Work In The Web3 Future We Deserve by Eskender Abebe

I originally got into crypto trying to in college uh trying to mine Bitcoin I don't still have the wallet but what really actually got me super engaged in the space was ethereum the idea of permissionless Unstoppable applications was incredibly compelling and it was like it this better closer oh got it thanks the idea of permissionless Unstoppable applications was super compelling for me it was like you could LimeWire any application and I was hooked today I'm a product manager at Village Dao for those of you that don't know villageow is a community success protocol enabling web3 projects to engage [Music] to engage incentivize and reward their communities for acting as trusted intermediaries with their customers we do this by enabling web 3 projects to elevate or attest their community members most highly trusted and engaged members onto our platform they then will create on-chain liquidity pools to fund their work periods which we call Seasons then every season we distribute the funds to your community members based on their participation and performance via Smart contract our goal is to build a platform and a protocol for open and transparent marketplaces between web3 projects and their contributors for this talk today I want to be clear that everything you'll hear is my opinion not that of my team or my employer it comes from my personal perspectives from building in the space and from talking with many other Dows daps nft projects and of course the super intelligent and thoughtful people I'm lucky enough to engage with this talk hopefully is for everybody regardless of your previous web 3 knowledge I hope you'll walk away a little more curious about how we got to web3 about why what web3 enables is essential understand the challenges we're facing and what I hope to see the ecosystem evolve toward so quickly going to break it down so we'll first talk about the path to web3 discuss like what is web3 dive into Dows then really quickly touch on the future of work like what that really means for those of us that are contributing to the web 3 space discuss the challenges and considerations we should have while we're building this technology and then finally a brief conclusion so to explain web 3 and why I think it's significant towards work I think we needed to take a step back and study the path that led us to this moment and I mean like way back like to the first Industrial Revolution you can silently raise your hand if you didn't know there were multiple industrial revolutions so the first one occurred between the mid 1700s and the first eight and the mid-1800s it was an air of incredible technological advancement and economic growth and the outcome of a few converging trends the adoption of new manufacturing processes allowed for the rapid scaling of factories leading to greater access to basic materials like steel and iron in commercial applications the factories then built new tools allowing for greater output from its individual contributors within the factory system these new factories tools and the increased production of its individual contributors compounded upon each other we started leveraging new energy sources like the steam engine and the internal combustion engine which then improved our transportation systems and drastically pushed down the price of consumer goods these converging technological Trends created new social structures and a new organization of work known as the factory system the factory system improved our ability to divide labor into smaller bits resulting in workers specializing in specific functions in order to improve the process of mass production but the converging Technologies and their resulting social structures didn't help everyone factories and plantations exploited child and slave labor only white males could vote and women and people of color were relegated to lower paying jobs or just literally banned from specific Industries this chasm in the structure of our social contract economically enforced inequality fueling what would later lead to labor movements and calls for reform leading to violence from from nation-states upon their own people but we should acknowledge that despite these incredibly preventable injustices the trend line for the human condition has been up only the economy changed factories provided paying jobs a massive Improvement compared to the Harvest dependent payrolls of their of other agrarian employers Urban centers swelled as people rushed to acquire factory jobs Factory management moved into and expanded the middle class this expanded middle class had greater optionality in the choice of education for their children cheaper Goods meant easier access to healthier diets better housing yeah in the revolutions that followed the second of which was one of Science and mass production think electrification and Automobiles and the third the digital Revolution thinks semiconductors personal Computing and the internet we continue to validate the lesson that capitalism's pursuit of production moves exponentially faster than our ability to protect workers we're now entering the fourth Industrial Revolution which the world economic Forum defines as a world in which virtual and physical Manufacturing Systems cooperate with each other in a flexible way at the global level this is what I believe web 3 is calling the metaverse and it's the fourth Industrial Revolution that I believe will will begin the third wave of the internet the legacy of the Industrial Revolution is the reminder that the power of technology to shape Society underscores the need for more thoughtful Innovation today we continue to see the impact of this period in history as we grapple with issues around automation globalization and the covet induced shift to remote work so as my terrible slide says web 3 is the technology and social layer providing the economic architecture that coordinates rewards and empowers the network participants to collaborate in a more decentralized secure and transparent manner this is really accurate but it's also like really shitty of a description if you're new to the space to help break it down I want to unpack the previous waves of the internet that led us to web3 so in web one it was all about information we had a read-only internet and while it wasn't an important source of information it couldn't really facilitate collaboration between virtual communities or store functionality for the users due to data constraints and infrastructure this later came in web 2. this was the interaction phase of the internet web 2 democracy democratized read and write capabilities but it came at a cost it became dominated by Massive online marketplaces intermediated by corporations but these markets were fake Venture Capital poured billions of dollars into propping up one or both sides of the market allowing corporations to fixate on growth not sustainable business practice or real market dynamics these Market monopolies have now effectively tapped out their growth strategies causing them to Pivot to become hyper efficient at maximizing their take rate take rate means to like collect fees from a Marketplace and we as users we feel this think of your relationship with web 2 marketplaces like Facebook Uber and Linkedin is it stronger today despite your long history as their customer or are they simply something you use because you must because the monopolistic value of their Network effects is the only measure is the only means by which you can do what you need to do so to pick on one LinkedIn for example it's a free social network for working professionals so how are they profitable it's a mix of a lot of things but the basic idea is they package your data and sell it so the lesson here uh yeah so they sell it to the marketplace on one side you on one side as the product use their platform and produce data for them and then on the other side of the market corporations are buying their date your data without paying you or getting