Web3 as ‘self-infrastructuring’: The challenge is how

Introduction

The field of emerging technologies and cultural expression known as ‘Web3’ promises a means for people to participate in provable ownership of digital assets. While many early conceptions of Web3 focus on ‘ownership’ of digital assets, Web3 is actually about creating the enabling infrastructure for the coordination of resources, beyond the concept of ownership. Based on qualitative insights drawn from digital ethnographic methods of observation of online forums and social media channels, participation in Web3 communities, and interviews, this commentary argues that Web3 is a collective exploration in ‘self-infrastructuring’. The verb ‘to infrastructure’ denotes the activities, processes of integrated materials, tools, methods and practices that make up and change an infrastructure (Star and Bowker, 2010). Thus, infrastructuring is an ongoing process of doing, and these processes are incremental, iterative, and long-term (Karasti et al., 2010). Web3 originates from anti-establishment ideals, and aims to provide the prefigurative means to build new structures for decentralized, self-governance from within the prevailing power structures of society. Yet, in viewing Web3 as infrastructure, the process of infrastructuring demands the coordination of people, processes, operation, governance, and maintenance of infrastructure. The fundamental technical and institutional challenge that Web3 communities now need to collectively determine is how to self-infrastructure. This research offers a contribution to the literature on Big Data and Society by providing a theoretical framework grounded in infrastructure studies that invites further scholarship on Web3 as a site of digital organization, algorithmic governance, and data governance.

What is Web3?

‘Web3’ is a generic term that refers to platforms that leverage public blockchain and related technologies to enable decentralized coordination of data and digital assets, instead of relying on central intermediaries. This differs from the first generation of the military and scientific internet in the 1960s–1990s (known as ‘Web1.0’) (Abbate, 1999), the second generation of personal computers and mass adoption of the internet which coincides with the re-centralization of economic capabilities and benefits and the rise of corporate digital platforms and advertising-driven revenue (known as ‘Web 2.0’) (Potts and Rennie, 2019), and the Semantic Web (or ‘Web 3.0’), which is an extension of the technical standards of the World Wide Web to make digital information machine-readable and actionable (Shadbolt et al., 2006). Web3 aims to offer an alternative digital infrastructure to that of centralized platforms, applications, and value that have been developed on the internet. If Web2.0 gave people the ability to read as well as ‘write’ digital media to the World Wide Web (for example, blogs and social media platforms) but enabled big data surveillance (Ball and Webster, 2020), then Web3 is a platform infrastructure to read, write, and coordinate.

The promise of Web3 is a decentralized infrastructural base that anyone can build on to create new economic and social paradigms, for individual or collective control and coordination of shared resources. The unique, composable properties of Web3 that enable digital value creation and the coordination of digital assets in a decentralized manner include cryptographic private key management (mathematical algorithms for secure communication over insecure channels), shared, distributed consensus of blockchain-based ledgers (databases), and opensource software. It is not so much that digital assets are ‘owned’ as they can be controlled for new models of coordination that extend beyond existing paradigms of data ‘ownership’ and monetization. Public blockchain technology leverages public key cryptography, meaning each person can control their own wallet ‘address’, rather than entrusting the custody of their digital assets to a third-party (such as a cloud-service provider or a corporate company). In theory, these public blockchains are not able to be owned or controlled by any single private actor or group because they are ‘decentralized’. Decentralization refers to the technical attribute of a subset of distributed system where multiple authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by all (Troncoso et al., 2017), as well as an ideology that manifests in the social, political, economic and legal dynamics of a system (Bodó and Giannopoulou, 2019). Grounded in notions of the purity and infallibility of mathematics, computer-based cryptographic economies (or ‘cryptoeconomic’ systems) combine cryptography and economic incentives to ‘reshape the nature of firms, governments, markets and civil society’ through new modes of communication, cooperation and organization (Berg et al., 2019). What is being imagined, built, and coordinated on these infrastructural foundations extends far beyond just financial assets, to include Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Regenerative Finance (ReFi), Decentralised Societies (DeSoc) and ‘open’ Metaverses (Nabben, 2021a). Combinations of these technologies and organizational frameworks offer a utopian promise of self-sovereignty through digital organization (Corballis and Soar, 2022; Ibrus and Rohn, 2023). Less is known about the social outcomes of these tools and infrastructures in practice.

