Is Web 2.0 a False Narrative?

False narratives bug me. In this post I wish to address false narratives that I see associated with the terms "Web2.0" and "Web3.0."

The first claim is that "Web1.0 is static" and "Web2.0 is dynamic."

The second claim is that "Web1.0 and Web2.0 were centralized" while "Web3.0, for the first time in human history, introduced the concept decentralization."

Both ideas are ludicrous.

Before I jump into a discussion of technology, I need to discuss the origins of the these.

The term "Web 2.0" was coined for a series of conferences organized by the O'Reilly Media Group called the "Web 2.0 Summit" held in San Francisco. The conferences ran from 2004 to 2011. Wikipedia.

The first thing I need to point out is that "Web 2.0" was a marketing term. The term did not refer to technology. The term referred to the way that a group of marketers positioned a product. It is possible that the terms "static" and "dynamic" appeared in marketing materials.

The stuff that flies from the lips of marketers is usually meaningless as marketers are more concerned with framing products in the market than they are in the underlying technology.

The thing that is really important is the time frame of the conferences. This conference series started in 2004.

The Web 2.0 Summit took place after the DotCom Bust.

The Internet market had collapsed. About 90% of the dotcoms created in the dotboom and collapsed. There was rapid consolidation in the market as CEOs sought to bail out their failing firms.

The term "Web 2.0" referred to efforts to regroup after devastating market correction.

The internet from 2004 to 2011 was actually less dynamic than the Internet of the Dotcom Boom because most of the dotcom plays had failed.

When markets consolidate, the independent players disappear. The giant corporations with static products are the only ones that survive.

Ideology of the Modern Era

There were some ideological ideas in play at the time.

Essentially, the left-leaning ideologies that we learn in the university favors consolidation to decentralization. But I want to talk tech and not politics.

The Internet In Inherently Decentralized and is Inherently Dynamic

My last post was about the Request for Comment Series by the IETF. While the series only captures a few pivotal moments in the development of networking technology, it provides a nice clean timeline for the tech that we use today.

RFC790 by J Postel published in 1980 discusses the Internet Protocol which creates a packet switching network built on the Transmission Control Protocol described in RFC761.

Postel describes the TCP/IP stack as a "host-to-host." The term "host-to-host" might sound centralized to the untrained ear.

The term "host" seems to refer to any computer running the TCP/IP stack.

The documents use the term local. Computers that are directly connected, usually through a router, make up a local network. Computers in the local network often have local addresses of the form 192.168.???.??? . There are usually gateway computers which connect local computers to all of the other networks on the planet ... and a few in space.

The TCP/IP stack describes a highly decentralized packet switching network.

The centralization that we currently experience comes from economic and political forces. It is not inherent in the technology.

Was Web 2.0 Static?

The structure of linked documents that we call "The World Wide Web" is a collection of linked documents built on the TCP/IP.

Many people credit Tim Berners-Lee as the inventor of the internet.

I find claims like this to be a bit absurd. People have been referencing and indexing documents since antiquity.

Just to bring up a case in point: The book people call "The Bible" is a collection of ancient articles. Many of the articles refer to other articles in the Bible. Scholars who study the various connections between the articles often become enchanted by the articles.

We see that in ancient times, people were interested in creating linked documents.

Most references were poorly formalized.

While working at CERN in 1980, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a system called "hypertext" which would help facilitate the creation and sharing of linked documents.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee published RFCs which described HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). He developed a version of SGML called HTML which included links. HTTP became a formal standard in 1996 with RFC1945. RFC1944 describes the URL with a Uniform Resource Locator used in hyperlinks.

The first standardized definition of HyperText Mark Up language came in 1995 with the publication of RFC1866. Interestingly, the first standard definition of HTML had the release number 2.0 indicating that scholars were actively developing text with hyperlinks before roling the program out to the public.

I wish to point out that the initial publication of the HTML standard included the FORM elements. The first publication of the HTTP standard included the POST method.

The form tags and POST method are the primary components of the "dynamic web." The claim that Web1.0 was static while Web2.0 is dynamic is demonstrably false because the initial definition of the HTTP and HTML standards included dynamic elements.

Yes, the marketers for the Web2.0 conference may have used the terms static and dynamic in their promotional materials. But, this is simply an example of the type of tripe that flows from the lips for marketers.

False Narratives Lead People in the Wrong Direction

Web2.0 saw the rise of centralized social media. In centralized social media, big tech firms give free accounts to users. Users can write blog style posts in plain text with a limited number of directives.

