One of the nice things about being an early Gen Xer is that I remember life before the Internet. I especially remember the transition into the “early web.” or “web 1.0.” This is the period from about 1993, when NPR did the the first Internet broadcast — which I vividly remember listening to at the time — to 1999 when AOL bought Netscape.
I lived in Chicago then. In 1992 the Chicago Tribune invested in America Online and ran a big advertising campaign to attract new users.
I was one of the first 50,000 or so to sign up. I had previously used CompuServe for a while, but it was a wonky, command-line experience. AOL was the first to use a graphical user interface.
A GUI Changes Everything
The interface was a massive improvement. Overnight AOL started attracting tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of users. By 1995 they had 1 million users. One year later they had 5 million.
Content was mostly discussion boards. The hot topics then were the same as today: guns, abortion, and Mac vs PC (Seriously, Mac vs PC was vicious). For me, someone who likes to argue about all kinds of nonsense over text, it was crack. I loved going on message boards and spent far too much money in by-the-minute access fees.
You know what else I loved about AOL?
The siren song making me log in multiple times per day even though I couldn’t afford it?
The thing that made me feel connected to the entire world, however tenuously over a 14.4k modem?
I asked my buddy Jeff Goldblum to explain.
That’s right. Email. We make fun of that silly AOL “You’ve Got Mail!” voice today, but widespread, easy to use email was critical to the early Internet.
Email is why the web became dominant.
Without email, Amazon-style e-commerce was not possible. How else would you create an account without email? How else would you be notified of shipment? (Bezos also used email to get feedback from customers.)
Match.com launched in 1995. It used email to notify you when you had a match. I know this because <cough> I was one of their first 10,000 accounts that Match gave out free to seed the marketplace. Back then, they didn’t even have photos. Just text and email, which made sense to those of us used to personals in the Chicago Reader.
Email lists were in use even before the web. Check out this classic piece of history from 1993 by internet pioneer turned superstar investor Marc Andreessen.
Yahoo’s strategy was to acquire email addresses for their My Yahoo feature, a strategy pursed by other so-called “portals” of the era.
Without widespread use of email on college campuses, Facebook is impossible.
You get the picture, right? The early web gets most of the attention, but email is what made it more than a fad.
“Thanks DJ,” you’re thinking, “but why does this history lesson matter?”
Great question. The reason I bring this up is simply to ask the question:
Is there anything like that for web3?
Imagine we’re 30 years in the future and you’re writing a version of this post. “Way back in the 2020s when I was just a teenage degen, we didn’t have flying cars or drone-delivered food or robot plastic surgery or every company’s financials posted in real time on a transparent immutable ledger. But we sure did have _______!”
NFTs, some might say.
There is only one sane response to this:
Are you fucking kidding me?
Even an old mix-tape-making Gen Xer like me can see that NFTs are the most cringe thing ever. It’s like taking a selfie, posting it on eBay, making the picture of that eBay listing your profile pic, then talking nonstop about eBay listings of other people’s selfies. In the very best case they are a short term monetization tool for gasbag influencers. But a socially transformative technology akin to email? Seriously?
NFTs are a massive money vacuum deployed by attention economy narcissists to more efficiently transmit suckers’ money to their (fiat) bank accounts. That’s all they’re good for.
I don’t know what we’ll be talking about in 2053, but I guarantee you that in 2032 NFTs will be looked back on as the pet rock of the 2020s. (More GenX nostalgia)
So what will we be talking about?
What is the “gotta have it” feature of crypto networks that will take us from a few million users to billions?
I have spent years thinking about this problem, looking at hundreds of different projects and concepts. I used to think that a crypto native version of 1994 Marc Andreessen with Netscape or 2004 Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook would come along and create a product that seems obvious in retrospect.
But none have.
Earlier this year Charlie Warzel perfectly expressed the core problem of web3:
I find so much of Web3 deeply inaccessible. When I took the time to set up a crypto wallet and participate in the new economy, the experience was devoid of thrill. I didn’t feel that sense of hope and potential that came when I first logged onto the internet, logged into Facebook, downloaded a song on Napster, or held a smartphone in my hand and checked my email away from a computer.
What if the billions of dollars that has been poured into crypto, and billions more lost in Ponzi schemes, rug pulls, poor security practices and general market gyrations turns out to be a complete dead end?
I have some — LOTS! — of thoughts on that, but this is already running long, so stay tuned for my next post when I explain what I think is the only thing that will bring web3 to the masses.
Update: part two is now live.
Damn. This ended too quickly! Excited for the next post