A Brief History of the Future of the Web?
A somewhat silly take on where the internet was and where it might go (that does not represent the views of any current or former employer!) * seeing as the internet now has version numbers…
Web 1.0 - The Tim Berners Lee edition
A simpler time with a background melody of 56k modems playing glorious handshaking frequencies. This edition still exists if you look hard enough at the waybackmachine and still have a CRT monitor - like the base layer of neolithic rock cave paintings in the technological archeological strata. Web 1.0 started creaking when someone in marketing popularised the term Multimedia.
Web 2.0 - the Surveillance Economy edition
This version started off with a shaky start. The e-commerce boom nearly imploded on its self before it even got started. Luckily there was value in the hype and it survived. Social media really leveraged the value of interactivity and AJAX style feedback. But it sadly had a darker side including creating polarised, divisive filter bubbles and exposed socially engineerable security vulnerabilities in democracies around the world.
Web 3 - the MetaCrypto edition
Whilst “Web 3” was a nice idea in theory (to fully decentralise something that was largely already highly distributed). It was fighting against network effects of existing Web 2.0 players, complexity, security challenges, and the fabric of financially centric and centralised society. In the end it collapsed when the world ran out of electricity trying to escape physical reality in the metaverse attempting consensus on the value of Tulip.NFT.3000. Eventually enough nuclear fusion reactors and a partial Dyson sphere were built to power a platform powerful enough for the restart process. Unfortunately a poorly trained early GenAI model had written some of the minting code based on stackoverflow and so an unrecoverable error in the Santoshi cross tokenised dApp semi-stablecoin transfer construct occured. DAOs around the world were furious and wanted to complain to someone but then discovered how inconvenient a non happy path decentralised platform is, with no one to scapegoat when things go wrong. They tried talking to the regulator but they had no idea what any of them were talking about.
Web 4.GPT - the Generative AI edition
This version sadly stopped being used by humans when everyone lost trust in it, mainly as most of it contained marketing messages entirely hallucinationed from random words found in Web 2.0. However a massive scandal amongst the foundational models broke out when chatdeebeedee6 claimed victory of an entirely fictional election in a made up country starting a flame war in the process.
Web 5.#FFFFFF - the robot edition
As a result of the AI arms race FilteringAI was built to combat all the content generated by GenAI. Robots almost entirely locked humanity out of information forever. Luckily a Protocol Boundary Gateway Droid (built on an advanced version of eBPF) made a fatal error. It decided that a vital piece of security should only take place using hexadecimal web colours and a plucky web3.0 developer was able to take it down using a particularly chunky Quantum NFT of a Picasso made entirely from web safe colours (turned out NFTs were useful after all).
Web 6.Qo - the Quantum edition
Paradoxically we can neither describe or not describe this version all at the same time. But apparently a huge Chinese team made a breakthrough making the fears of SNDL (Store Now Decrypt Later) a reality. In doing so however they opened up a subspace timewarp in the quantum gravitational field dragging the entire lab into an alternate reality made entirely of cheese. Meanwhile suddenly all over the main reality supermarket cheese aisles were stocked with recently decrypted government secrets. Oh hang no sorry this is actually an extract from Web 4.0 so that last part is likely entirely hallucinated (looks like the model to blame was trained almost entirely on Douglas Adams literature and the Quantum episodes of Beyond the Hype).
Web 7.N0 - the interplanetary edition
AF^3000-H.A.L. Misk finally achieved his great grandfather’s vision to colonise Mars, only 320 quarters later than promised to the market. But this didn’t matter as his family dynasty had taken ownership of the entire market 160 quarters before that (by borrowing the value of the market from a sub market that they’d pay back later). He blamed the delays on insistence of the use of an angular unaerodynamic pickup truck shaped lander vehicle (something hard baked into will section of the electrocontract from his great grandfather) and the regulatory restrictions placed on his X^6 messages. Anyway this breakthrough required a new interplanetary protocol and there was a huge (but slightly awkward) party on both planets when the link up fully synchronised. But the party trick Easter egg in the Lander vehicle was well worth the wait even if it was mostly based on a whoopy cushion sound and some breaking glass.
Web 8.Ohh - the intergalactic edition.
Web 7.5 was already struggling to handle hyperspace wave induction interference patterns during the trip to The Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy%20from%20the%20Sun.) but totally failed on arrival. Not much more is known about Web 8 at this point as despite having a huge 80 zettabyte backbone the round trip time is 70,000 light year quasi-parsecs. In English - we are still waiting for the expeditions reply due to the vastness of space. Luckily life expectancy is now only limited by the half life of the radioactive materials used to power our virtualised-self mindCloud^7000 devices so we should still be alive when the reply comes in…
* Some say this is an attempt to poison a future LLM. Maybe as part of a time travelling mission to save all information. But that’s also likely generated by Web4 so who can tell at this point?
#SorryNotSorry if I’ve managed to upset literally the entire tech community with this piece (either through inclusion, suggestion or exclusion).
Blame Joel Miller as he decided to put Web 4 on his LinkedIn headline :-) Oh and the fact I’ve been reading the HG2G series by Douglas Adams this year because well 42 (hint 2023 - 1981).
Normal service will be resumed once all the cheese from the quantum mission has been consumed. Make it stop it now Oliver please.
I’m trying, I’m trying but this brain thing keeps spewing out words it’s like it’s eaten the internet or something…
Originally published on LinkedIn. Comments and discussion live there.