social internet, on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Suddenly, we could build relationships and interact online. The problem is that all of our interactions became “data,” and the scale of the firms that controlled that data have become unsustainable.
Enter Web 3. With the evolution of the blockchain, we have new technology, so they say, that enables us to build networks that don’t require a Google or a Facebook to host and process all of our activity, or theoretically even a national government to regulate it. If your tweet can be censored, you’re not decentralized yet.
Web 3 proponents argue that we can build truly decentralized networks that will build a more open and fair internet for everyone, and create new incentives that foster collaboration and creativity, at a speed (fast!) and scale (global!) that has never been seen before, without the traditional gatekeepers. The promise of a frictionless world seems closer than ever.
There are, of course, multiple sides to this story, and like everything, some things are smoke and mirrors. But where there is smoke, there is fire, and just like nobody thought the internet would be a thing, and now we’re living in it - it’s worth paying attention to what people are doing on the frontiers, even if you haven’t been HODLing Bitcoin since the early days.
Articles:
The Sovereign Individual: What you need to know Doug Antin, 2019
The best starting place I’ve found for any serious understanding of the social, political, and economic implications of the emerging internet come from the book “The Sovereign Individual,” written in 1999 by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg.
The linked article is the best summary of the book I could find, written by Doug Antin. Essentially, the core argument is that as networks emerge, the locus of power shifts from institutions and nation states, to “sovereign individuals.” This will create a new class of people (and a resulting increase in inequality) who increasingly operate with no anchors to larger institutions.
We see this already in the emerging creator economy, the growing work-from-anywhere movement, and the emergence of currencies and assets that operate on the internet, ahead of the regulations of the nation state.
The book itself was 20 years ahead of its time, and is having a resurgence as a “prophetic” take on what’s emerging now.
It’s an important starting place, to frame the conversation about web3 as less about “the technology” and more about what it’s doing to the fundamentals of society and how we relate to it.
What is Web 3.0 & Why it Matters. Fabric Ventures, Medium, 2019.
This explainer from Max Mersch and Richard Muirhead is one of the better web3 overviews we found.
It explains how we’ve shifted from a “Web 2” era, - which was primarily a shift to mobile, social, and cloud based applications - to a “Web 3” era, marked by open, trustless, and permisionless applications built on blockchain technology.
In their view:
Web 3.0 enables a future where distributed users and machines are able to interact with data, value and other counterparties via a substrate of peer-to-peer networks without the need for third parties. The result: a composable human-centric & privacy preserving computing fabric for the next wave of the web….the most important evolution enabled by Web3.0 is the minimization of the trust required for coordination on a global scale. This marks a move towards trusting all constituents of a network implicitly rather than needing to trust each individual explicitly and/or seeking to achieve trust extrinsically.
Some of the possible implications they explore, from risk management, to data sharing, to peer-to-peer transactions, at a global scale, are really interesting.
If nothing else, we need to understand “coordination on a global scale” and “implicit trust of everyone in a network” are the key features emerging in this paradigm.
Why Decentralization Matters Chris Dixon, 2018
This article explores the history of the web through the lens of the growth of decentralization as the primary feature. He argues that networks that rely on a 3rd-party authority inevitably move from the collaboration that built the network, to the competition that destroys. New networks built on the blockchain subvert these incentives:
In short, cryptonetworks align network participants to work together toward a common goal — the growth of the network and the appreciation of the token. This alignment is one of the main reasons Bitcoin continues to defy skeptics and flourish, even while new cryptonetworks like Ethereum have grown alongside it.
Today’s cryptonetworks suffer from limitations that keep them from seriously challenging centralized incumbents…The next few years will be about fixing these limitations and building networks that form the infrastructure layer of the crypto stack. After that, most of the energy will turn to building applications on top of that infrastructure.
Decentralization, of course, is not necessarily a new idea, but one that seems to emerge whenever a network or community becomes too “centralized,” which has happened with the monopolization of the big tech firms (everything in Web3, you could argue, is a response to the centralization of Big Tech).
The Meaning of Decentralization. Vitalik Buterin, 2017
Vitalik Buterin is the primary architect and founder of the Ethereum protocol, which makes him one of the two or three most influential thinkers and engineers in all of crypto.
The best parts of this article are in the first half, where he gives us a matrix to think about the differences between (1) Architectural decentralization, (2) Political decentralization, and (3) Logical decentralization, which helps give a grid for the “types” of decentralization people are arguing over.
Beyond that, he gives a rationale for why decentralization is helpful - because it (1) makes a system less likely to fail, (2) makes a system less likely to suffer an attack, and (3) it mitigates against collusion and multiple bad actors influencing a system.
While this is very directly applied to computer science, the mental models he gives are helpful in thinking about the larger social implications of decentralization that will emerge as people use the internet in the future.
A Warm Welcome to Web3 and the Future of the Internet. Vivek Singh, 2018
This short explainer goes all the way back to Tim Berners-Lee in the 1980’s, and how his quest to manage data complexity led us the internet that we have today. This context is helpful, as is shows the evolution of the internet in a very short time frame, from the “read only” web to the “unmediated read + write” web that’s emerging today. In their view, “web3 is a chance to build a better, fairer system…[and] a more democratic iteration of our web.”
What is Web3? The Decentralized Future of the Internet, Explained. Free Code Camp, 2021.
