The Three D’s of the 2020s
Three tenets of a new, accelerationist tech space that acknowledge and gave rise to “digital by default”.
If the 2020s had a definable Zeitgeist, there are 3 big, creditable D-words. Veteran practitioners of digital crafts have their tenure going back to when TCP/IP was a breakthrough technology. With the rise of computer networks and the internet, network administration became a crucial career field in the 1990s. Network administrators were responsible for managing and maintaining computer networks, including configuring network devices, monitoring network performance, and ensuring network security. The plight of defining “Web 3.0” has been a timeline of seemingly effective use cases, most of which were presented to the public too early to accredit with propriety (i.e. the conceptual Metaverse). The general public caught onto the buzz en masse and eventually dispersed. Sandbox and Decentralland came and went, fast. Morgan & Morgan released a genius, hilarious commercial on citizens of the Metaverse getting injured, and experiencing “unnecessary pain and suffering”. Mark Zuckerberg took his company’s stock for a tumultuous, Top Thrill Dragster-style ride making his shareholders clutch their doggy bags, simply by announcing that Facebook is now owned by the new Meta. Many self-labeled futurists have laid a framework for a new repertoire of occupations for digital workers (i.e. “prompt engineers” and “generative artists”). Others are contrarians, take the opposition, and predict these new occupations will remain dilettante labels swiftly drummed up in the heat of the moment (that -moment- being 3 years of a pandemic-induced industrial race), It certainly caused many to harken back to the mainline list of players that evolved and materialized not so long ago:
Database Admins: managed and maintained databases, including designing database structures, optimizing database performance, and ensuring data integrity and security, playing a critical role in organizations that rely on databases to store and manage large volumes of data.
Information Technology (IT) — IT management roles oversaw and coordinated various aspects of an organization’s IT infrastructure and operations. IT managers were responsible for strategic planning, budgeting, project management, and ensuring that IT initiatives aligned with the organization’s goals and objectives.
Network Admins — managed and maintained computer networks, including configuring network devices, monitoring network performance, and ensuring network security.
Software Developers — a mix of engineers, programmers, and developers responsible for designing, coding, testing, and maintaining software applications and systems.
System Admins — installed, configured, and troubleshot operating systems and software, as well as ensured the reliability and security of computer systems and infrastructure.
Technical Support — helped users resolve hardware and software issues, answered technical questions, and provided training and guidance on using computer technologies.
Web Developers — were responsible for designing, building, and maintaining websites and web applications, using technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and server-side scripting languages.
Just because I defined each of these in the past tense, these occupations haven’t dropped out of the public consciousness. Despite the discourse that populated Web 3.0 spaces on Twitter and Discord shifting towards artificial intelligence, the discourse on industry subreddits has geared around efforts to maintain professions. Artificial intelligence ventures, a clear, aggressively utilitarian, and uppermost disruptive, make the ventures of Web 3.0 2020–2022 pale in comparison.
Like how Colonial Penn asked “What are the three Ps?” of life insurance on a fixed budget in their line of commercials, there’s a _$
What are they? You should know; you’ve heard them well before…
Decentralization
We tend to like central figures — it’s a form of structure that tells you who’s running the program.
In the other corner, the argument for decentralization allows for greater flexibility and adaptability in responding to diverse and changing local circumstances, challenges, and opportunities. In a community, local decision-makers are better positioned to tailor policies, programs, and interventions to address specific local needs and contexts, promoting innovation and experimentation in governance and service delivery. Financial resources, administrative capacities, and other resources are devolved to lower levels of government or non-governmental actors. This enables local entities to mobilize and allocate resources according to local needs, preferences, and priorities, fostering greater efficiency and effectiveness in service delivery and resource management. It promotes accountability and transparency by dispersing decision-making authority and creating mechanisms for oversight and accountability at multiple levels of governance. This can include local elections, citizen participation mechanisms, and transparency measures to ensure that decision-makers are accountable to the communities they serve. It’s been said by multiple people that “Gatekeeping was a necessary evil.” It filtered the winners and the losers and recruited the best talent, but in the AI arms race, gatekeeping draws a different sentiment;
In April of last month, Emad Mostaque withdrew his spot as Stability AI’s CEO to pursue “decentralized AI”. He spoke to Peter Diamandis: “[Centralized AI companies] are building single systems that take our collective intelligence…and package it up, sell it back to us, but they don’t care. These organizations are trying to build a system that will take away our freedom, and liberty, and potentially kill us all. Let’s be quite fair about that. Let’s be direct…When I resigned from Stability, I said you can’t beat centralized intelligence with centralized intelligence. The only way you can beat it is to create the standard that represents humanity: decentralized intelligence. It’s collective intelligence — datasets and norms that help children, that help people suffering, that reflect our moral upstanding and gather the best of us to do it.”: “If we build an AGI as a centralized thing, is Windows or Linux safer as infrastructure? A monolith is likely to be crazy…Geniuses are not mentally stable. Why would you expect an AGI to be so? You’re putting all your eggs in one basket versus creating a complex hierarchical system that is a hive mind. That’s the intelligence that represents us all. We should be working towards building that because it’s safer, it’s better.” Centralization will only exist out of a long-standing necessity and standard.
