In Web3: A Concept Game (click to jump to the article), we discuss that making "ownable" at the heart of web3's new vision is actually a ridiculous word game that goes against common sense. Because "possession" itself is an ideology that relies on human society, the attempt to "technicalize" and "objectify" ideology is doomed to be fragile.
In this article, we will further illustrate that these attempts are not only fragile, but also dangerous. We will present structurally how the specter of capitalism has burrowed into the cloak of web3 technochemism. And how did this combination of technicalism and capitalism eventually form a unique and familiar "cyber capitalism" for human beings.
To define bourgeois ownership is nothing more than to describe the whole social relations of bourgeois production
- Karl Marx
On March 4, 2021, a registered account of the BurntFinance blockchain team burned a painting by British artist Bansky, "Moron", live online.
Before that, they had just auctioned off the 2006 work for $95,000 and made it into the NFT collection. Then they destroyed the work in the live room.
Such crazy behavior, however, allowed them to get a considerable reward - this "Idiot" NFT backup, sold in the Opensea platform for more than 4 times the price of the original.
Burned a Volvo, and tearfully earned a Maybach.
In BurntFinace's manifesto for "burning the painting," they explained the seemingly crazy act as follows:
"If [a work of art] has both an NFT and a physical part, the value will be primarily in the physical part. By removing the physical attributes and leaving only the NFT, the contract validity of the blockchain can be ensured... This in turn shifts the physical value to the NFT. ”
As those of us who have received ideological education, similar scenes are actually more familiar.
In capitalist societies, producers often take the initiative to annihilate the commodity itself (use-value) in order to maintain the price of the commodity as a whole (exchange value). We are most familiar with an event in 1929 when American farmers dumped milk to maintain overall commodity prices during the Great Economic Crisis.
That picture is still in our textbooks.
If you look back at the current situation of today's blockchain collapse and look back at the "hindsight", this kind of "burning painting" behavior is also like "pouring milk", which to some extent indicates the bursting of the web3 bubble:
(1) The monetary energy of web3 has reached a climax, the pricing model has lost its rationality, and the property rights model has also been detached from the real world;
(2) The "aggressiveness" of radical web3 players is officially presented to everyone - they believe that web3 and the physical world are not "complementary", but there is a clear relationship between value opposition and value competition;
(3) Like all capitalism, they use the value of money as a criterion and are cold-blooded and brutal to things themselves.
If you had to choose a picture to depict cyber capitalism under web3, "burning" must be an iconic scene.
But just "burning the painting" is obviously not enough to show the whole picture of capitalism in Web3. In the following, we will gradually illustrate the combination of capitalism and technochemism in the context of web3 from three aspects.
Cyber property rights and the birth of the whale
In Web3: A Game of Concept, we mention eshita et al. web3 as a revolutionary "ownable" network. Correspondingly, "property rights" naturally became the first important concept in web3.
Whether it is coin or NFT, in fact, it is using web3 technology to re-depict property rights in the digital world.
How is this form implemented?
We can think of blockchain as a giant spreadsheet, each column of which records the corresponding assets, transaction records, and the wallet to which the assets currently belong. This is probably like The "Book of Life and Death" of Yama Wangye, which comprehensively records the profit and loss of the "blessings" in each private account.
What both have in common is that for every microscopic individual, this "book of life and death" is a "transcendent" being. None of us can tamper with this form, but can only try to change a small column that belongs to our own grid - in Yama's case it is "burning incense", in web3 it is paying Gas (which can be understood as a fee).
The difference between the two is that Yama's book of life and death can only be read by the gods, but in web3 this form is public, and everyone can download and view these forms.
Therefore, there are also views that the underlying world of web3 is essentially a reconciliation system.Originally, the reconciliation system itself could not be established separately from the entity, but the whole vision of web3 actually made this reconciliation system have vitality. Taking NFT as an example, in fact, a unique pixel address (usually an address supported by blockchain technology such as IFPS) is introduced in the entire bookkeeping system.
In web2's view, NFTs are pixels that can be copied at will. But in web3's view, within two blockchain systems superimposed on top of each other, this pixel has exclusivity, and then becomes the property rights of only one person.