Claims about Web3 include that it presents an ‘exciting and terrifying’ future (Park et al., 2022) that ‘reinvents the internet through token-based economics’ (Voshmgir, 2020), so that ‘people can coordinate more easily and build or repurpose innovations that serve their needs’ (Rennie et al., 2022). Just one of the countervailing tendencies to many claims about Web3 is that technocratic solutions often omit the complexity of human society and obfuscate the role of people in building and maintaining digital infrastructure, rather than acknowledging the social inputs that shape and maintain technological interventions. Some scholars have pointed this out, including the assumption that technical networks without a centralized intermediary manifest democratic decision-making, as well as digital equity requirements, such as digital literacy and access to an internet connection (O’Dwyer, 2020; Manski, 2017; Nabben, 2021b). Web3 also presents a new market for existing big tech companies to try to capture value, as has occurred with previous hopes for democratic, digital networks (Greenstein, 2015). Few concrete definitions, analytical lenses, and examples of ‘Web3’ exist as it is a nascent and emerging field of technological and institutional innovation, and Web3 is yet to prove it can live up to its claims as an infrastructure.

Web3 as self-infrastructuring

As well as a promise, a fantasy, or a technology, Web3 can also be viewed as infrastructure that provides a basis by which to support other activities. Information infrastructures are the material objects constructed by people, composed of relationships between social and technical elements, including technologies, people, processes, standards and actions (Star and Ruhleder, 1996). Infrastructures are ‘shared, evolving, open, standardized, heterogenous’, providing an installed base on which to build (Hanseth and Lyytinen, 2012). Technologies, such as cryptography and blockchain transaction ledgers, become infrastructures when they are assembled and embodied as part of human organization to support one or more functions within a broader ecosystem (Star, 1999). Thus, infrastructure is relational and ecological and cannot be understood apart from its use (Star and Ruhleder, 1996). Bowker, et al. argue that when dealing with information infrastructures, we need to look not only at the technology but the entire array of social organizational forms, practices and institutions that accompany, make possible and inflect the development of new technology, their related practices and their distributions (2009: 103). Institutional infrastructures accompany technological infrastructures as the sets of political, legal and cultural institutions that form the backdrop for economic activity and governance to enable or constrain operations, and organize and configure societal relations (Hinings et al., 2017). In this context, Web3 is both a technical infrastructure that provides a basis for people to own their own wallet addresses to coordinate digital assets and build decentralized applications, as well as an institutional infrastructure that provides a substrate to support other economic and governance activities. According to one analysis of Web3 whitepapers, creators are defined as ‘we’, ‘thinkers and doers’, ‘community members’ and ‘contributors’ and the supposed beneficiaries are ‘all humans’, ‘humanity’, ‘individuals’ ‘the global society’, and ‘everyone’ (Tan et al., 2022). What binds the diverse intersection of characters exploring all corners of Web3 is the desire to build their own information infrastructures to enable new economic models of organization.

I call this practice in Web3 of when people are able to participate in designing, owning, operating, governing, and/or maintaining their own infrastructure, ‘self-infrastructuring’. Self-infrastructuring is when people have the ability to place boundaries around their own actions in relation to shared purposes or goals, that are then expressed in technical and institutional infrastructure. The verb ‘to infrastructure’ denotes the ongoing activities, processes, tools, methods, and practices that make up and change an infrastructure (Star and Bowker, 2010). The purpose of infrastructure is to support a particular activity in an adaptable and persistent way. For example, one ‘social DAO’, provocatively named ‘Friends with Benefits’, states their aim is to ‘equip cultural creators with the community and Web3 tools they need to gain agency over their production by making the concepts and tools of Web3 more accessible, building diverse spaces and experiences that creatively empower participants, and developing tools, artworks, and products that showcase Web3's potential’ (Nabben, 2022). Despite good intentions and widely innovation social customs and technical tools, this is a hard thing. In my multi-year ethnographic encounters with Web3 communities both online and in-person, it is apparent that Web3-natives just don’t know ‘how to infrastructure’ yet.