If I typed the @ sign followed by an account name, HIVE will created a link to a home page. Here is a link to my profile page: @yintercept . A hashtag in front of a keyword creates a link to the trending page for the tag. Here is a link to the trending page for #STEM . I can just paste a URL on my page and get a link. This is my personal homepage: https://yintercept.com/

Social media allows large numbers of people to create linked documents with little effort. The unfortunate consequence is that social media leads to centralization.

The world of Web1.0 was dominated by an idea called the Personal Home Page. People often created personal homepages at their local ISP. There emerged a large number of discount web hosts which offered the full LAMP stack for web designers.

LAMP refers to the combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

In Web1.0, users had complete control over the design of their web sites and a huge number of web sites included dynamic databases.

In social media, people can do a limited number of things with great ease. The personal home page gave people total control over a web site with total control of the content and links.

Which is more dynamic: A limited subset of operations or complete control?

I contend that complete control is more dynamic. The false narrative allowed big tech to roll over the small independent web sites. The false narrative help feed the forces of centralization.

Why This Is Important

To make the future better we must first understand the past.

False narratives harm our ability to move forward because false narratives cloud our understanding of the past and blind us to the real threats.

The primary cause for the centralization of the Internet after the dotbust was market consolidation and the rise of big social media.

In the fight against centralization; we should start by recognizing that the internet is inherently a decentralized medium. Yes, it is a host-to-host network. Any computer can become a host by adding an HTTP listener.

For security reasons it is best to browse the web from dedicated clients and to host applications on dedicated servers.

There is nothing that prevents the readers of this post from setting up their own web site. There are numerous free services. There are discount web hosts that provide the LAMP stack. There are also companies that provide VPS services for about $5 a month. A VPS is a virtual machine that allows the user to set a web server from scratch.

Does "The Blockchain" Create Decentralization

I believe that blockchain technology can play a vital role in breaking up bigtech monopolies.

To accomplish this task we need to understand which aspects of blockchain technology can help in the cause and which aspects might pose a danger.

I will look specifically at HIVE. The HIVE ecosystem has two blockchains. The HIVE-Blockchain is a database that records all of the transactions related to the HIVE crypto currency. The HIVE-Engine blockchain is a database which records the transactions related to the alt coins.

Wait a second?

There are only two databases and these databases share the same authentication scheme.

So, HIVE presents the world with one central structure for creating applications.

I know that people have married the narrative that Web1.0 was centralized and Web3.0 is decentralized. But the narrative is false.

If something happened to this centralized structure, then we are all screwed.

This is precisely what happened with STEEM. Justin Sun was able to take control of SteemIt Inc and held enough STEEM to take control of the blockchain.

Fortunately, a group of STEEM witnesses were able to create a hardfork.

Blockchain technology did not save us.

It was the inner will of the HIVE witnesses to resist Justin Sun's hostile takeover which saved us.

BLOCKCHAINS and Web Development

The Web3.0 Narrative tells use that legacy internet technologies are inherently centralized and that the only possible way to avoid the scourge of centralization is for future web developers to build their sites on centralized BLOCKCHAINs.

If blockchains themselves are centralized structures, then the false narratives coaxes web developers to inject a dependency on a centralized construct.

While I personally see value to some aspects of blockchain technology, when I look at the underlying technology I see blockchains as a potentially dangerous dependency. Since the underlying technology of the Internet is decentralized, I believe the best path forward would be to create web sites that build on independently hosted databases and that interface with the blockchain.

What HIVE needs is more independent web sites that interface with HIVE.

The Picture

A group called O'Reilly media hosted the Web2.0 Summit in 2004. O'Reilly is publishing group. They made money hands over fist selling computer manuals in the initial roll out of the Internet.

I remember lining up at Frys Electronics in Sunnyvale to browse through the latest computer manuals with hoards of other Internet enthusiasts. O'Reilly was consistently a top seller.

By 2004 the Internet itself became the leading source of technical information. Computer books sales were tanking and O'Reilly itself was suffering from the dotcom bust.

Since O'Reilly sold computer books, it is likely that they would have promoted the slogan that Web1.0 was static and that developers needed to buy the latest O'Reilly books create the new dynamic web that would rise from the ashes of the dotcom bust.

The image below shows a Steam Engine sitting atop of a copy of "HTML .. The Definitive Guide" published by O'Reilly in 1996. The book includes a chapter on HTML forms. Of course, one would need to buy additional O'Reilly books to learn how to process forms on the server side.

I would have put a hive on the book, but the last time that I tried using a hive for my model, the wasps living in the hive stung me.

Posted with STEMGeeks