In the eyes of outsiders, this "property rights" logic is an incomprehensible game. But when enough people believe in this logic, within a particular group of people, the bookkeeping system has "legitimacy." Therefore, within a specific range, the exclusive pixel addresses within these systems naturally have value.
therefore For the "macro world," the future of web3 should be a monopolistic, interconnected super-large table——
We can allow for the simultaneous existence of Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and arhats, who are compatible with each other and form a unified world in the form of "cross-chains" and so on. But if we have Yama, Buddha, God, and Allah at the same time, then we are in fact equivalent to an atheistic state.
This is also why in the eyes of the public chain believers, the alliance chain is a pagan existence, because the former actually undermines the monopolistic vision of the latter.
But for that
"Micro Individual" In this case, this table in turn means "decentralized" properties, so that our assets do not have to depend on some specific entity to exist.
In the eyes of technologists, a "decentralized" property system means countless "good words":
Transparent and open, the form means that the asset is transparent and verifiable; Decentralization means liberal and democratic. Some people even compare Web2 and Web3 to capitalism and communism, respectively, to emphasize the superiority of this "decentralized" ability and describe a beautiful vision of "the unity of the world".
But there is often a huge gap between vision and results.This is reflected in at least three properties of web3 finance:
First of all, assets although traceable,
But wallets are actually anonymous.In the view of blockchain, there has never been a so-called "equality of all beings", and only "wallets" are equal. The wallet will not be annihilated, and the key cannot be modified. Theoretically, as long as anyone knows the key of a wallet, it is equivalent to having the wallet permanently.
Therefore, it is almost difficult for regulation to land under such primitive technical conditions. Who can review a key that doesn't even know where it exists and whether anyone remembers it? This makes web3's DeFi (Decentralized Finance) market almost the most opaque in the world.
No one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is, how many wallets it has, how many coins. And such a "pseudonym culture" is actually very popular among early web3 entrants. After all, "making a fortune in silence" can help them avoid many risks in public opinion, policy and taxation.
secondly, since the essence of the chain is a set of bookkeeping systems. So in theory,
Digital assets can enter the ledger in any way and in any form.It can be any NFT in the form of audio and video, or it can be a company's shareholding, or a membership card of some brand, and so on. It can take the form of a package of several assets or an infinitely divided share of an asset (the "stake" of a web3 project is often presented in the form of tokens).
Of course, the premise is that these goods have "legitimacy" support - such as these brands to identify with the existence of blockchain membership cards, or within a specific range of funds, everyone agrees that NFTs and coins have exclusive value.
At lastSince it is an undifferentiated digital asset, it also gives these assets a great deal
Liquidity.The dual properties of decentralization and digitization have de facto opened the ceiling of digital asset trading.
In the physical world, commodity delivery requires the support of complex systems such as matchmaking and logistics. When it comes to web2, the purchased content often needs to be used on a specific content platform, such as the obvious vinyl record "digital collection" you buy, in fact, it can only be played on a certain head platform. Like stocks and futures, they need to rely on the opening hours of the exchange to trade.
But because web3 is an undifferentiated bookkeeping system, any content on the chain can actually be "decentralized" transactions - transactions with anyone at any time and on any occasion.
In addition, as an asset, it can also be spun off in advance to promote liquidity; "Anonymity" can also bypass regulation without the need for complex compliance filings and tax filings.
Liquidity is an important concept that essentially represents the "power" of the holders of capital.
Arguably, at web3, what we can see is a vision of capital flows that is infinitely approaching absolute freedom. Sincerely As Sartre put it, absolute freedom brings absolute power.What would happen if the vision of web3 really covered real-world economic rights?
- Based on the above three attributes, we can fictionalize an investment case in a web3 scenario:
Suppose we are a funder of an LP that invested in the global web3 and metacosm giant "Byte Immovable" overseas early fund. So how long do you have to wait to get the return on capital after the world's most successful Dapp "Ant" split and listing?
In real life, you may never get the money. Because early funds may lose gains in the new consumption track; Even if there is no loss, the lengthy cross-border capital flow review is also very troublesome. Perhaps the best way to monetize quickly is to sell your fund shares in a package.
But in the world of web3, it's essentially a bookkeeping game. We just need to calculate the corresponding parts and write them into your wallet.
