A Battle For The Soul Of Web3
By Benjamin Life
Ethereum is at a crossroads.
It was just a matter of time before the culture war arrived in the emerging world of blockchain.
All it took was the particular combination of seismic geopolitical shifts in the United States and a seismic socio-technical shift within DeFi for Ethereans to find themselves watching their leading position in the Layer 1 blockchain ecosystem rapidly slip away. The poetically ironic icing on the cake was the launch of $TRUMP on Solana the eve of the inauguration. In a very short period of time, the meta-narrative within Ethereum went from L2’s competitively funding public goods as a blue sky marketing strategy into rapidly spreading flame wars across different subcultures within Ethereum, each more focused on assigning blame for the network’s shortcomings than providing generative, systemic solutions.
This essay doesn’t attempt to adjudicate a winner of that culture war. Rather, it seeks to articulate Ethereum as a pluralistic substrate for experimentation on civilization-scale infrastructure. In a landscape in which the nihilistic, hyper-capitalist DeFi narrative has already largely been lost to Solana, it’s critical for our collective survival for Ethereum not to chase the degen dragon but to return to its roots and double down on the ethos that brought many of us into this space in the first place: a dream that another world is possible.
Despite the seeming polarization of ideological perspectives relative to what Ethereum is and what its future should be, we are all builders and we are all dreamers.
What unites the communist and libertarian and all the others in between fighting it out in the comments is a mutual care for the future of our global cyber-physical infrastructure, a fight for the original promise of the internet.
From my vantage point, Ethereum’s competitive edge comes from its pluralism: an infinite garden in which those audacious enough to imagine entirely new systems and social contracts can experiment and explore. Unlike the social, political and ideological struggles of the 20th century, our ideological differences and struggles can be hashed out in blockspace, an open canvas and evolutionary fitness landscape in which various ideologies can be tested and dialectics can evolve as strategies are synergized through an open market of both ideas and systems.
While many, particularly in the West, celebrate the freedom of the free market, many of us who have gravitated to blockchains have recognized that in actuality, we do not have the freedom to choose the systems that we participate in. In the infinite garden of a networked society with Ethereum as a shared substrate for interoperable mechanisms, we might become truly free to choose the systems that govern our social, political and economic lives.
Creating that kind of world requires builders and dreamers with the audacity to believe that new social, political, and economic systems can be created in blockspace, opening up a new domain of cosmo-local collaboration and mutual learning as we co-explore the possibility space of how human civilizations can be organized.
At the core of this mutual exploration are the principles of pluralism and the commons.
Pluralism supports diversity in its best sense: a multiplicity of approaches and strategies whose success or failure determine how we collectively evolve. In a pluralistic design space, we’re not competing for some ultimate authority, rather we are building systems rooted in consent and participation that optimize towards improved quality of Life for ourselves and for society. With the freedom to create and opt into a plurality of social, political, and economic experiments, evolutionary selection will help us prune our ideas as we vector into a protopian future together. Unlike nation states which impose regulatory and physical enforcement of laws, in blockspace, consenting parties can engage in whole new set of interactions governed by smart contracts. This consent-based and pluralistic substrate allows for true experimentation between consenting peers, unlike the paternalistic political and economic order we inherited.
In this sense, it doesn’t matter if you’re a communist or libertarian.
What unites us is our belief that another world is possible and that we can utilize decentralized and opt in infrastructures to make it a reality. For Ethereum to be successful as the substrate for that endeavor, many flowers must bloom in the infinite garden.
A note on Ethereum as planetary cyber-physical commons
In another twist of cosmic irony, blockspace on a public ledger may be the last private space we can access as global Citizens of the web.
This dual function of encryption, transparency and anonymity, produces a ledger that secures trust between independent parties, ideally without any form of centralized control. This process requires many different stakeholder groups to function and operate as a global virtual machine. For Ethereum to fulfill its potential, the central principles and affordances of sovereignty, public goods, and incentive alignment must be what binds these various groups, each with their own intentions and goals, to a shared vision for the future, meta-narrative guardrails that can help us avoid the pitfalls of narrow optimization and short term gains.
