WhatsApp, Web3, and Wordle: Evolving a Digital Society
summary
Argues that open protocols are eroding as services centralize, citing ICANN and RIPE refusing Ukraine’s request to cut Russia, the failure modes of BGP that cause a six-hour Facebook outage, and consumer shifts into gated apps and WhatsApp commerce. Quantifies Wordle’s reach as two million daily Wordle players and shows it cost about $36/day to serve in static files, then contrasts that with ideas for paid microtransactions for guaranteed email delivery and the roughly $1bn lost in NFT/web3 grifts.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Digital society evolution
- 13:01Internet access as right
- 23:15Internet monopolies threat
- 34:14Web as powerful platform
- 43:06Monetizing small web services
- 51:04Decline of open web standards
- 1:00:11Email as paid system
- 1:07:14Web3 and blockchain hype
- 1:13:38Fair digital commerce future
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