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CRYPTOPILLED

### Shifting the Web Back Towards Open-Handedness

[Less Likes, More Connections](ethereum://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7/3985)

*this essay is available both in video (above) and text (below) formats // video available via auction on Zora*

One of the most important objects of my life rolled in on squeaky wheels when my teacher brought a brand new computer into the elementary school classroom. Now, the school already had a few computers at the time, but those were green-and-grey text machines, rudimentary and clunky, unfriendly to children and teachers alike. These new computers were of an entirely different class, featuring user-interfaces (ooh!), software applications (ahh!), and most importantly, graphics (wow!!). 

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/c7cfd833-58b5-4a72-af87-bb75db3dd14c.jpeg?height=844&width=1500)

My teacher instantly recognized the learning potential stored within this humming totem as she proudly positioned it at the front of the class. Because our school only had one computer we all took turns using it, and over the years my teachers would plunk me down in front of the machine with different applications opened each time. One day I played Math Blaster to test my addition and subtraction knowledge. Another day I set off on the Oregon Trail, caught dysentery, and died. 

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/e25511e0-9107-4400-bfa1-29cdab4816b2.jpeg?height=844&width=1500)

And another day — a truly special day — my teacher put me in front of an open browser window and gave me one simple command: ‘Make a website’. 

There were no further instructions that I can recall and I’ve desperately tried to remember exactly how I made a website at such a young age. GeoCities? Something else? I can’t remember, but by the end of the period I somehow managed to create my own homepage about black holes. 

The site featured a pitch black background and a spiral gif spinning ominously in the center. I walked over to the school’s library and checked out a book on outer space, returning to copy the most interesting facts and add them to the page. In these early, heady days, citations weren't required and information felt free to give and get. After I finished I asked my friend about the website she made during her turn on the computer. She created a site dedicated to her favorite animal, the cheetah, which she loved because of how fast they could run. I told her I would look it up next time I got a chance to use the internet. 

Looking back, both of our websites were pure in intent. I thought black holes were cool, and she thought cheetahs were cool. That was it! We recognized the web as a place to host our interests and potentially find others who felt the same way about them, and it excited me to have published something. Would someone else see it? Would someone desperately in need of information about outer space come across the facts I left behind? And what else would be possible as computers evolved?

Unfortunately, the answer wasn't entirely rewarding. 

As I progressed from elementary school to middle school to high school, the computers did indeed develop alongside me — now there were whole computer labs filled with rows of colorful iMac G3s and beige Windows PCs and entire classes dedicated to using them — but as the hardware became abundant, the field of learning seemed to somehow narrow. 

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/1386558d-adef-4103-b77e-3463576076fa.jpeg?height=844&width=1500)

I took a computer class with the hopes that it would teach me the things that I needed to build more websites like the one from elementary school, but instead I found myself in front of a preloaded copy of Microsoft Frontpage and given very specific instructions on how to compose a website about golf balls. 

I asked the teacher if I could deviate from the rather boring lesson plan. He told me that I could not. I finished the exercise in thirty minutes and have no other memories from the class at all.

While the internet of my elementary school days seemed full of creativity, over the years the space began to feel stymied; eventually culminating in the WYSIWYG and social network dominated world that we now live in. That freedom that I initially felt now seems a little foreign. Today there are plenty of safe and convenient ways to make websites about golf balls in 30 minutes, but fewer and fewer options to explore something completely new. 

The web has become watered down and impersonal, run by a handful of gigantic organizations that hold all the power and give just enough of it back to their users to satiate them. The internet of my childhood was the internet of blank pages — tabula rasa! — but the whole business model of today’s internet revolves around never showing the user a blank page at all, providing them with an endless stream of new information to fill every waking moment.

I've missed that foundational version of the internet and felt dissatisfied with what we have — until recently. 

web3 represents the blank slate I’ve been looking for; a space where people create purely to create and participate not to disassociate from their lives but to create deep and meaningful connections, build with others, and stake a claim on the future.

I felt extremely open-handed while making my website about black holes. I wasn't trying to monetize the words I added or recoup my hosting fees. I wasn't thinking about running ads or getting likes or gaining followers, concepts that wouldn't take root for years. Instead, I was thinking about black holes — and thinking about how other people might also be thinking about black holes. The early internet felt collaborative and selfless in a way that's been completely lost in a rigid web obsessed with building (and trapping) influencers, their attention, and their audiences.

web3 shifts the internet back towards open-handedness. Musicians create music for audiences moving from the role of spectators to partners, online communities treat members as stakeholders who receive tokens in return for their participation, platforms give their keys over to their users, and on and on and on. It's a fantastic time to be a creator because anything is possible and new projects of interest pop up each day. FOMO feels like less and less of a thing because it's inevitable that yet another crazy and life-altering event will happen tomorrow, and you're capable of being a part of each one. 

