This past weekend I went to the Consensus conference in Austin. I hadn’t been to another, so I can’t easily compare this year with previous years. But here are my impressions, in random order:

• The show was huge. Supposedly 20,000 in-person attendees. Just walking from one presentation to another at the other end of the conference took a considerable amount of time. And there were other locations distributed all over downtown Austin.

• Lots and lots of trade show booths with lots of traffic.

• In spite of “crypto winter”, companies still spent on the trade show booths. (But then, maybe they committed to the expense before the recent price declines)

• Pretty much all sessions were “talking heads on stage”. They were doing a good job at putting many women on. But only “broadcast from the experts to the (dumb) audience”? This feels out of touch in 2022, and particularly because web3/crypto is all supposed to be giving everyday users agency, and a voice. Why not practice what you promote, Consensus? Not even an official hash tag or back channel.

• Frances Haugen is impressive.

• No theme emerged. I figured that there would be one, or a couple, of “hot topics” that everybody talked about and would be excited about. Instead, I didn’t really see anything that I hadn’t heard about for some years.

• Some of the demos at some of the booths, and some of the related conversations were surprisingly bad. Without naming names, for example, what would you expect if somebody’s booth promises you some kind of “web3 authentication”? What I won’t expect is that the demo consists of clicking on a button labeled “Log in with Google”, and when I voiced surprise, handwaved about something with split keys, without being able to explain, or show, it at all.

• I really hate it if I ask “what does the product do?”", and the answer is “60,000 people use it”. This kind of response is of course not specific to crypto, but either the sales guy doesn’t actually know what the product does – which happens surprisingly often – or simply doesn’t care at all the somebody asked a question. Why are you going to trade shows again?

• The refrain “it’s early days for crypto” is getting a bit old. Yes, other industries have been around for longer, but one should be able to see a few compelling, deployed solutions for real-world problems that are touching the real world outside of crypto. Many of those that I heard people pitch were often some major distance away from being realistic. For example, if somebody pitches tokenizing real estate, I would expect them to talk about the value proposition for, say, realtors, how they are reaching them and converting them, or how there is a new title insurance company based on blockchain that is growing very rapidly because it can provide better title insurance at much lower cost. Things like that. But no such conversation could be heard – well, at least not by me – and that indicates to me that the people pitching this haven’t really really encountered the market yet.

• An anonymous crypto whale/investor – I think – who I chatted with over breakfast so much confirmed this: he basically complained that so many pitches he’s getting are on subjects that the entrepreneurs basically know nothing about. So real domain knowledge is missing for too many projects. (Which would explain many things, including why so many promising projects have run out of steam when it is time to actually deliver on the lofty vision),

• The crypto “market” still seems to mostly consist of a bunch of relatively young people who have found a cool new technology, and are all in, but haven’t either felt the need to, nor have been successful at applying it to the real world. I guess billions of dollars of money flowing in crypto coins allowed them to ignore this so far. I wonder whether this attitude can last in this “crypto winter”.

• But this is also a great opportunity. While 90% of what has been pitched in web3/crypto is probably crap and/or fraudulent (your number may be lower, or higher), it is not 100% and some things are truly intriguing. My personal favorites are DAOs, which have turned into this incredible laboratory for governance innovations. Given that we still vote – e.g. in the US – in largely the same way as hundreds of years ago, innovation in democratic governance has been glacial. All of a sudden we have groups that apply liquid democracy, and quadratic voting, and weigh votes by contributions, and lots of other ideas. It’s like somebody turned on the water in the desert, and instead of governance being all the same sand as always, there are now flowers of a 1000 different kinds that you have never seen before, blooming all over. (Of course many of those will not survive, as we don’t know how to do governance differently, but the innovation is inspiring.)

In personal view, the potential of crypto technologies is largely all about governance. The monetary uses should be considered a side effect of new forms of governance, not the other way around. Of course, almost nobody – technologist or not – has many thoughts on novel, better forms governance, because we have so been trained into believing that “western style democracy” cannot be improved on. Clearly, that is not true, and there are tons of spaces that need better governance than we have – my favorite pet peeve is the rules about the trees on my street – so all innovations in governance are welcome. If we could govern those trees better, perhaps we could also have a street fund to pay for their maintenance – which would be a great example for a local wallet with a “multisig”. Certainly it convinces me much more than some of the examples that I heard about at Consensus.

I think the early days are ending. The crypto winter will have a bunch of projects die, but the foundation has been laid for some new projects that could take over the world overnight, by leading with governance of an undergoverned, high-value space. Now what was your’s truly working on again? :-)

What is the common theme in these commonly stated problems with the internet today?

• Too much tracking you from one site to another.
• Wrong approach to moderation (too heavy-handed, too light, inconsistent, contextually inappropriate etc).
• Too much fake news.
• Too many advertisements.
• Products that make you addicted, or are otherwise bad for your mental health.