Even the "bug" listing itself is a pseudo-proposition, because web3 may have wiped out the exchange, leaving the project in the so-called "listed" state all the time.
- We can think again about the second example:
In the world of capital in Web2, Musk ran into trouble withdrawing funds when he bought Twitter. So what would happen if Zhang Sanming, chairman of "Byte Immovable", wanted to acquire web3 social media "Twitters"?
We'll probably see twitter and bytes, two companies, with some (or maybe none) in asset prices. People with a heart will find that a batch of wallets that have not been touched much begin to sell bytes without moving, and a batch of new wallets begins to buy Twitters. But in the vast world of web3, few people associate the two.
Then, at the next blockchain vote, it was discovered that Elona Musk had finally succeeded in becoming the chairman of Twitters.
Of course, what people never know is that what elona stands behind is actually Zhang Sanming.
This is an interesting metaphor.
Actually in the real world Money is like water, with a variety of complex forms.It has both flowing rivers (primary and secondary markets) and lakes (banks, funds), and a considerable part of it is fixed in the soil (companies & industries). Due to many restrictions such as the sovereignty system, taxation mechanism, market supervision, etc., the owner of land actually owns water in name, but cannot easily strip away "water".
The advantage of such an institutional arrangement is that it ensures that most of the "water" is focused on the construction of productive forces, cultivating food for human society. Otherwise, if the water flows freely, there will be a shortage of water in the soil (industry).
But in web3, capitalists and capital become ghosts, and ghosts are truly free.
Human society may appear for the first time, and only through a few virtual wallets, as a direct natural person, it will grasp all the wealth of human society. They can move between different shares without having to expend high management effort, face complex market competition, or even pay taxes. And today's DeFi miracle has given birth to the invisible rich with tens of billions of wealth, and this wealth centralization of web3 seems to have no upper limit.
It is often said that money is "something outside the body", and web3 will make capital into a "thing inside the body" in a sense.It's a bit like the rich in The Time Planning Bureau, whose "wealth" is directly reflected in their wrists.
Web3 technocracy de facto circumvents regulation, transforms the liquidity of assets, and thus constructs a new capitalist world. It is not a human continent woven by men and women, but an ocean...
If in the land, there will be organizations, civilizations and empires; Then in the ocean, whales will be born.
But what humans need is organization, and only whales need whales.
Tokenism and potential human alienation
As mentioned above, the blockchain technology behind web3 has been plagued by anxieties about the source of "legitimacy" since its inception. This anxiety has spread to this day – as a bookkeeping system that is too good to be true, it is so good that nothing of real-world value can account for it.
This is, of course, directly related to the power relations of traditional asset centralization.Especially when web3 becomes a corner that cannot be covered by regulation, it is difficult for the traditional system to complete compliance in it, and it is difficult to derive any benefits of efficiency necessity in it.
Web3's solution to this is to invent digital assets and make the blockchain system work. We try to "learn" how web sequences are defined ("read-only" versus "writable"), and divide this web3 progression into three stages, like web serial numbers:
- 1.0 period: the blockchain currency represented by Bitcoin, which is almost an asset born purely for this system, was born almost at the same time as blockchain technology;
- 2.0 period: content assets represented by NFTs, the "on-chain" of books, audios and videos.
These assets are very similar to what was happening when the web was just growing. After all, 30 years ago, and today, content is the asset that looks the most cost-effective — they have a high ceiling per unit price and a very low migration cost. Especially for those "read-only" "boutique content", this is even more so.
But obviously, the "legitimacy" crisis of blockchain at this stage has not been lifted.
Even in the "base camp" of the United States, although Zuckerberg gave way to Libra's landing plan, the government still firmly rejected the stablecoin project. This means that Congress has great doubts about the risks of this financial approach .
Too difficult to regulate is the armor of web3, but also the weakness of web3. Web3 must find new scenarios to further extend its "legitimacy." One of the most famous conceptual attempts is the "metacosm".Compared with coin and NFT, the future edge computing and decentralized scenario requirements of the metacosm are more ambitious. It will solve the legitimacy crisis of Web3 once and for all, and build a new world that grows independently beyond regulation.
