When gloom and doom is warranted: web3

Short post today because I wanted to riff off of these interactions on twitter today:

https://twitter.com/ClarissaAdjoint/status/1471159466775105536

https://twitter.com/ClarissaAdjoint/status/1471174865981894657

So I stand by my words in the second tweet-thread.

I think the problem is that we're witnessing a new phase of platform capitalism and we basically *can't* be too pessimistic about what might happen. The entire history of personal computing and the internet has involved further and further centralization.

Does anyone actually, if they've thought about it for even a few seconds, think that there's any good that can come from having a world where giant tech companies are finding ways to track us and build a coherent identity across all our pseudonyms *and* there's suddenly a publicly checkable inventory of all our digital assets?

Is that going to be a world we want to live in?

And why am I so confident that this will happen? Because capitalism is an optimization engine for extraction. To deny the possibility is to argue that everyone is going to simultaneously choose to leave money on the table in a system where the only way to continue to succeed is not to maintain but to grow.

That's not realistic, I assure you.