The ideologies Web3 espouses include a politics of decentralized organizing, self-governance, and newfound agency through cryptographically verifiable ownership in digital domains. Yet, the technical and institutional models of how to do this are still being conceptualized and developed. Infrastructure, and the practice of infrastructuring, has fallen out of the common, collective understanding of technology in favor of startup-era products and business models that productize people as data, VC capital as funding, and growth as the trajectory. Whilst products are designed to capture attention and earn revenue, infrastructures are invisible when operating effectively. Furthermore, products are easily replicable, temporary and disposable, whereas infrastructures are persistent and require maintenance. Web3 communities are being required to rediscover the practice of infrastructuring and develop novel tools and institutional arrangements for self-infrastructuring to pursue their ambitions of collective coordination and self-governance. The second-order effect of this experimentation in ‘how to infrastructure’ is that infrastructures are both great enablers of society and have significant, often unanticipated, implications (Star, 1999).

How to self-infrastructure

Web3 as a technology and an ethos enables social, political and economic modes of self-organization through the ability for those that can participate to enter and exit infrastructures according to their values, preferences, and ability to shape the rules of the infrastructure in which they participate. This flexibility cannot always be planned for as changes in social, technical and economic settings are often unpredictable. How the ‘infrastructural legos’ of Web3 components can and should be combined and to which emergent models of data governance they will ascribe will greatly influence the social outcomes of Web3 infrastructure. The underlying logic of Web3 remains underarticulated in relation to the real or perceived users of these tools, for example, whether it is based on cooperative data governance models, more legalistic data trust structures, or personal data sovereignty (Micheli et al., 2020).

Furthermore, the work of creating and building infrastructure is secondary to the work of ongoing maintenance. The civil infrastructures of modern societies are typically built and maintained by large bureaucracies. In other distributed networks, such as the Internet, standards bodies and social arrangements make the development and ongoing maintenance of large-scale technological infrastructure possible. Although standards are essential in the development of large-scale infrastructures, they are a messy entanglement of social processes, across numerous layers of a technology stack, require practice, and evolve over time (Star and Bowker, 2010). Web3 projects must grapple with these messy entanglements of social and technical bits, for example, ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organizations’ determining their own funding and economic models that don’t depend on centralized Venture Capital (Nabben, 2022). At present, one of the fundamental contradictions of Web3's ambition to build and create digital infrastructure is in defining and developing patterns of activities, processes, tools, methods and practices for long-term infrastructural generation, governance, maintenance, and growth that differ from what has already been done. This is evident in the emphasis in the Ethereum community on generating new models to ‘fund public goods’. In trying to design coordination infrastructures, the subliminal, unaddressed, question that Web3 must grapple with is ‘how to self-infrastructure’ in ways that give people more collective ownership of the rules and value of infrastructure in digital domains, without demanding stratospheric technical aptitude or unnecessarily burdening them with arduous governance duties. According to its ideology, decentralized infrastructure cannot be governed by centralized bureaucracies or funders in the long term, yet infrastructures require long-term strategies for operation and maintenance.

The origins of self-infrastructuring

Social and cultural factors are pertinent in the development of large-scale infrastructures. Emerging infrastructures, including Web3, can be identified by the ‘master narratives’ that they espouse (Star and Ruhleder, 1996). Web3 stems from, and in some ways perpetuates, the radical politics of a countercultural group of hackers known as ‘the cypherpunks’ in its prefigurative propensities to build one's own infrastructure. The cypherpunks were a group of software engineers, cryptographers, and philosophers that emerged in the 1990s and idealized self-governance through technological means, and were seminal in the development of the Bitcoin protocol (Brekke, 2021; Nabben, 2021c). Bitcoin has been described as one instantiation of decentralized ‘infrastructuring’ (Kow and Lustig, 2018). Understanding how Web3 has evolved from the ideological origins of the cypherpunks and the collective will to self-infrastructure is crucial to understanding broader experimentation with blockchain technology as a form of prefigurative self-infrastructuring.

