IT NUMEROLOGY

Dick Pountain /Idealog 331/ 06 Feb 2022 03:44


It’s become a centrepiece of IT-biz wisdom that one should always, if possible, wait for version 2.0 of any new technology. Some of us who write about IT of course cannot wait and must suffer at the bleeding-edge, and once you get beyond version 2 though all bets are off (as an ex-Windows user I refuse to participate in 10 versus 11 chatter). However in recent weeks two other small integers have been brought to my attention, namely Web3 and 6G communications, and these seem to portend a forking of the IT evolutionary tree into two very different directions Web3 came properly to my attention thanks to three articles in the February issue of The Atlantic magazine, about the growing backlash against cryptocurrencies and the financialisation of digital content via NFTs. I’m slightly embarrassed that I haven’t covered crypto in this column before, but it’s no accident: ever since Bitcoin was first launched it has struck me as a dangerous, possibly fraudulent social experiment, based on ultimately unsupportable technology, but I’ve shied away from the torrent of abuse that this opinion is likely to provoke. I’m not an anarchist, but I do agree basically with the late economic anthropologist David Graeber about the origins and function of money. It’s fundamentally a way of fixing and storing the intangible emotion of trust, and the idea that blockchain technology somehow makes money ‘more democratic’ is nonsense. All it does is make it more unstable, the last thing we need in our post-viral anxiety state.

The ‘3’ in the name Web3 – coined by Gavin Wood, co-founder of the Bitcoin competitor Ethereum in 2014 – implies that Web2, dominated by Google, Facebook, Amazon will soon be over, replaced by people transacting directly with each other using blockchains. Let’s briefly recap the full genealogy. Web1, the original Berners-Lee/Andreessen invention, was a noncommercial, distributed publishing system that let scientists and nerdy hobbyists communicate with one another for free, and it spawned many services we now take for granted like webmail, blogs, memes and videos. By the mid-1990s businesses discovered its power and moved themselves online, while service providers like Google, Amazon and Facebook realised they could stay free to end-users by selling said users’ data to advertisers. That was Web2, which reaped fortunes the like of which the world never saw before.

Web3 and NFTs represent the next step, total financialisation of digital assets. Any old data, like monkeys-in-daft-hats, become speculative instruments. This potentially affects everything because nowadays computers are in everything so almost anything can become a digital asset, even your doorbell videos. Those Atlantic articles describe the furious backlash building in the USA, that calls Web3 and crypto scams, Ponzi schemes, parasitism and compares it to the 2007 sub-prime mortgage disaster.

It seems unlikely the monster corporations will be replaced soon, especially Google which funds much deep, world-leading research. Which leads me neatly on to number ‘6’. The same week I received an email from the University of Oulu in Finland with links to seven videos that demonstrate their cutting-edge research in 6G communications. I clicked, I saw, I boggled (see for yourself at

https://www.oulu.fi/6gflagship/6g_demo_series).

These 6G innovations depend on very short wave, terahertz, radio signals, and on ways the Oulu teams have found to focus and steer them. The 6G radio demo shows how such signals can communicate and remote sense – detecting the shape and surface textures of nearby objects – simultaneously from the same device like a smartphone. The 6G optics demo shows communication via THz modulation of the lighting in a room, thwarting any radio-frequency snoopers outside the room. The 6G edge computing demo shows a scanner generating detailed 3D representations of objects, including you, almost instantly, using an array of Raspberry Pi’s as ‘edge processors’. Most fun of the videos is the 6G vertical demo about lighter-than-air drones that can patrol a building in sci-fi fashion to check for defects or take drinks orders. My conclusion after watching all of them was that Zuckberg backed the wrong horse with Meta: virtual reality is actually rather naff Web1.

The world’s politicians are as always several decades behind the implications of all these innovations, but very soon some crunch-time decisions will need to be made about the deployment and regulation of them. Most state banks are looking at introducing digital currencies (not blockchained crypto) which could offer huge simplifications of their tax, spend and welfare systems. But they could also be abused, as they already are being in India and China, to penalise and control political dissent. We badly need to start serious public debates about where all this stuff is taking us, whether the 6G/Web3 future will be a eu- or a dys- topia.