Ah, the dream of Web3! A world where users own their data, smart contracts rule the day, and corporations as we know them are a thing of the past. But let’s take a slightly more cynical view, shall we?
Imagine a time when every cat or dog photo you share, every inane thought you tweet, and every meme you laugh at is stored on your very own, cryptographically secured blockchain. Or maybe your own Solid (initiated by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web) personal online data “pod”. You’re not just a user anymore, you’re a data baron. And each time someone wants to view, like, or share your content, they pay you in crypto. Or, you unilaterally eliminate your data from the world, leaving gaping holes in your former friend’s data feeds, streams, and chats.
You can even create and fund your own porn habit in complete privacy. Congratulations, you’re practically a Kardashian! Speaking of Kim and her newly minted law degree.
Let’s talk about smart contracts. Oh, the smart contracts! In the words of our former President, not just regular contracts, but smart, so smart, maybe the smartest ever created contracts. They live on the blockchain, and they’re as immutable as your high school yearbook or driver’s licence photo. They execute automatically, without the need for pesky humans and their emotions or delays. Who needs lawyers when you’ve got a bunch of code ensuring everything goes as planned? Let’s hope no one made a typo or slipped in a tiny bug, though, because that could lead to some unintended consequences. Maybe there will be a ChatGPT for small print review as AI makes even more and smaller print to review. But hey, that’s the price of progress, right?
Now, you might wonder about the big corporations, the Microsofts, Googles and Facebooks of the world. Surely, they must be shaking in their boots, right? Well, not exactly. See, they’ve got resources, lots of them. So, they start their own blockchain projects, create their own cryptos, build their own pods, and before you know it, you’re not just a user in their ecosystem, but also an investor in their branded coin. Who knew data ownership could be so… profitable?
And let’s not forget the energy consumption. Each transaction, each smart contract execution, each NFT minting, all of it guzzling power like a non EV-Hummer on a joyride. Ok, even an EV-Hummer. But hey, that’s just the cost of decentralization, right? After all, who needs polar ice caps when you’ve got the digital art of pixelated apes in endless but unique colors?
In the end, we’re all just cogs in the crypto-wheel locked in our own private podaho, hoping that our blockchain dreams don’t turn into smart contract nightmares locked away in our Elon Musk neuralink personal vaults. But hey, at least we own our data… well, that is until we forget our private keys, lose our wallets or are tricked into Metaverse meetings from an deepfake phone call that socially engineered us to click on that PDF from an enhance Nigerian scammers email.
Sweet Sheep Dreams my La petite mort.