In my view, the common theme underlying these problems is: “The wrong decisions were made.” That’s it. Not technology, not product, not price, not marketing, not standards, not legal, nor whatever else. Just that the wrong decisions were made.

Maybe it was:

• The wrong people made the decisions. Example: should it really be Mark Zuckerberg who decides which of my friends’ posts I see?

• The wrong goals were picked by the decisionmakers and they are optimizing for those. Example: I don’t want to be “engaged” more and I don’t care about another penny per share for your earnings release.

• A lack of understanding or interest in the complexity of a situation, and inability for the people with the understanding to make the decision instead. Example: are a bunch of six-figure Silicon Valley guys really the ones who should decide what does and does not inflame religious tensions in a low-income country half-way around the world with a societal structure that’s fully alien to liberal Northern California?

What do we call the thing that deals with who gets to decide, who has to agree, who can keep them from doing bad things and the like? Yep, it’s “governance”.

Back in the 1980’s in 90’s, all we cared about was code. So when the commercial powers started abusing their power, in the mind of some users, those users pushed back with projects such as GNU and open-source.

But we’ve long moved on from there. In one of the defining characteristics of Web2 over Web1, data has become more important than the code.

Starting about 15 years ago, it was suddenly the data scientists and machine learning people who started getting the big bucks, not the coders any more. Today the fight is not about who had the code any more; it is about who has the data.

Pretty much the entire technology industry understands that now. What it doesn’t understand yet is that the consumer internet crisis we are in is best understood as a need to add another layer to the sandwich: not just the right code, not just plus the right data, but also plus the right governance: have the right people decide for the right reasons, and the mechanisms to get rid of the decisionmakers if the affected community decides they made the wrong decisions or had the wrong reasons.

Have you noticed that pretty much all senior technologists that dismiss Web3 — usually in highly emotional terms – completely ignore that pretty much all the genuinely interesting innovations in the Web3 world are governance innovations? (never mind blockchain, it’s just a means to an end for those innovators).

If we had governance as part of the consumer technology sandwich, then:

• Whether I see which of my friends’ posts should be decisions that I make with my friends, and nobody else gets a say.

• Whether a product optimizes for this or that should be a decision that is made by its users, not some remote investors or power-hungry executives.

• A community of people half-way around the world should determine, on its own for its own purposes, what is good for its members.

(If we had a functioning competitive marketplace, Adam Smith-style, then we would probably get this because products that do what the customers want win over products that don’t. But have monopolies instead that cement the decisionmaking in the wrong places for the wrong reasons. A governance problem, in other words.)

If you want to get ahead of the curve, pay attention to this. All the genuinely new stuff in technology that I’ve seen for a few years has genuinely new ideas about governance. It’s a complete game changer.

Conversely, if you build technology with the same rudimentary, often dictatorial and almost always dysfunctional governance we have had for technology in the Web1 and Web2 world, you are fundamentally building a solution for the past, not for the future.

To be clear, better governance for technology is in the pre-kindergarten stage. It’s like the Apple 1 of the personal computer – assembly required – or the Archie stage of the internet. But we would have been wrong to dismiss those as mere fads then, and it would be wrong to dismiss the crucial importance of governance now.

That, for me, is the essence of how the thing after Web2 – and we might as well call it Web3 – is different. And it is totally exciting! Because “better governance” is just another way to say: the users get to have a say!!

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are something new enabled by crypto and blockchain technologies. We are only at the beginning of understanding what they can do and what not.

So I asked my social network: “What can we do with a DAO that cannot be done with other organizational forms?”

Here is a selected set of responses, mostly from this Twitter thread and this Facebook thread. They are both public, so I’m attributing:

• Kurt Laitner: “They enable dynamic equity and dynamic governance”

• Vittorio Bertocci: “Be robbed without any form of recourse, appeal or protection? 😛 I kid, I kid 🙂”

• Dan Lyke: “…they create a gameable system that has less recourse to the law than a traditional system … [but] the immutable public ledger of all transactions may provide a better audit trail”

• David Mason: “Lock yourself into a bad place without human sensibility to bail you out.”

• Adam Lake: “We already have cooperatives, what is the value add?”

• Phill Hallam-Baker: “Rob people who don’t understand that the person who creates them controls them absolutely.”

• Jean Russell: “Act like you have a bank account as a group regardless of the jurisdictions of the members.”

• David Berlind: “For now (things are changing), a DAO can fill a gap in international business law.”

Follow the links above, there are more details in the discussions.

I conclude: there is no consensus whatsoever :-) That may be because there such a large range of setups under that term today.

Consider this diagram:

Trying to find:	truth	Crook	Scientist
	lies	Demagogue	Debunker
		Sharing: lies	truth

If I try to find the truth, but lie about what I’m telling others, I’m a crook.

If I try to find lies that “work” and tell them to others, I’m a demagogue.

If I try to find lies to expose them and share the truth, I’m a debunker of lies.