The participatory action of prefiguration that Web3 communities engage in is ‘self-infrastructuring’ through the development of decentralized digital infrastructure. Prefigurative politics refers to modes of creation and organization that strive to reflect the future society a group is trying to manifest in response and opposition to existing institutions (Swain, 2019; Maddox et al., 2016). Stemming from the origins of public blockchain communities, proponents of Web3 embrace a politics of prefiguration by attempting to embody the politics and power structures that they want to enable in society through the direct action of building more participatory digital infrastructure. The political philosophy of public blockchains has been described as the self-provisioning of public goods via technological tools, free markets, and governance minimization (Swartz, 2018). Indeed, decentralized technologies aim to facilitate self-governance to ‘configure social relations in a decentralized manner and constitutes new social realities’ (Miscione and Kavanagh, 2015; Reijers and Coeckelbergh, 2018). Thus, if blockchain is about infrastructural experiments in re-ordering society, then Web3 is the configuration of these new social worlds. What is not completely clear is what society is being prefigured towards.

Culturally, Web3 is a continuation of a hacker ethic to engage in play, politics, and prefiguration. The cultural politics of Web3 embrace the hacker ethic of participatory organizing for the political re-ordering of existing power structures from institutions to individuals through ‘playful tinkering’ (Coleman, 2011). For hackers, ‘code is speech’, meaning a sphere for free speech and protest (Coleman, 2009). Similarly, the saying “code is law” (Lessig, 2000) has been adopted and adapted by Bitcoin communities to refer to the immutable, software code that acts as an enforcement mechanism of the rules of the system. In Web3, code is creation, meaning that hackers are not breaking software systems but engaging in the prefigurative act of building digital infrastructure that can be controlled by ‘the people’ (encapsulated in the memetic phrase (‘meme’) of ‘BUIDLing’). Creation speaks of iterative ‘experiments’ in new institutional infrastructures and societal possibilities for self-organization. The stated aims of projects that consider themselves to be ‘Web3’ include ‘decentralizing funding access’ to fund opensource software as a ‘public good’ (Owocki, 2021), ‘storing humanity's most important information’ via a decentralized marketplace (Protocol Labs, 2017), and an experimental ‘crypto state’ with ‘a mission to bridge the physical world to the digital metaverse’ through secure, opensource microchip hardware (The Ambassador, 2021). These communities are increasingly diverse in goals and values, from ‘Decentralized Finance Degenerates’ or ‘DeGens’ that care about making profit in cryptocurrency markets, to ‘Regenerative Finance, ReFi Regens’ that care about innovating sustainable economic models for the coordination of shared resources (such as the environment).

Web3 is an ambitious desire for broad-scale, self-made societal improvement where local actions lead to global change. Yet, the subliminal but underlying tension behind Web3 enthusiasm is how to reconcile broad social and political aspirations to self-infrastructure with the practicalities of infrastructuring everyday institutional technologies that facilitate people's lives in a more decentralized manner. The risk of prefiguration is that rather than offering an escape from digital surveillance, technological infrastructures will just offer another competing institutional system with its own power asymmetries. Thus, the question begging Web3 is not just ‘what is good governance?’ but ‘what is good infrastructure, and how do we build and govern it through the everyday activities of self-infrastructuring?’. It is how this infrastructural tension plays out in practice that requires further empirical inquiry.

Conclusions

Ultimately, it is the social consequences of infrastructures that matter. Good information infrastructures are those that are adaptive to changing circumstances and environments, yet designing for flexibility in relation to a clear purpose is not an easy task (Star and Bowker, 2010). Understanding Web3 through an infrastructural lens reveals the relevance of Big Data & Society scholarship on algorithmic governance, digital organization, and data governance to the field of Web3. This research invites further scholarship on how existing models and insights can be adapted, adopted, or avoided in Web3 to generate new insights that inform and shape the emergent field of Web3 as digital infrastructure.

Rather than a critical analysis of Web3, this piece has provided the theoretical framework of ‘self-infrastructuring’ to invite further analysis of the phenomenon of Web3 to invent, resurface, and conduct all kinds of experiments to figure out ‘how to infrastructure’ in more decentralized and participatory ways. As Web3 scales in development, general interest, adoption and the rise of challengers to it, it must have a clearly articulated purpose that is reflected in daily practices to unite and guide its self-infrastructuring if it is to deliver on the hopes of its roots and its promises as a genuine alternative to Web2.0's failings.