your explicit consent the lesson here is that web 3 mod web 2 models Force corporations to seek higher take rates to replace growth but the higher the take rate of the marketplace the more misaligned the users within the system and that system's operators become so we finally arrived arrived at web3 also known as the semantic web which really exists to realign those misaligned incentives by replacing corporations with protocols protocols that are competing to be public goods these protocols will be the foundation of web3 taking the fees collected by corporations and instead Distributing them back to Market participants so where web2 is defined by our participation in platforms web 3 is about our ownership interacting in protocols ownership over your participation your identity and your data in web 3 ownership is enforced via Smart contracts self-executing contracts that automatically enforce the rules encoded within them smart contracts allow us to trust in our interactions they present the opportunity to rewrite the rules of the internet however when people say web 3 they're typically only referring to Smart contracts and tokens on a blockchain but in my opinion that's incomplete when we look back at the industrial revolutions that preceded us it wasn't a singular technology that really changed things it was the convergence of many Technologies at first mingling and then compounding off of each other I believe web3 will eventually be divine defined by the convergence of blockchain's artificial intelligence AR and VR even Quantum Computing the mingling has already begun AI can write really trash smart contracts nfts are being leveraged in AR and VR environments there's a field of science called Quantum cryptography which is purely focused on using quantum mechanical properties to perform cryptographic tasks it's really early days but the trend is apparent all right so now that we have the setup we can talk about work structures but so at the Forefront of this revolution in web 3 our Dows Dao stands for decentralized autonomous organization but don't take those words literally Dows don't have to be 100 decentralized or 100 autonomous these terms are really just describing a range of options within the structure when I think about Dows I find it really helpful to think of them as more of a design space a space where different kinds of businesses non-profits or hobby groups or anything you can imagine can be created to me what release that style is apart from non-dows is their use of smart contracts this allows for members to trust each other based on whatever interactions power dynamics and governance systems have been pre-encoded knowing the rules of the game before you start is the first step to a fair game predefining the rules of work in an enforceable manner is really incredible for example many of us have soft understandings of the rules and conditions between ourselves and our employers but they're not guaranteed employers can break this anytime and there aren't systems in place that help hold them accountable dials are critical to the future of work because they allow for experimentation in our work [Music] for human specialization reversing the changes brought about in the first Industrial Revolution the convergence of these technological Mega Trends which for us again is blockchain AI Quantum Computing things we might not even know about yet along with the emergence of dynamic work structures like we see today in Dows will present us with a new frontier of work we might discover that no humans can outsurgeon or out farm that technology stack displacing tons of knowledge workers so rather than specialization we'll need to focus more on generalized education better suited to our personal interests then by collaborating with this technology we'll be able to pick multiple fields of expertise this choice and the tools we'll have at our disposal will drastically increase the output of individual contributors again like in previous industrial revolutions workers will then be more empowered to move between fluid organizations organizations will then have to adjust to this new worker pool and design collaboration Frameworks tailored to them we'll begin to move past the working conditions and structures that we've inherited from previous generations things have changed incrementally over time but now we finally have the tools to enforce exponential change that's been collectively bargained and agreed upon there might even be a real metaverse one day that runs in parallel to base reality Earth all the rules will be completely different all right but it's not all roses web 3 is currently in a hyper capitalistic fever dream with participants chasing small market cap tokens farming air drops and interacting with unverified smart contracts to Mint the next big nft project I do it to crypto Twitter is lit the subculture there is super entertaining but we need to remember that that's crypto not web 3. web3 needs to be focused on the converging Technologies and get back to the core missions of banking the unbanked taking the power of money out of the hands of nation states and democratizing access to the wealth created by our participation in the network effects of the platforms we use web3's working organizations are challenged by the fact that we have terrible onboarding it's a multivariate problem but we need it to be solved especially if we want to really start attracting Talent into Dao's wallet ux is currently too cumbersome to onboard billions of users ethereum and Bitcoin are public ledgers anyone can see everything you're doing that is not the end game the lack of formal structure and hierarchy in Dallas can be both a strength and a weakness it could democratize knowledge and power while at the same time making it difficult for new members to onboard contribute and get involved Dows introduce organizational complexity in new ways there are always trade-offs to be made between scale speed and structure and it can be challenging to balance these effectively um while with distributed decision making many web3 governance systems leverage token weighted voting which keeps the power of these web3 protocols in the hands of those with the most capital creators came into the space with the promise of being able to enforce royalties for their work and that's now under attack as marketplaces aren't respecting Creator who that don't respect Creator fees have rapidly grown more prominent in the space tldr we could really [ __ ] this up we could end up building new digital spaces that just enforce a different type of exploitation on its participants so what will work in the web 3 future that we deserve look like I honestly don't know I don't believe dowels will completely replace corporations instead I think they'll compete with corporations over a global talent pool I don't know if we'll have a real one true metaverse one digital plane that seamlessly integrates the sensations of Earth and allows for virtual and physical Goods to move back and forth [Music] well I don't even know if crypto will remember that we started this wanting to bank the unbanked and that we wanted to build Collective systems of money that sat outside the power of nation states the short answer again is that no one knows but I think that the history we've discussed can give us a general idea of the trend regardless of the final implementation converging Technologies create rapid areas of growth excuse me create errors of rapid growth this time will be no different but the power of these technologies will make the changes to our social structures even more drastic the future of work we deserve will be the one that we build thank you if you'd like to learn more about what we're building uh you can go to our website at villagedow.com join the email list and join our Discord and definitely give us a follow on Twitter thanks again for your time and attention if you have any questions feel free to chat with me on the side of the stage thank you foreign [Music]