"Web3 as ‘self-infrastructuring’: The challenge is how"
"The term ‘Web3’ refers to the practices of participating in digital infrastructures through the ability to read, write and coordinate digital assets. Web3 is hailed as an alternative to the failings of big tech, offering a participatory mode of digital self-organizing and shared ownership of digital infrastructure through software-encoded governance rules and participatory practices. Yet, very few analytical frameworks have been presented in academic literature by which to approach Web3. This piece draws on the theoretical lens of infrastructure studies to offer an analytical framework to approach the emergent field of Web3 as an exploration in ‘how to infrastructure’ through prefigurative self-infrastructuring. Drawing on qualitative examples from digital ethnographic methods, I demonstrate how the origins of Web3 reveal the intentions of its creators as a political tool of prefiguration, yet its practices reveal the inherent tension of expressing these ideals in coherent technical and institutional infrastructure. Thus, I argue that one of the fundamental challenges Web3 is negotiating through technical and governance experiments is ‘how to self-infrastructure?’." by Kelsie Nabben
➡️ #Web3 promises a participatory mode of digital self-organizing and shared ownership of infrastructure. But how to 'self-infrastructure'?👉In this new commentary @kelsiemvn explores the challenges drawing on #infrastructurestudies and #digitalethnography https://t.co/vWWafbfH0I pic.twitter.com/3AaDCuY6F8
— Big Data & Society (@BigDataSoc) February 27, 2023
"Web3 is an ambitious desire for broad-scale, self-made societal improvement where local actions lead to global change. Yet, the subliminal but underlying tension behind Web3 enthusiasm is how to reconcile broad social and political aspirations to self-infrastructure with the practicalities of infrastructuring everyday institutional technologies that facilitate people's lives in a more decentralized manner. The risk of prefiguration is that rather than offering an escape from digital surveillance, technological infrastructures will just offer another competing institutional system with its own power asymmetries. Thus, the question begging Web3 is not just ‘what is good governance?’ but ‘what is good infrastructure, and how do we build and govern it through the everyday activities of self-infrastructuring?’. It is how this infrastructural tension plays out in practice that requires further empirical inquiry."
Nabben, K. (2023). Web3 as ‘self-infrastructuring’: The challenge is how. Big Data & Society, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231159002
