web4 – The Second End of History?

“Dare to Think!”
– Immanuel Kant

TL;DR: The internet’s evolution mirrors historical societal development. Transitioning from web2 to the social web and ultimately to web4 signifies a transformative shift akin to the end of the Middle Ages and the dawn of modernity, with the ultimate goal of achieving liberal democracy. In the style of the Dot Com Boom, the social web will witness the rise of influential digital forces, which will in this case be global collectives, shaping the digital and societal landscape. Web4, characterized by these decentralized collectives, offers the potential for positive change within the liberal democracy framework; with the possibility of reaching the actual end of history for homo sapiens and the entering of a new stage for humanity, in which a new form of human will emerge: the homo digitalis.

What will the web of tomorrow look like? So far, the big promises of crypto bros haven’t proofed themselves to be true: whatever web3 supposed to look like, it’s not nearly there. But something will come, right? Sure, and decentrality sure will be a part of it, but not in the way people expect it to be. So let me open the crack in the monolith of walled gardens and show you a glimpse of this new world that I discovered to a completely new chapter, yes, a new evolutionary step of the web: the social web, and after that: web4 and why it could mean a re-run of the seemingly already decided debate of the end of history.

If you believe the silicon-valley-bros, development in the digital can only looked at through one lens: that of technological and economic growth:

If you focus only on that, you naturally end up with something like the Metaverse or Token-Utopias.

… but as it turns out not so surprisingly, none of these dreams seems very enjoyable, liveable or even sympathetic to most people, we intuitively recoil at the thought of them, they seem cold and human-unfriendly and that’s because there is no potential for societal capital in them. But in the Fediverse, there is plenty of that. For community and for stories. Actually, it’s a hub for both of those things. If the bitcoin movement was driven by the promise of money, the Fediverse will be driven by stories and the promise of community.

It seems like these days, people are unable to look in the future, even make a guess at it and therefore, are afraid of it. Because if there is no future, all you are left with is the boring, horrible, eternal now – a future without perspective. That’s because in most of our current cultural tech-dreams: AI, crypto and the Metaverse, there is no potential for societal growth in it, and as individuals in a society, we see the future through this potential – through stories. But because big tech has almost completely eroded what was left of societal structures, people are more and more unable to do that. Even though of course, it is not that hard to imagine the future if you think of it in terms of societal growth: if you think of it as being part of some kind of bigger societal structure like the catholic church in its old days but digital and more diverse and much more of them. Then of course the look in the future becomes much more outlined and with more joy, it stabilizes, because you can get a grasp of it.

It’s not a new iteration, it’s a new evolutionary step of the web. But humanity will probably go through new iterations in this web stage, until they reach the next one and eventually, overcome being human.

That’s why in the following, we will take a stab at looking at development in the digital from a different perspective, that of societal growth:

1. A new Perspective – Comparison of different Outlooks on the Web and trying out an alternative that doesn’t feel dystopian

“‘Solutionism’ for me is, above all, an unthinking pursuit of perfection – by means of technology – without coming to grips with the fact that imperfection is an essential feature of liberal democracy.”

– Evgeny Morozov

But why is that? Why isn’t this usually done? Why does it seem almost like a contradiction? For that, first of all, let us look at some of the prospects of the web that are currently debated.

First of all, you have of course the web3 of the crypto-bros and of course that of walled-gardens-companies like Meta:

Both of these prospects are dead ends and lead to nightmarish dystopias. They don’t only seem unpleasant; they will be unpleasant. People are right in their instinct there.

Why are these two so bad?

First of all, they look very different; and for the first one: no one can really explain to you what it will look like, because as a societal blueprint, it just doesn’t make any sense and will just result in chaos and authoritarianism. No one ever would try to run a kindergarten or school based on blockchain, it just doesn’t make any sense. That’s an advantage by the second one: it’s the logical conclusion from the current web. Not that that would be exactly so great and it wouldn’t be an actual progress as we will see later.

