I’m disgusted how a bunch of VC types thought they were so incredibly clever with that piece of dystopian commodification double speak.
MBA-ification is actually very very high on the list.
Let’s run lean, let’s do it without human interaction, let’s push our solution first, we can force people in to this, etc.
I used to think Ayn Rand’s comments about creators and consumers were smarts people vs dumb, but that isn’t it at all. I think we’re in a complexity crisis and MBA driven business and large government is in a race for unsustainability.
I always understood the primary differences in the Web "versions" to be:
1. Web 1.0: dedicated servers on the Internet producing a lot of content/services by your average user who accesses that content with a web browser.
2. Web 2.0: really focused on the rise of user-generated content, e.g. social media, blogging platforms, image sharing sites, etc. But the architecture is still primarily client-server with end users interacting with server-provided apps.
3. Web 3.0: The main differentiator in Web 3.0 is trustless peer-to-peer architecture. That is, it's no longer about end users needing to connect to Google or Facebook-owned servers to receive and share content. Instead, the content lives on a distributed blockchain that no single entity owns. All of the applications that people talk about in "Web 3.0" like smart contracts, NFTs, etc. arise as a consequence of the underlying architecture being this distributed blockchain.
Web3 refers to how the Ethereum community decided that the user interface to blockchains should be web-like, instead of say via commandline terminal or via Qt desktop apps (like Bitcoin).
You can see this with Metamask, which is essentially Ethereum’s App Store for smart contracts. https://metamask.io/
From that concept, the notion extended into using crypto to augment Web2 apps, like with micropayments or NFTs or the like.
Now it is a catch-all term for the Internet of Value, or the global Web augmented with a native currency that is not controlled by any country or company.
I’m not sure it was a good idea to co-opt a familiar term (Web2.0) and then define blockchain and cryptocurrency in terms of that. It’s unsurprisingly getting pushback, and Ethereum is being accused of “marchitecture” (like with the Pentium4, tech designed for marketing which compromises true performance, or security, or something else). Blockchains are expensive fully replicated distributed databases. They inherently want to host very light weight but high-value data, like accounting ledgers or internet names, and websites and apps are not that.