Marc Andreessen: belief

Transcript context

…What prevents a lot of intermediaries from re-emerging in Web 3.0 and making it in some ways a lot like Web 2.0? Which could be okay, but actually recentralized. There are gatekeepers again. There are censorship issues again, and it’s not actually that different, but with marginal improvements? Why isn’t that the scenario? There will be some of that. Let me give you an example of how that did happen in the old world. Email was fully open in many ways. By the way, at least in theory, it’s still fully open emails. There’s an ATP protocol in email that lets — basically, you or I or anybody could write an email client, email server, and we exchange email with all the other email servers on the internet. Then, basically, a webmail emerged, and then you got Yahoo mail. Now you have Gmail. Gmail’s an example of what you’re talking about. Call it a semi-walled garden. It’s an environment that you can live in. It’s complete UI [user interface]. It’s got all these features. It does give you the ability to send email. You can still send and receive email with Gmail, with other email clients using SMTP. It’s still in there, but what users experienced — to your point — they experienced this new intermediary, and then Gmail has its own anti-spam algorithm. I’ll give an example. Gmail is not censoring content yet that I know of, but I think it’s basically any day now. They could start at any moment. The people living and working inside Gmail are going to start to have the same experience that they have in any intermediary or gatekeeper that starts censoring content. Actually, online retailers deal with this already. Online retailers are always fighting, basically, all of their email to their customers getting classified as spam. It’s the Gmail spam engine that does that. It’s not SMTP. In this case, a gatekeeping function emerges. The argument, basically, is email is no longer open. It’s now closed. It’s been moved from that first category of network to this second category of company, and we’ve lost the anarchic and freewheeling aspect of it. Look, there is some truth to that. Notwithstanding that, you can still build your own email system and in fact, Google built their own. At one point, everybody was on Yahoo mail. Now everybody’s on Gmail. I would describe it as a little bit the loyalty, voice, and exit Hirschman framework, which is, if you’re just in a walled garden, you have loyalty or voice, but you really don’t have exit. Again, people blame themselves. People blame this on policies, the companies, whatever, and that has something to do with it. But it’s also an architectural observation, which is, it’s the difference between something getting built just by a company versus something getting built by a network. If there is an underlying network, then there is exit. In a lot of cases, the Web3 things that we’re backing — they’re not even companies; they’re projects. They are Web3 projects out of the gate. We’re not even buying equity; we’re buying tokens. They’re decentralized from the very beginning, and they’re open protocols from the very beginning. So, it’s this alternate way of looking at the world, alternate way of designing systems. Then it opens up this exit option, and I think that, as usual with any human system, it turns out that matters a lot. What’s the main problem that needs to be solved by tech for hybrid meetings or hybrid workplaces to really succeed over the longer run?…

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