But after all, the metaverse is too far away, and we can regard this 3.0 period as the upstream ("writable") of scene and behavior data for the time being.
The most intuitive attempt is X2E (X to earn), which allows web3 to create its own scene. Users generate data on the Dapp in exchange for the corresponding tokens, and then complete the "monetization" of their own behavior data and scene data.
We can see that the digital journey of web3 is almost equivalent to the tokenization process.People try to do web3 transformation (on-chain) all the assets that were once centralized, and then sell the corresponding tokens. Theoretically, any asset that can be digitized can be tokenized; And everything that can be quantitatively described can be digitized. If the digital process is vast, then token will be like the rat lying on the digital cow in the zodiac racing story.
So whether it's the metaverse, or real life merging with the web. We can all make a judgment about what is happening in the future based on the above logic of the development of web3:
Any asset that has "private property value" and "can be digitized" will be on the chain and will have its own token.These assets include, but are not limited to, our valuable behavioral data, health data, and even privacy data; All virtual assets in the metaverse, including but not limited to real estate, clothing, avatars, in-game vehicles, etc.
We might as well call this expectation "tokenism" – in the web3 world, everything can be tokenized. Like what
In real life, an item is first and foremost an "item" and a second a "commodity."The existence of "commodities" in the form of goods is actually very short-lived, often only from the factory to the cash register, just a few days to a few months; And once an item embodies the value of "supplies", its "commodity" attribute is quickly depleted.
But in the web3 world, there is no concept of "depreciation" and the end of centralized "circulation forms". All tokens can present an undifferentiated commodity form at any time.
Other words
In the web3 world, items are "goods" first and "goods" second.The impact of this exchange of items' attributes can be complex. For example, all commodities in such an environment will show a certain "investment attribute", and then the price of scarce goods will rise rapidly.
In real life, there are actually corresponding cases, such as the sale of basketball shoes and medieval women's bags. In order to maximize the protection of the product value of the sneakers, participants do not wear shoes on their feet even once. Historically, ancient governments focused on controlling items with similar attributes, such as salt, iron, silver, and so on.
Because without a good market supervision system, it is almost certain to attract a small number of people to monopolize the market of goods – when the goods are free of the risk of discounting, the benefits of price monopolies will become more attractive.
This change in the attributes of items will inevitably promote the total alienation of people in different dimensions.We don't want to talk about the impact of so-called "screen traffic" and "mobile phones" on the human brain here. This article focuses on the discussion of cyber capitalism, so we return to Marx's classic theory of "labor alienation" for the time being.
In Marx's view, alienation has at least two aspects.
On the one hand, alienation makes human labor a commodity.
The most typical expression is Henry Ford's famous quote, "We obviously only want to hire a pair of hands, why did we come to a person?"
Second, the result of alienation's labor is not only "alien", but also becomes a force against itself. Marx believed that under the framework of capitalism,
"The value added of the world of things is directly proportional to the depreciation of the world of man"。
The harder the workers as a collective worked, the cheaper the single fruit of their labor became. He himself will become a cheap commodity, and the poorer he will be.
In fact, in some Third World countries, workers' labour is already cheap enough to require several jobs to barely meet household expenses. For the middle class, people always forget this "exploitation" when they get cheap goods and services, and then think of it when they buy a house or when children go to school or the elderly see a doctor.
So we can follow this logic to ask a new question:
If tokenism allows people's data to be digitized and monetized pervasively, will the exploitation of capitalism also become pervasive?If everything we have is tokenized, then everything of the people at the bottom will also enter the realm of digital exploitation.
Ford needs a pair of your hands, Gates may need your eyes, and Musk may need your legs. When people sleep, there may be large pharmaceutical companies, equipment manufacturers, or insurance companies that need your sleep data. Can web3 in the future get a lot of proletarian data and labor "legally" under the guise of tokens, at extremely cheap prices — just as they would contract a womb for $300 in the third world.
Then web3 will only protect the data security of the middle class and the above economic class, and de facto and deeply exploit the data ownership of the proletarian.
Exploitation of the web3 world has taken place in third world countries and is currently in the form of X2N.