What they do have in common is that the digital world becomes more and more independent and separate from the “real” world. This, of course, is not true, because the two are inseparably linked. Instead, it’s a certain world view that views society as a certain thing that certain parts of society are responsible for and the digital world, for which other people are responsible for (of course usually Silicon Valley people). In this sense, progress in the digital world is only thought of as technically and economically, because everything else would threaten the dominance of tech people in the digital world and is therefore out ruled by default.  However, if we follow this line of thought, we end up in a dystopian world, in which the digital world is completely separate from our analogue world and tech people that build this world try to keep it completely separate. In other words: our current web, which doesn’t mean that it couldn’t get worse, for example in form of the Metaverse. People and society should feel responsible for the digital world, which doesn’t mean keeping out companies entirely; but also, not leaving it to them entirely.

But of course, the two things aren’t separate, in fact, the digital can be thought of much more as an extension of the societal beyond our analogue world; and in that sense, we shouldn’t let the creation of that space go solely to the a-social nerds of the Silicon Valley. They have a small sense of society and societal institutions in general and like to think of the web in categorizes of absolutist rule.

Then there are also left-liberal prospects like web0, which basically tries to go a step back in the evolutionary ladder again and basically “take another go” at it.

But surprise: big platforms were bound to happen and if you just turn back the clock, you will either be stuck with the old web, or they will happen again. So, this doesn’t work either: it’s naïve and has nothing to do how society currently works, and also kind of romantized the web as it was in the early days. It’s the same as idealizing nomadic tribes and wanting to turn the clock back there to avoid the development of private property. It’s socialist, nostalgic daydreaming.

Is this really all we got? Is there nothing better that we could come up with?

Sure, there is! And it comes out of the cradle of good old liberalism. So then, there is another idea, which focuses on the social aspect of the web and does not exclude unlimited growth, which kind of makes sense, because after all, the idea behind the web and the internet more over, was always to connect people and groups of people to one another even over great distances to an always increasing degree. Naturally, this would result in always bigger groups of people being able to emerge in society and therefore also new institutions, etc. Here, you can also think of several stages that can be achieved and maybe this is really the most promising way the web could go in the next years: it will open itself up again and branch out again like a tree.

The question is what will come after that.

During the 2000s, a similar thing happened with the dot com boom. After that, a few platforms emerged. Will now happen the same thing, too? Probably, but instead of even bigger platforms, this time, new social structures will emerge from it: dezentralized, global collectives, which will hold the potential for huge amounts of societal capital and the potential for a liberal, democratic system in the web.

So, to summarize, these are the options we have:

Of course, continuing like currently could get us in the position to get a stab at the social web again, but that’s not necessarily the case. So we should take the chance while we have it.

Will we take the right path? I don’t know. But if we do, stuff could get interesting again.

But why interesting? What could be so interesting about societal growth? Often people say to me they don’t know what this development should look like. Well, its already developing. Just look at the development-eras of Humanities’ Lifestyles, resulting in always larger societal structures and systems (national, continental, global, inter-planetary, etc.):

2. The Digital Enlightenment, or: The Second long Journey of Humanity towards the End of History

“In neoliberal thought the market is an allocation device … it’s an infrastructure of seeking and allowing for greater of social interaction and it’s a device which allows people to withdraw and form their own communities with all sorts of constraints and restraints …”

– Evgeny Morozov on Discovery Beyond Competition | Future Histories S02E44

“The organizing religious myth at the core of neoliberalism is that you only have two options: the market and the state and there is nothing in between and if you don’t do the market you’ll eventually end up in Gulag. And that’s just not the story … it’s partially correct … yes, you can run society as a black box. And by running it as a black box, you can essentially coordinate effectively with all sorts of … externalities and uh … do we really need them? And if we don’t need them the question becomes what other alternatives and possibilities and infrastructures of social coordination, discovery and becoming do we need?”