This essay is not intended to direct any blame or judgment for Ethereum’s lack of clear vision and collective imagination. Anyone who has ever founded an organization likely understands that vision alone is insufficient to deliver the utility and value that you hope to create in the world. Often founders are so consumed with the immediate needs of building that they lack the foresight to design the types mechanisms that become necessary as their work evolves. I believe it takes outsider voices to identify these gaps and opportunities, offering new strategies that can’t be seen or named within the institutions themselves. In both web2 and web3, the competing interests and financial motivations of many parties have cascaded into a massive social and political Gordian knot that is often avoided and unnamed due to its seemingly impenetrable structure. These competing interests aren’t bad on their own, but in order for the all-win game theoretic outcome to occur for all of us, we must return to first principles around Commons governance and establish corrective mechanisms that restore the credible neutrality and pluralistic open-endedness required to steward such a cyber-physical commons or substrate.
We all have a vested interest in Ethereum succeeding. By their very nature, protocols are a common pool resource. As such, we have no choice but to lean in and govern them collectively. Despite our different ideological contexts or our particular critiques of each other’s worldviews, we ultimately are fighting for the future of Ethereum because it matters for the future of humanity.
But despite the vast potential of a truly decentralized and pluralistic human civilization, running on Ethereum, in which decentralized worker-owned cooperatives, community currencies, and tokenized collective ownership of infrastructure become the norm across societies, at present we are still nascent, fragile, and tenuous, as has been the case in every transformative and disruptive emerging technology throughout history.
Our peril or promise may hinge on our ability to heed this message from Sir Tim Berners-Lee describing the early days of the internet:
The early internet was like a bobsled race.
At first you push and push and push trying to get it to go. And then, as you begin to accelerate, you realize that you don’t have to push anymore.
Now you must get in and steer.
But I fear that we got in to steer too late. And now that trajectory of the internet is like an asteroid moving through space on an existential collision course with Earth. Altering the trajectory of that fast moving object requires skill and timing, but if anyone can do it, I believe it is you all.
— Paraphrased from DWeb Summit 2023
This cautionary tale from one of the founders of the original internet offers a stark warning and guidepost for the future of Ethereum.
Currently, the governance of the protocol is opaque. Even though All Core Devs calls and repositories are published transparently and forums can be accessed by anyone, the level of knowledge required to participate vets out most, and the competing interests between the various large and increasingly institutional stakeholder groups seem to drive most of the processes behind the scenes.
I believe that if we take Sir Tim’s words to heart, we’ll realize that it is now time for us all to collectively steer.
The words cybernetics and governance both harken back to the notion of steering a ship, and commons governance is our collective steering of common pool resources like water, fisheries, forests, and now, blockspace.
In a network as pluralistic and open ended as Ethereum, such a commons governance body would be hard to conceive. Yet, if any are capable of doing so, I believe it is the Ethereum community.
Even though Audrey Tang and Glenn Weyl were thrown under the bus amidst the Ethereum culture wars, with pictures of them alongside Joseph Gordon Levitt and Vitalik offering seeming evidence of their disconnection from the current state of Ethereum, perhaps it is exactly people like Audrey and Glenn that Ethereum most needs. I believe our collective meta-narrative could very well be bound to new models for civic participation, participatory democracy and citizen assemblies. These commons governance innovations could make Ethereum an example for nation states in how vastly complex social and technical processes could be truly governed as a commons.
There are many intermediary steps that can be taken towards those ends, from implementing the IETF’s early internet protocol governance mechanisms to Ethereum town halls, AI assisted sense-making, or V-Taiwan-style public sensemaking processes. These interventions would not only make Ethereum the most successful Layer 1 blockchain, they would create the substrate for the blossoming of a truly flourishing and pluralistic human civilization. While our current social contract is in shambles, torn asunder more and more each day as rising generations lose all hope in a viable future, a substrate for the pluralistic experimentation towards new social contracts is needed now more than ever. Ethereum can be a beacon of hope amidst dying systems as a place in which many new kinds of systems are born. Our fight is not one between left and right, rather it is a fight between open and closed systems.
I believe this is what Ethereum is for.