For example, in the Philippines and Argentina, the "PLAY TO EARN" blockchain game "Axie Infinity" has become the work of some young people. They earn blockchain currency by breeding pets, fighting against them, or selling pets to obtain blockchain currency, forming a set of "breeding industries" on web3.
On the StepN platform, the high reward allows some people to buy expensive virtual shoes in the platform, and then hire takeaway riders and couriers to "wear" shoes, and then obtain cash flow - this has become a classic labor exploitation scenario, some people have "means of production" and then buy labor to get money.
But compared to the industrial agglomeration advantages of different countries, web3 is actually global in theory.This means that, as long as the rules allow, African farmers and American workers will participate directly in the StepN "running competition", and the interregional barriers to industrial workers will no longer exist. The relative "welfare society" that capitalism has created for the sake of the stability of its own system, in which it constantly transfers value exploitation outwards and thus maintains its own country, will also face challenges.
Proletarians all over the world, the world with this cool and hot.
We should be glad that running can't really make money, otherwise someone will run and die in a virtual shoe. We should also be thankful that washing dishes will not make money, otherwise someone will wash dishes at home every day. But that doesn't mean we won't play the guy who keeps washing dishes or running in designs like X to eran in the future.
We may not yet know what the future forms of exploitation will be, but this kind of use of digitalization to monetize and then market human life is something that must be vigilant.This may be a slightly strange thing, compared to 100 years ago when people were alienated into machines and became a component of machines, our generation may be alienated in "life".
In the end, tokens will become an auxiliary capital, an unprecedentedly efficient tool of exploitation in terms of the breadth of geography and the depth of workers' lives.And this tool will become more powerful under the structural blessing of super capitalists and super monopolists.
Super monopoly capitalism
All web3 proponents will tell you that web3 is true equality and represents the light of freedom and democracy.
The reason why techno-techism often misjudges in the big-tech outlook is because technocrats often think from the perspective of the petty bourgeoisie. They receive a portion of the capital dividend, and they simply worship the free market, but they are more likely to ignore the systemic problems that come with the debinding of capital.
This isn't the first time IT elites have preached about the "equality" of new technologies, and it probably won't be the last. However, in the absence of fundamental changes in the basic social production relations system, almost all of the "technological equality" of human beings will eventually bring about a larger-scale "economic centralization":
Web1.0, people believe that the Internet will bring about the free flow of information, personal websites can dissolve the information monopoly of large traditional media;
Web2.0, the social media era broke out, Twitter, Weibo became the new Internet square; LBS-based identity social networking and takeaway are believed to break the hegemony of geography.
But the end result? The hegemony of web1.0 is one notch larger than the market capitalization scale of traditional media; the hegemon of web 2.0 is one level larger than the scale ceiling of the web 1.0 era.
Yahoo's market capitalization peaked at $120 billion in 2000, equivalent to Thailand's GDP that year, ranking 32nd among sovereign states in the world.
Apple's market capitalization in 2022 will exceed $3 trillion, equivalent to last year's GDP of the United Kingdom, ranking 5th among sovereign countries in the world.
In fact, the development trend of web3 is actually worse than that of the web2 era. Bitcoin, for example, has a highly artificial, monopolistic design for early miners.Bitcoin is actually a mining game that only protects relative first-comers, with a total of only 21 million. Early miners can take a personal PC to mine a lot of bitcoins, while later miners contract an entire hydropower station, and they can't reach the output of a PC that year.
In the real world, scarcity leads to higher prices, often with the result that the liquidity of assets is affected.
But assets like Bitcoin can in fact be infinitely divided. In 2011, the Bitcoin Conference determined that its smallest unit was 1 satoshi, and 1 satoshi equals 100 million bitcoins. In other words, if you're an early miner, you're actually enjoying a total protection of $21 million; But if you're a latecomer, the real total amount of money will be as high as $2100 trillion.
This is actually the classic leek cutting of the first entrant relying on its own monopoly position to beat the drum to pass on the fancy style to the late entrant.
The "de facto monopoly" brought about by this "coin issuance" is actually applied in many other scenarios. Bitcoin's powerful demonstration effect makes coin issuance a weapon for the web3 project to attract early capital investment. Such as DAO, X2E and other gameplay, there are similar attempts.