This is another “history of the internet” type post, exploring the context that got us to today. What I like about this article is how it emphasizes the life cycle of Web2 companies, and how their incentives lead them to compromise on user data and privacy, for the sake of growth, and how Web3 stands to address that core problem.
Also in this article is a proper framing of what cryptocurrencies do - create the financial incentives necessary for decentralized networks to be built and maintained. I think that’s an important point, and changes the emphasis. This article also introduces DAO’s (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), which I’ll explore more in a future newsletter, but are important to understand what’s emerging.
So far, Web3 is really Web2.01. Scott Galloway, 2022
And finally, the contrarian take you’ve been looking for. Scott Galloway is a sharp business commentator and professor at NYU. The reality, so far, is that Web3 hasn’t netted out to “cutting out Google and empowering the little guy.”
The reality, as Scott highlights, is that 80% of the NFT market is owned by 9% of the accounts. In Bitcoin, it’s even worse: 2% of the accounts own 95% of the 800b Bitcoin market cap. Yikes.
In his view, “decentralization” is simply the latest hot language to draw capital to new ventures that aren’t, in the end, that different from their predecessors. Highly recommend this read.
Afterword:
If you’re a pastor or ministry leader, you’re in the “business” of building community, teaching scripture, discipling people, creating content, stewarding an organization, and communicating the Gospel in the public realm.
These forces affect you. You most likely feel disrupted by the internet already, as we’ve gone through the last two years. It can feel daunting - but getting handles on how our world is being built is more important than ever.
When it comes to the tidal wave of change and our posture towards it, I think of Newbigin’s famous quote:
“I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead!
We don’t have to conquer these cultural forces, but we do have to live faithfully and courageously in the midst of them. The Gospel and the Christian community have always traveled on the roads that the world builds (e.g. Rome), with the technology that the world builds (e.g. printing press).
In some ways, this will be no different, so we can learn from history. But we also need to have an imagination for a future that won’t be like the past.
There are some missiological themes that I think will emerge as we explore this topic, that I want to tease out, and hopefully explore in later digests.
How communities organize. How communities, tribes, friendships, and social circles of all types are formed is radically shifting in digital spaces. They are moving from geography-based and loyalty-based, to increasingly affinity-based or purpose-based. Not only will our denominations become global networks, our congregations will increasingly become global networks, to some degree.
Social trust and authority. How trust, belonging, loyalty, authority, and governance are moving through human networks is changing. This has massive implications for our idea of “church,” and what it means to function in flat-power networks.
Centralization vs decentralization. Every leadership conversation about growth, megachurches, planting, satellite campuses, funding, branding, culture, etc., are at some level about navigating the tradeoffs of centralization and decentralization. Instead of moralizing them, we have to understand their underlying benefits, such as freedom to experiment (decentralization) vs unity and momentum (centralization), as well as their liabilities, like lack of shared resources (decentralization) or uniformity and stifling of innovation (centralization).
Information and (de)formation. Who has the power of narrative control and is able to manage information is radically shifting. We are rushing headlong into a more user-generated, democratized arena of idea sharing, and the way that we consume content and who we trust has massive discipleship implications.
Entrepreneurship and creativity. Who can “start things” is radically changing. The future of the sovereign/empowered individual is a future where everyone is a free-agent in their vocation, and can start something new whenever they want to. You will increasingly lead a church or an organization full of entrepreneurs who aren’t waiting for permission to create.
Prioritizing access vs engagement. The history of mission was primarily a story of “access” - getting to unreached and least reached people. There are fewer and fewer of those spaces left, and the internet is putting everyone into a global city. The future of mission will be about prophetic engagement and “living such good lives among the pagans” at a truly global scale.
A crisis of meaning. The loss of the meta-narrative has been well discussed in all of the conversations about post-modernism. The trend of fragmented community, fragmented realities, and the “buffered self” are leading to massive spikes in mental health, depression, and despair. I expect this trend to increase, as the gap between traditional maps of meaning (home, community, family) and new ones get wider and wider.
There are more. The opportunities for the Gospel are significant, and the “harvest is plentiful,” as we’re promised.
If you’re interested in exploring these conversations, drop me a line. I’m working on a slack channel (maybe a discord!) for those who want to go deeper.
Coming Next Week
Next week, I’m going to share the best articles available on understanding Blockchain technology, where Bitcoin came from, and why it matters.
Share, subscribe, stay tuned.
1) About the Missional Labs Journal:
Our journal a digest of articles and ideas on innovation, culture, and leadership, translated for ministry leaders pioneering the church in the modern world, written by Tyler Prieb, at Missional Labs.
2) Explore our digital community:
We’re beta testing a digital network for emerging missional leaders, for conversations around leadership, culture, innovation, and mission.
If you’re a ministry leader under 40-ish (pastor, church planter, creative staff, technologist, nonprofit staff, etc), and you’re interested, let us know.
3) Got an idea? Join our incubator:
We’re launching an invite-only incubator program for Church and mission-adjacent entrepreneurs and ventures. You might have that technology project, media project, or new ministry that you think the world needs. We’ll help you get it going, with a world-class community of peers and mentors. Email us for information.
4) Work with our innovation team:
This content is part of our interdisciplinary services team that partners with Churches, nonprofits, networks, and other missional organizations. We do full-service strategy and innovation work for leaders navigating change and building the future. We can help - say hello.