Can Web3 technologies help us break our reliance on Big Tech companies to supply much of our online infrastructure, and reinvent the nation state for the 21st century?
Those are some of the ideas explored in Fast Forward Aotearoa, the nearly 600-page new book from Ben Reid, the Christchurch technology consultant and the country’s foremost futurist. Reid’s weekly Memia newsletter has become a go-to resource for those trying to keep abreast of developments in exponential technology.
Fast Forward Aotearoa is sprawling work that expands on the themes explored in Memia, while outlining ten ambitious “missions” for Aotearoa, and 100 technologies we could potentially harness to advance social, economic and environmental aims.
When it comes to Web3 technologies, Reid sees them as giving our small nation an alternative to the existing “techno feudalism” that dominates how we live and work.
“Our entire country runs on this West Coast technology stack. There have been huge advantages for us. We get really high end technology, iPhones, access to some of the best AI on the planet,” Reid told Web3NZ.
“But longer term, it just creates this structural dependency,” he added.
A potential third way
“These large technology providers right now are providing everything on a loss leader basis. At some point that price will go up. If we've completely hollowed out our capability nationally to actually understand, build, and develop our own technologies, then it really raises some quite significant questions for national sovereignty in the future.”
We clearly haven’t the resources or scale to develop our own technology from the ground up, nor would we necessarily want to. So what’s the alternative?
“We are seeing this third way if you like, of open source, decentralised, sometimes called Web3,” said Reid.
“It’s a move towards a far more open source, more accessible third platform that doesn't have this centralised control of any one government by a few large technology companies.”
In Fast Forward Aotearoa, Reid looks at several emerging trends that underpin Web3 which offer potential to do things differently as we face the myriad challenges of the 21st century.
Fast Forward Aotearoa author Ben Reid
Crowdsourced infrastructure
Reid writes that the “most interesting development” of the Web3 era may be the “emergence of decentralised ‘mini-internets’ which extend Web3 innovations happening further up the stack to operate outside both state- and commercial control”.
Instead, he suggests, these networks could use private fibre cables and wireless mesh technologies at scale, and operate under the DAO-based governance model that many cryptocurrency and Web3 initiatives currently have in place.
“An early predecessor of this model may be the Helium network, already a massive decentralised global network model supporting LoraWAN and 5G connectivity worldwide. (But running across conventional Internet backbones),” Reid writes.
Helium bills itself as the “people’s network”, operates its own HNT cryptocurrency, and offers 5G mobile coverage in the US in conjunction with provider Dish, with a host of wireless operators also part of the Helium network offering roaming throughout the US and elsewhere.
The ‘network state’ as a DAO
He describes it as “a bit of a rough sketch right now”, but Reid uses Fast Forward Aotearoa to outline how decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs) could be used to bring to life American tech entrepreneur Balaji Srivinasan’s concept of the “network state” to life.
“A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states,” Srivinasan has written.
Reid outlines a future scenario for a DAO, the Whatunga (network) state, that starts off with 1,000 environmentally-minded citizens investing $10,000 each in a token issue aimed at pooling money to buy land to reforest and regenerate.
“As the New Zealand regulatory system is still waking up to how to deal with DAOs, several legal contortions are required to establish the DAO as a legal entity able to hold its own currency and property assets like any other charitable organisation or company. Plus pay tax,” he writes in his scenario.
Reid sees the DAO movement growing in the next decade as these autonomous organisations prove their value, to the point where they become powerful systems of governance with significant assets at their disposal.
“By 2035, the same DAO movement has been growing all around the world and Whatunga DAO is now part of a global “Network of Network States” which represents over 100 million people worldwide and counting, spread around an increasing patchwork of territory in over a hundred countries worldwide,” he writes.
“The transformation of global governance systems and new DAO-to-DAO trade networks springing up force a radical rethink of what constitutes a “nation” and calls begin to be made for DAO representation at a reformed United Nations entity.”
Decentralised data sovereignty
Reid sees an opportunity to take a new, more granular approach to data sovereignty that sees it as a derivative of the sovereignty of every individual, or collective entity of individuals, with end-to-end encrypted data being exchanged between them “with no third party potentially able to intercept, read or copy the data or keys”.
That is in contrast to the highly centralised approach to digital identity, data storage and ownership currently in place, with the three big public cloud providers hosting vast amounts of data on our behalf.
“The far-off promise of Web3 technologies to turn this decentralised computation capability into off-the-shelf commodity technology is still a long way from being realised,” Reid writes.
“For now, these capabilities will remain beyond the practical reach of all but the most technically competent and/or security paranoid. At the time of writing, there are a very small number of end-to-end encrypted Web3-type decentralised services for email and productivity tools - one example is Skiff, an open source challenger to the big Microsoft and Google suites, although its financial backing and long term viability of its business model is open to question,” he adds.
The big opportunities in Web3 - Ben Reid
Reid concludes that there is “Still substantial doubt” that decentralised software protocols and blockchains will be able to scale and perform sufficiently to ensure their widespread adoption, “outside niche use cases”.
But he goes on to outline some key areas where he sees Web3 technologies playing important rules in society and the economy:
- Universal digital payments the promise of near-instant, secure, permissionless, borderless, frictionless payments for all 8 billion people on the planet.
- Redistributive sovereign cryptocurrency In 2020 I wrote an article proposing national-level digital cryptocurrencies which automate the distribution of wealth among a population, fundamentally redesigning income and wealth redistribution systems into the money we use — thus achieving targeted reductions in inequality at a fraction of the cost to the state of introducing and managing wealth taxes.
- Quadratic voting and funding the concepts of “quadratic voting” and “quadratic funding” originated from the work of Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, along with Zoe Hitzig and Glen Weyl. They first proposed the idea in a research paper published in 2018. Quadratic funding is a democratic crowdfunding mechanism that aims to promote fair and inclusive funding for public goods amongst a community. It combines modest individual contributions with larger matching sums from sponsors or contributors, ensuring that contributions made by more people are matched more generously. The idea has gained traction in the blockchain and cryptocurrency communities, as well as in the effective altruism movement and may be a key lever towards tackling inequality in society. Supply chain transparency a decentralised, immutable blockchain ledger can record transactions in a supply chain to securely and transparently track the movement, provenance, and status of goods from raw materials to final delivery. Each stage of the product's lifecycle can be recorded and verified by multiple parties, significantly reducing the risks of fraud, errors, and inefficiencies. This level of transparency is especially crucial in industries such as pharmaceuticals, food and luxury goods, where the authenticity and safety of products are of high importance.
- Decentralised, open source AI at the end of 2023 the raging AI safety debates are centring on a few axes of disagreement, particularly Open vs. Closed Source and Centralised vs. Decentralised AI. Stability.ai CEO Emad Mostaque sums up what is potentially at stake in future if all AI models are closed source and centrally controlled.