Lots of people agree that there is a problem with data centralization, access and control that has arisen from of the most fundamental aspects of how "web2" works.
A few people are proposing that a specific technology, actually invented for something quite different, could be used to address some or all of these problems.
A lot more people are concerned that not only is the technology not well suited to the task of addressing these problems, but that seeking to use it for that purpose will actually make things worse, possibly catastrophically worse.
There were similar debates taking place online around the dawn of e-commerce. People concerned that pushing retail online would have dire impacts on physical stores, would upend local and national economies, would change the nature and range of things that we have access to in ways both small and large, good and bad.
Those debates did not get resolved, of course. Some idiots at Amazon went ahead and did it anyway, and here we are today, picking up after the storm.
Maybe view the discussion around the potential role of blockchain technology to address data centralization in a similar vein i.e. it will likely make no difference to what happens, but will at least leave behind a trace socio-archeological record that there was some disagreement before things changed.
> There were similar debates taking place online around the dawn of e-commerce.
I don't remember any debates in the 1990's about this. Some people built stuff, others just closed their physical shops and moved on to something else, or added online versions with delivery and survived. There was no debate per se, or if there was then it was by doing, not frigging talking.
Also, it didn't take Amazon 10 years to take over shopping. In 1999 Bezos himself famously said he's the most surprized person on Earth by how sucessful Amazon had become. It was obvious to most people e-commerce was there to change shopping forever, except for those who ran high street shops.
I was debating the e-commerce thing with people at UWash CS&E and Microsoft, including Mhyrvold, in 1993-1994. There were a few op eds and articles in magazines like the Atlantic, Harpers and New Republic that also touched on the matter. It wasn't a matter of dinner party discussion, but then neither is web3. It was somethng that those of us hanging around the edges of the coming e-commerce world were talking about on usenet.
I don't know where you got that story about Bezos saying that, but it's BS. Jeff was never surprised by the success of the company that he started. It also wasn't obvious at the start of amzn that it would work. Even Jeff had no idea the extent to which people would feel comfortable with the web as a platform, which is one reason why amzn had an early contigency implementation of an email-based store (yes, really).
Lots of people agree that there is a problem with data centralization, access and control that has arisen from of the most fundamental aspects of how "web2" works.
A few people are proposing that a specific technology, actually invented for something quite different, could be used to address some or all of these problems.
A lot more people are concerned that not only is the technology not well suited to the task of addressing these problems, but that seeking to use it for that purpose will actually make things worse, possibly catastrophically worse.
There were similar debates taking place online around the dawn of e-commerce. People concerned that pushing retail online would have dire impacts on physical stores, would upend local and national economies, would change the nature and range of things that we have access to in ways both small and large, good and bad.
Those debates did not get resolved, of course. Some idiots at Amazon went ahead and did it anyway, and here we are today, picking up after the storm.
Maybe view the discussion around the potential role of blockchain technology to address data centralization in a similar vein i.e. it will likely make no difference to what happens, but will at least leave behind a trace socio-archeological record that there was some disagreement before things changed.