![](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/2ed94645-28d8-47df-9d1e-bad23f663b6f.jpeg?height=844&width=1500)

web3 presents a new frontier of infinite possibility and optimism that supersedes even the most pessimistic of viewpoints, and we're just getting started.

Less Likes, More Connections

Growing up in the 90s, our first family computer was a Compaq Presario. It was a chunky desktop PC with speakers that attached to the monitor like oversized ears and a translucent purple faceplate on the tower that popped open to store CDs. 

It was glorious.

![My beloved Compaq Presario](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/783a0557-c2dd-4cec-bfc0-aa85e73e4815.jpeg?height=1048&width=1920)

That computer changed my life — and so did a piece of software that came with it called Microsoft Encarta.

Encarta was an encyclopedia digitized, Wikipedia before Wikipedia, and opening it revealed countless entries about important world events and historical figures. These entries took the form of videos and multimedia presentations that gave the user access to the world's knowledge in a way that was more vibrant and alive than paragraphs of text on a paper page could ever be. The experience was magical from the first moment: When you put the disc in the CD drive, a start screen would pop up with a variety of images and faces all interconnected: An astronaut, the Mona Lisa, Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela. Then, choral music would begin to play and voices would speak in succession…

[Encarta intro](https://twitter.com/DrewCoffman/status/1387888935724937217?s=20)

As a child, I was so inspired by these words and these faces. They filled me with a sense of optimism that made me excited to use Encarta, but more than that, excited to use the *computer*! I innately felt that this technology was allowing me to engage with the world and its lessons in a meaningful way. That CD let an 11-year boy sitting on his parent’s computer encounter the great icons of history and be inspired by them in a way that *hadn’t been possible before*. Unlike a book or documentary where the narrative is linear in nature, Encarta let me learn by creating my own path.

Encarta was ‘just’ a rudimentary encyclopedia, but it held a version of the digital age that I’m still yearning for. It feels representative of a version of technology that was eternally hopeful, putting the world’s knowledge in our hands and challenging us to look to it as we make decisions for the future.

This feels, on the whole, much different from today's technology. 

Where Encarta had an unbridled sense of optimism, today’s social network dominated internet too often seems to bring out our darkest motivations, centering itself around a kind of pessimism that gives way to outright hostility — and beyond that, it *simply no longer feels possible to create your own path the way it once did*.

Our technology needs to evolve, but evolution is hard. 

To learn a little about why that is, we can look back at how we created pathways through the physical world. There are lessons to be learned by looking at the foundations of the land we live on.

Many of the cities that we live in have similar origin stories, and they sound something like this: One pioneer decided to move onto a piece of land and take a risk. Then, someone would move nearby and take a risk on another plot of land. Then another. Then another. 

![1870s-era homestead](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/b1d43215-5af4-4458-9932-139a8ff31a27.jpeg?height=541&width=1024)

Next, those people would have children. They would expand their homes to make room for their growing families. More people would move nearby, and as both the families and the community grew, so too would the town. Each person provided something — resources, utilities, a helping hand. Each person took risk after risk, bet after bet, and the towns expanded or evolved in response, eventually turning into the spaces many of us live in today.

That transformation from ‘one pioneer’s homestead’ to ‘sprawling urban cityscape’ happened slowly. It was *evolution by addition* as the area organically grew larger and larger to meet the needs of more and more citizens.

Yet, somewhere along the way a new method of developing the physical world came into existence, and it goes like this: A real estate developer takes a giant loan and buys a large amount of property. Homes are built, all at once, in a cookie-cutter fashion. The homes are then sold, one by one, and the neighborhood is complete.

![2010s-era subdivision](https://images.mirror-media.xyz/publication-images/4defc3f7-4def-46bb-b1cd-bccc6acabac6.jpeg?height=541&width=1024)

That’s it! There’s no *adding* on to the community in a meaningful way. No new land can be purchased and built upon. There’s no *evolving* the neighborhood. It’s ‘finished’ — which means that the only paths forward are stagnation, staying just as it is, or decline, falling into disrepair.

Our society has grown accustomed to not only our *physical* spaces existing in this finished state, but our *digital* spaces as well — and that’s a problem. 

Today’s internet has felt like a suburb for some time now; with the monoliths providing us with our platforms and networks buying up land and selling it to us in a cookie-cutter fashion — and just as the suburbs from the late 90s and early 2000s are now falling into stagnation or decline, so too is the suburb that is ‘Web 2.0’.

The good news is that there’s a new digital frontier opening up. The world of web3 is providing space for us to find new soil, to take a stake on a piece of land and make something new, and to once again *create our own paths forward*. 

Now is the time to reclaim the optimism from the early days of the web as we take risks to create a future we’re proud of.

And it's early days yet.

CRYPTOPILLED

How I went from knowing next to nothing about crypto to taking a full-time job in web3, all in under 6 months

Less Likes, More Connections

Shifting the Web Back Towards Open-Handedness

A New Frontier