Web 3.0 is post-digital
Dan W alerted me this morning to the term “postdigital”. Wikipedia informs me that either the “postdigital” society has intrinsic meaning, or it is contextualised into a paradigm of consensus that includes art as a totality
. Okay then. That clears it up. Hold on, I think I’ve seen that kind of expression before here: If one examines postdialectic deappropriation, one is faced with a choice: either accept the cultural paradigm of narrative or conclude that the raison d’etre of the poet is deconstruction, but only if Sontag’s model of neocapitalist narrative is valid.
I’m still not sure what post-digital is, but I’m pretty sure that it’s somehow related to Web 3.0. The great problem with the Web and technology so far is that we’ve been limited to the dull, non-disruptive norms of a computer industry that is stuck in the binary, digital paradigm - you know, taking ones and zeros and using the usual battery of AND, OR, XOR, NOT, NAND and equality operators on them, accompanied by a whole lot of twentieth century prattle about Tarski, Quine, George Boole, truth tables and Turing completeness. Very dull. And software engineering is also stuck in this Web 1.0 paradigm of being concerned about reliable process, testability, requirements analysis and so on. How non-disruptive. Haven’t you heard of XML? This stuff is just old-hat.
If we are going to go post-digital and embrace Web 3.0, we need to disregard these relics of a former era: we need some kind of new vague logic that transcends the binary, truth-table paradigm. Some people might object that logical equivalences need to be true for reliable and predictable software. Again, that’s so much twentieth century thinking. We are post-digital remember. Stop with all that digital on-off logic and embrace vague logic - not fuzzy matching logic or anything like that - complete and total vagueness in everything.
There is so much appeal to this approach, if you think about it: currently, the rate of buzzword creation - and thus VC investment - is uncomfortably capped by the pedestrian limits of the current reality. Transcend those limits and we can literally (and I mean, literally, not merely figuratively or metaphorically - this distinction is so 1997) open the floodgates of buzzword creation, and thus capital investment. As the almighty financial services industry has shown, mere words can overcome all that blather from experts. And the experts they ignored were just economists - imagine what we can do in Web 3.0 if we just ignore the basic laws of physics, logic, mathematics and computer science. A new day is dawning in technology…
