Web3 and how it will change our working lives
by Zak Manhire, co-founder / CRO at Fr0ntier
Web3 is still in its early and pioneering days. For those who are already familiar with what it is, and what it can be, there’s already a sense of excitement and wonder at its potential. But for those who aren’t yet familiar with it Web3 seems a strange and alien landscape, full of new “buzzwords and acronyms” and starry-eyed converts.
It will take time, education and clear explanation to help Web3 to become embedded, but the principal driver to support mass adoption will be for people to see and experience just how useful, if not invaluable it can be.
It will become integral to everyone’s lives, without them having to know about NFTs or blockchain, and it will be adopted on a mass basis when people and businesses can see just how useful it is. It will be transformative, and it will rely on the kind of proprietary technology we are developing at Fr0ntierX to make this future happen.
Web3 is both a continuation from the type of internet which you already work with, but it’s also a revolutionary step forward and outside. If you think of current Web2 as working in 2D, Web3 adds a third dimension, levels beyond levels. In Web 2 you work interactively within those two dimensions, whereas in Web3 you work across, above and beyond those dimensions.
And one of the most important features of Web3 is that it is multi-levelled, multi-dimensional, and has no single or monolithic form of control or ownership. The Web2 that most of us currently work within is controlled or mediated through governments or major corporations. Whereas Web3 aims towards greater decentralisation of creation, ownership and practice.
Web3 has the potential to bring about a transformative impact on all our daily lives and practice, although in the immediate future this impact will only be seen in certain tech-based fields, such as gaming, digital creativity, financial systems and processes, and communication.
It’s in these areas that we are already seeing the newer types and styles of work – more interactive, more collaborative, working across global barriers and time zones. Rather than the older ways of working in one place, for one company, doing one type of job, Web3 sees ways of working which are flexible, autonomous, more collaborative.
Future ways of working are likely to be very different from the present. In just the same way that our current forms of work and ways of working are radically different from how they were thirty years ago when we did not rely on technologies such as email, the Internet, or social media.
Web3 does mean, and bring with it, new ways of working – where we work, when we work, how we work, and how we think about work. Older ways of working were perhaps more static, working “office hours”, working “at the office”, working “for the company”, and working in one field for the whole of your working life. Web3 is likely to mean that we work in a far freer way, across time zones, working collaboratively, globally and 24 hours a day.
It will be different, and it will mean that we will think very differently about work/life balance. But the changes in working practices, attitudes to work, concepts of the working space, whilst they will be major overall, will evolve gradually, as they have already done in recent years, with people “working from home” and fully reliant on a decent Internet connection.
I am not saying that it will be better, but it will certainly be different.
The best thing about Web3 technology for me is the potential it offers for us to work, create and engage in new and transformative ways. We don’t yet know exactly how it will change the world, but it has the potential to liberate people, to enable them to interact and experience reality in new ways, and to support originality, creativity and communication.
It’s hard to convey, but I might use the analogy from the days of television and mass communication. In its earlier days, all TV was broadcast in black and white. Imagine then trying to explain what it’s going to be like watching TV in colour, and then watching programmes on-demand or from streaming platforms.
Viewers from that era of monochrome TV would think you were crazy if you tried to explain what TV is going to be like in the future. And so, it is now, as we anticipate a very different and innovative way of viewing and engaging and participating and enjoying.