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Picture an internet
that puts you at the center, learning and adaptive, representing the
multifaceted nature of your life, interests and activities. One where you hold
the power and the right to use your data as you wish. Wouldn’t that be amazing?
Web3 holds that promise.
article here
In a post on
Medium, Tom Vandendooren asks us to visualize the Internet of You. It
isn’t hard to do.
“Imagine a world
where you don’t have to adapt to the environment and its settings, but instead,
the environment adapts to you. Whether that world is real or virtual,
interaction will be on your terms and technology will be at your service.
That’s the true promise of the Internet of You (IoU) — to have everything we’re
surrounded by or interact with, adapt to us, learn from us, blend into our
lives seamlessly, and remove all friction between us and our immediate
environment.”
The Belgian web
architect goes on to explain that the IoU is a “superset” of the Internet of
Things (IoT) and the Internet of Everything (IoE), where smart tech and objects
will be connected into an intelligent network providing “hyper-personalized”
services and assistance.
The IoU will be a
smart network powered by AI and autonomous systems that will reconfigure the
world around you, “whether IRL or URL,” (in real life or online) “to match your
identity, preferences and affinities.”
Digitization of
Everything
It’s right to
assume, as Vandendooren does, that consumers increasingly expect smart services
to adapt to their personal preferences, and for experiences to be tuned to
their real-time or predicted needs. And while personal data is required to feed
these intelligent and adaptive systems, people are no longer willing to trade
off privacy without keeping control over data access and sharing permissions,
and without seeing a return of tangible value.
Hence, the need for
an evolution of the internet — one that enables not disempowers the individual.
This is Web3 — “an internet that is not value extracting, but rewarding,
fueling a positive-sum game where you get to participate and partake in the
economic value created.”
In contrast to
today’s current Web2, the next version is planned to be decentralized. Its lack
of centralization means that control shifts back to the individual, including
the data and privacy that goes along with it.
“Thanks to a native
ownership and authentication layer, Web3 will enable and accelerate the
digitization of everything,” says Vandendooren. “Smart contracts and tokens act
as a digital representation of ownership, enabling verifiable ownership within
and across networks. Not only can you prove that your identity, assets, and
objects are yours, you can take your identity, reputation and assets from one
location to another, wherever they are supported.”
Ownership and
Identity
Essentially, rather
than centralized and walled garden data structures, the distributed blockchain
puts the onus of true ownership on the users. Users, via tokens and wallets,
will manage their identities, data and assets, and ultimately decide which services
and applications get access.
“As a result, Web3
allows us to expose ourselves to platforms and smart services without fear of
scrutiny or intrusion of privacy,” argues Vandendooren. “By aggregating our
online data and sharing the parts we find relevant to receive better
recommendations and find better opportunities, Web3 enables us to carry our
identity — in the form of an address with on-chain data — across apps,
platforms and communities, while having control to share those parts of
ourselves that we choose.”
When combined with
smart contracts, and connected to smart devices and services, “a person’s
digital twin will reflect and update relevant status and context in real-time,
triggering … experiences and outcomes which are optimized to a person’s in-the-moment
needs and desires.”
He is not the only
one eulogizing such a theory. In a blog post titled “People are the New
Platforms,” Web3 investor David Phelps says, “Web3 can let us
transcend the limited language of existing platforms by creating more advanced
living, breathing identities on-chain. … The point ultimately is that it will
showcase who we are not simply as checkboxes of consumer taste, but active creators,
contributors, and collaborators — as humans.”
Web3 is being billed as a resetting of the internet — one that is “By the people, for the people.” It offers us a future where we are in charge of our own identity, data and reputations, not beholden to the whims of big data hoarding companies.
“Web3 promises to
shift value, control and bargaining power back to us, the users,” advocates
Vandendooren, to transfer identity of our “sovereign self” onto the blockchain
and in doing so, Web3 will move us a little closer to the promise of the
Internet of You.
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