Democratization
The confounding of “Decentralization” with “Democratization” happens easily. Both tenets apply to the kid making well-received, “fire” tracks on their iPad, in their bedroom, with no signage from labels. They both aim to bypass the de facto authority of intermediary middlemen. Every generative AI venture advertising accessibility to general users doesn’t constitute a threat unless it was somehow instilling the average American with foundational technical direction over character creation of a fully-rigged, cinema-ready 3D character model of a tyrannosaurus.
The ability to prompt and produce countless, wonky variations of polished-looking fever dreams was a blessing to anyone incapable of drawing. In that same moment of breakthrough lies the possibility of the sacred client-provider relationship being compromised.
The compositing program Nuke was developed to composite complex, laid-out, node-based shots (the kind of shots we know from Marvel classics). A guy deploying Midjourney:
A). Ends up with fixed image sequences; nothing truly manipulatable or revertable; only re-processable.
B). Can’t achieve fidelity in what is demanded in such an arbitrated process.
Some of us simply don’t see what the big deal is. The bigger concern than allowing for artistic experimentation is the act of corporate outsourcing thanks to a more expansive talent pool. Now, it seems the pro-WFH, pro-AI, and the opposition (grounded in tradition) have been letting the cards of a labor-centric civil war move and stack up on their own, for over 3 years. The fact is, we will not see a resurgence of the “20th-century workplace”; the new model of work arrived at its due time out of necessity, and there will be more Coronaviruses that cause more seismic shifts. Democratization can still be symbiotic with competition. The social media juggernaut of video we’ve seen grow since 2005 has been fueled by a signature “clout economy” which, due to lower barriers for entry, has expanded below itself into dingier corners of the earth into bedrooms. Some see this as a very dismal thing. It’s simply the time we’re in.
In a sole democracy, there is no regulation of public decision and we end up in some kind of feedback loop of civil governance. As some of your teachers, youth leadership figureheads, and other adults have alluded to, the United States is not a democracy, but in fact, a Democratic Republic, characteristically speaking. In a democracy, decisions are made directly by the people. Citizens vote on laws and policies themselves, without intermediaries. Direct democracy sees fruition in small communities or groups where everyone has reasonable leeway for executive decision-making. Organized into the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, responsible for enacting laws and policies that align with the will of the people, a democratic republic grants citizens the opportunity to participate in governance through voting for representatives and engaging in political processes, but they don’t directly make laws themselves. The United States is often cited as an example of a democratic republic, where citizens elect officials to represent them in the government.
Disruption
The clearest cut of the three Ds,
It’s an entirely different approach to building the next variant of a wheel, rather than adding onto the progress-deficient model. Most will have to concur that said disruption indeed captured lightning in a bottle by changing an industrial standard like the car to the horse, the cigarette to the vaporizer, and the taxi cab to the Uber. 35+ years ago, there were attempts and failures at staking the claim of the internet as a commercial product. It was the isolated efforts Vinton Cerf, Bob Kahn, Mark Andreesen, Paul Baran, and Robert Cailliau which converged to break ground at different points, giving the personal computer a new purpose to its life.
Then arose the notion that remote work and telecommuting held the potential to cause the world’s innovation hotspots in California and New York to atrophy into obsolescence. We haven’t seen this in full swing, but veteran investors and veteran white-collar whales as a monolith who “were there” during the internet breakthrough but never applied themselves at a maximal level, did not see digital telecommuting becoming an accepted standard. Now that we’re seeing the large language models grant basic knowledge indexing to most users, and unlimited power to “prompt engineers”, FAANG is in a precarious situation as a long-standing mainstay name. They finally have to compete with user-generated content from those creatively competent enough to go toe-to-toe with them. The compaction of tech during industrial revolutions is as horrifying for IRL career paths as it is intriguing for contemporary historians. In the smoky canon of market capitalism, there’s a timeline that exists, whether or not you want to acknowledge it. Disruption is war. In some cases, it’s mutiny. It starts as mischief and then it’s entrepreneurship. Being “number one” in the frey, and scoring huge money will yield very different rewards moving forward.
Conclusion
The essential interest behind these 3 defining words lies in what comes tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and the next day. Mass adoption remains a goal that hasn’t seen a singular watershed moment, but a series of staggered news developments. While Web 3.0 holds promise for transformative changes in how we interact with the internet and digital assets, it also faces challenges and uncertainties, including scalability issues, regulatory concerns, and adoption barriers. There will be virus after virus that adversely affects the business world. Nonetheless, the ongoing innovation and experimentation within the AI and Web 3.0 ecosystems suggest that they’re poised to continue evolving and potentially drive significant developments in the future of the internet and digital economy.
