Web3 has great potential by changing the incentive structure of the internet. Think of it like socialism vs capitalist. Each has their strengths but taken too far both can be bad. I think the current state has taken it too far on the socialism scale so we've ended up with a very shitty internet, just like you end up with shitty products in a completely socialist economy. It might take a while to play out but we might get much higher quality digital content over time this way.
I'd love to be pointed into the direction of this socialist internet to try it out, because the only internet I'm familiar with is run by corporations that could be straight out of Neuromancer with a bunch of aging hobbyist communities hanging on for dear life in the crevasses
Under extreme socialism, think Orwellian levels, definitions of words are inverted. So the argument would be, if one believes we're already deep into Orwellian territory, that what most people think of as some kind of extreme capitalism because we have these large, unchecked corporations running around, is actually extreme socialism, aka fascism: the merger of corporation and state. And that's the reason these companies have gotten so large and unchecked. That we're not in a free market, but rather dealing with cartels that have grown like weeds and enforced their monopolies through violence through co-opting and/or cooperation with the state.
That's the idea, not trying to argue that's the case. Just giving a possible answer to your question. In reality we're all in a completely free, survival of the fittest-type situation. We're all gonna die someday and all that. It's just that society provides some nice illusions wherein we can debate about whether we're socialist or capitalist.
The term IngSoc in 1984 is a parody of Nazi, that is to say that 1984 is about the dangers of fascism masquerading as socialism or otherwise cosying up to the working class to gain enough popular support to implement a totalitarian state, not about the dangers of socialism.
We spent the last two decades watching the rise of surveillance capitalism, which financializes our behavior via advertisement. What web3 enables is the financialization of our behavior via financial derivatives. Private corporations will extract value from every transaction on the blockchain by betting on those transactions and repackaging those bets into new primitives to bet on. It is like the mortgage crisis, but for everything.
This isn't a move towards socialism. It is a move towards additional hypercapitalism accelerated by almost entirely unchecked automation controlled by technologists who have access to absolutely insane amounts of investment because they got lucky as early adopters of the coin du jour.
