Web 2.0 was about all the pretty, shiny things about social media, like user-generated content, blogs, customer participation, ”everyone has a voice,” etc. Now, Web 3.0 is all about the dark side: algorithmic bias, filter bubbles, group polarization, flame wars, cyberbullying, etc. We discovered that maybe everyone should not have a voice, after all. Or at least that voice should be used with more attention to what you are saying.
While it is tempting to blame Facebook, media, or ”technology” for all this (just as it is easy to praise it for the other things), the truth is that individuals should accept more responsibility of their own behavior. Technology provides platforms for communication and information, but it does not generate communication and information; people do.
In consequence, I’m very skeptical about technological solutions to the Web 3.0 problems; they seem not to be technological problems but social ones, requiring primarily social solutions and secondly hybrid solutions. We should start respecting the opinions of others, get educated about different views, and learn how debate based on facts and finding fundamental differences, not resorting to argumentation errors. Here, machines have only limited power – it’s up to us to re-learn these things and keep teaching them to new generations. It’s quite pitiful that even though our technology is 1000x better than in Ancient Greek, our ability to debate properly is one tenth of what it was 2000 years ago.
Avoiding the enslavement of machines requires going back to the basics of humanity.