And if I try to find the truth, and share it, that makes me a scientist.

If so, we can now describe each one of those categories in more detail, and understand the specific behaviors they necessarily need to engage in.

For example, the scientist will welcome and produce copious objective evidence. The demagogue, likely, will provide far less evidence, and if so, point to other people and their statements as their evidence. Those other people are likely either other demagogues or just crooks.

If we could annotate people on-line with these four categories, we could even run a PageRank-style algorithm on it to figure out which is which. Why aren’t we doing this? Might this interfere with attention as the primary driver of revenue for “free” on-line services?

P.S. Sorry for the click bait headline. It just lent itself so very well…

Update Feb 04, 2022: It looks like I was entirely correct with this November post. Facebook is out of new users, over 10 billion in metaverse investments have nothing to show for it yet, and the markets have caught up, dropping the stock by $200 billion in a day. To make things worse, Zuckerberg supposedly said “focus on video” in the all-hands on the same day. He chickened out; he should have doubled down on the metaverse story if he truly believes it. But he did not.

The more I think about Facebook’s Meta’s pivot to the metaverse, the less it appears like they do this voluntarily. I think they have no other choice: their existing business is running out of steam. Consider:

• At about 3.5 billion month active users of at least one of their products (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp etc), they are running out of more humans to sign up.

• People say they use Facebook to stay in touch with family and friends. But there is now one ad in my feed for each three or four posts that I actually want to see. Add more ads than this, and users will turn their backs: Facebook doesn’t help them with what they want help with any more, it’s all ads.

• While their ARPU is much higher in the US than in Europe, where in turn it is much higher than the rest of the world – hinting that international growth should be possible – their distribution of ARPU is not all that different from the whole ad market’s distribution of ad revenues in different regions. Convincing, say, Africa to spend much more on ads does not sound like a growth story.

• And between the regulators in the EU and elsewhere, moves to effectively ban further Instagram-like acquisitions, lawsuits left and right, and Apple’s privacy moves, their room to manoever is getting tighter, not wider.

Their current price/sales ratio of just under 10 is hard to be justified for long under these constraints. They must also be telling themselves that relying on an entirely ad-based business model is not good long-term strategy any more, given the backlash against surveillance capitalism.

So what do you do?

I think you change the fundamentals of your business at the same time you change the conversation, leveraging the technology you own. And you end up with:

• Oculus as the replacement for the mobile phone;

• Headset and app store sales, for Oculus, as an entirely new business model that’s been proven (by the iPhone) to be highly profitable and is less under attack by regulators and the public; it also supports potentially much higher ARPU than just ads;

• Renaming the company to something completely harmless and bland sounding; that will also let you drop the Facebook brand should it become too toxic down the road.

The risks are immense, starting with: how many hours a day do you hold your mobile phone in your hand, in comparison to how many hours a day you are willing to wear a bucket on your head, ahem, a headset? Even fundamental interaction questions, architecture questions and use case questions for the metaverse are still completely up in the air.

Credit to Mark Zuckerberg for pulling off a move as substantial as this for an almost trillion dollar company. I can’t think of any company which has ever done anything similar at this scale. When Intel pivoted from memory to CPUs, back in the 1980’s and at a much smaller scale, at least it was clear that there was going to be significant, growing demand for CPUs. This is not clear at all about headsets beyond niches such as gaming. So they are really jumping into the unknown with both feet.

But I don’t think any more they had a choice.

This is an outcome of a session I ran at last week’s “Logging Off Facebook – What comes next?” unconference. We explored what technical architecture choices have which technical, or non-technical consequences for social media products.

This table was created during the session. It is not complete, and personally I disagree with a few points, but it’s still worthwhile publishing IMHO.

So here you are:

	Facebook-style ("centralized")	Mastodon-style ("federated")	IndieWeb-style ("distributed/P2P")	Blockchain-style
Moderation	Uniform, consistent moderation policy for all users	Locally different moderation policies, but consistent for all users on a node	Every user decides on their own	Posit - algorithmic smart contract that drives consensus
Censorship	easy; global	one node at a time	full censorship not viable	full censorship not viable
Software upgrades	Fast, uncomplicated for all users	Inconsistent across the network	Inconsistent across the network	Consistent, but large synchronization / management costs
Money	Centralized; most accumulated by "Facebook"	Donations (BuyMeACoffee, LiberaPay); Patronage (Patreon)		Paid to/earned by network nodes; value fluctuates due to speculation
Authentication	Centralized		Decentralized (e.g. Solid, OpenID, SSI)	Decentralized (e.g. wallets)
Advertising	Decided by "Facebook"	Not usually	Determined by user
Governance	Centralized, unaccountable	Several components: protocol-level, code-level and instance-level	Several components: protocol-level, code-level and instance-level
Search & Discovery
Group formation
Regulation
Ownership	Totalitarian		Individual