But just talking about DeFi obviously can't summarize the potential monopolistic tendencies in web3.Because many web3 fans insist that DeFi is only the pain of the early chaos of web3, when web3 enters the scene and develops Dapp, it will truly reflect the "decentralization" of web3, compared to the advantages of web2.
But the results can be just as counterproductive.
We think web3 actually produces monopolists in at least three directions:
- Monetary monopoly (as described above)
- Miner and underlying architecture
The computing power efficiency is highly involuted and the scene is single. If the demand is confirmed for a long time, its head attribute will inevitably be much higher than that of the public cloud market, and then produce a super mine that integrates maintenance from chips, energy, and computing power.
- Scenario Application (Dapp)
In Web3: A Game of Concept, we argue that web3 doesn't have a direct logical relationship with web2. In fact, web3 and the web are actually more like two parallel forms of the Internet. In terms of interaction logic, web3 and web are actually similar, and web3 is not fundamentally different from web2.
Because the interaction limit brought by web2 is not determined by web technology, but by the bandwidth of the human brain and the social structure.
First, the human brain bandwidth hasn't skyrocketed significantly over the past few thousand years, which means we still need a centralized, aggregated platform to help us sift through information;
Secondly, the structure of human production relations with a high degree of division of labor will not change, and we will still choose the best products and contents in the division of labor to feed ourselves;
Proponents of web3 argue that because data ownership is back in the hands of users, users can vote with their feet at any time, allowing the platform to diversify. But this is a fallacy that consumer societies often make.
It is always the production side that determines consumer content.In web2, there are already many monopolistic products, which do not rely on user data accumulation to create barriers.
For example, takeaway, group buying, e-commerce, and games, the lower the platform for user data barriers, the more giants with extremely efficient operations will be produced.
Capital does not allow users to churn. If one platform can't do it, capital will switch to a new platform.The final result will not be the diversification of the platform, but more likely to be a platform giant with higher operational efficiency, less mistakes, and more harshness on employees and service providers, becoming a "volume king of a mature set of methodologies".
But web3 will obviously not be a simple reenactment of the web2 pattern. On the contrary, the huge monetary influence of web3 actually brings two capital characteristics that web2 has never had, which may make the monopoly within the web3 system even worse than that of web2:
First, web3 head players are embracing politics, especially third-world regimes, as never before.Some state powers are endorsing diplomacy for some private individuals, and even integrating interests:
Such as the controversial Sun Yuchen, currently is
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Permanent Representative of Grenada to the WTO (World Trade Organization).These titles help him obtain "diplomatic immunity," thereby de facto avoiding the potential risk of being criminally investigated or prosecuted for suspects such as money laundering.
El Salvador directly identified Bitcoin as legal tender and took the national treasury to buy Bitcoin; Its president Bukkel has not only established personal training with many Web3 bigwigs, but also committed himself to making himself a global Web3 influencer. The frequency of his daily tweets is no less than that of Musk.
Recently, Sri Lanka has gone bankrupt, and many web3 people hope to use DeFi to transform the country's financial system, hoping to build web3 into a solution to third world problems.
These in-depth cooperation can help web3, which is "borderless funds", bypass china, the United States, Europe and other regions with strong sovereignty supervision, and obtain sovereign-level strategic cooperation in the third world.
You can't imagine a day when Google, Apple, and Microsoft will invest in most of the developers on the market, but in the world of web3, it will become a reality. The relationship between chain, coin, and developer is actually very ambiguous, and in many cases it is even trinity.
This combination can be complex:
- The actual control fund of the chain has a large number of coins, and they need someone to make a big cake, so they will take the coins to attract a large number of Dapp;
- And if the developer is successful enough, it will make a chain or issue a coin (for example, Solana was founded by the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX).
- DAO bypasses all this directly, allowing developers around the world to unite and play their own coins and ecology;
- There are also some venture capitals similar to the logic of web2, linking platforms and developers at the same time, drinking a bowl of soup at both ends;
As a result, you may find that under the vision of web3, whether it is Dapp, miners, platform chains, DAO, whales, they may be the same group of people at all. They are interconnected through tokens, with the token price as the form of distribution.
Web3 never belonged to the world, it belonged to "them." The person who is known as the dragon slayer can always become a new dragon.