– Evgeny Morozov on Discovery Beyond Competition | Future Histories S02E44

“It seems obvious to me that the basic story accepted by the neoliberals but also many on the left is that the choice is the choice between more market or more state. Its incorrect. There are plenty ways we coordinate … if you look at a basic school, there is a lot of complexity because there are a lot of pupils and teachers and rooms, and this complexity is solved with a very simple device called the timetable, which, as far as I’m concerned, is neither an example of the market nor of the state.”

– Evgeny Morozov on Discovery Beyond Competition | Future Histories S02E44

“Positive liberty is the possession of the power and resources to act in the context of the structural limitations of the broader society which impacts a person’s ability to act, as opposed to negative liberty, which is freedom from external restraint on one’s actions.”

– Wikipedia, based on Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty”

You can decide yourself which of these outlooks you find the most likely, but at least the social web would be something that one feels an immediate sense of familiarity. And usually, new things don’t come as something completely new, but as something familiar. Because it can already observed that something like this is already happening: people flock to one another over continents, they start movements, etc. People want to connect and it’s only a matter of time until bigger societal structures as well as new (or old but updated) institutions emerge from that.

In combination with the societal observations of the last section, we can make a fundamental observation here: the development of the web resembles that of the development of human society – and we are currently on the brink of leaving the middle ages.

So, to summarize, the development will look something like this and one can here make the hypothesis that this process, the process of social life on the web, follows a similar process than that of societies in the real world: toward liberal democracy, which some described as the end of history.

The Dawn of the Age of Renaissance as a comparison makes sense: you have AI and bitcoin alchemists promises whatnot as well as societal upheavals. Also, people were questioning absolutist rule of the time (just as the absolute rule of the spaces in the digital world). This time was also characterized by many revolutions and radical societal changes and upheavals. Through all of this the first light of the enlightenment and universalism is shining like a light in the darkness. How many more wars do we need to realize that we need to unite?

The time makes also sense through a second lense: the catholic church provided stability over centuries, now, new forms of living styles are emerging and eventually, they will result in different, dezentralized collectives, which need to come to terms over their shared values, which could result in something like a uni-polar state on the web on which everybody of which states its supports can have a dual-citizenship for. In this sense, too, web4 could mark the end of history, from which humanity itself will need to evolve itself from.

Each of these stages comes with its own characteristica and dynamics. For web2, we had enshittification and erosion of societal structures, for web3 we will have instance protectionism, defederation threats and shared federation policies, as well as stabilization of societal structures and for web4, the same things on the collective level (protectionism, diplomatic mediation, shared trait deals, further development of collectives). And each of these characteristica eventually leads to the end of the stage and the beginning of the next, or a fallback, that’s why they also can be exploited in different ways to influence the outcome of this process. In the case of our current web2, this happened with the buying of Twitter by Musk. Maybe without that, we wouldn’t have had now the potential of another evolutionary step forward for the web, just as the absolutistic rule of Ludwig the 14^th was an important contra-figure for liberalism. On the other hand, if Meta decides to pull the plug on it’s entering in the Fediverse, the whole process might be stopped before it even started. Nothing is given here.

But if it happens, it will be much better than web2 currently. It will not solve all our problems, but it will get us into a better position to fight these problems. If we continue to believe in liberal democracy and make use of these potentials.

3. Will this time be the actual end of History? (and what may come after that)

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

– Francis Fukuyama

The term “end of history” refers to a concept popularized by political philosopher Francis Fukuyama in the late 20th century. In his 1989 essay and subsequent book, Fukuyama argued that the collapse of communism and the triumph of liberal democracy marked the endpoint of ideological evolution, suggesting that liberal democracy represented the ultimate and final form of human government. He contended that with the end of the Cold War, there would be no significant ideological challengers to liberal democracy, making it the ultimate destination in the evolution of political systems. However, this idea has been debated and critiqued by various scholars over the years.

In this sense, web4 will not mark the end of history, but it will enable humanity to reach it. Now, in the analogue world, the end of history proved to be a wrong prediction – but could it maybe hold its promises in the digital world? Will it be the true end of history for the homo sapiens? Maybe. And what will come after that?

After this second journey, the end of history may need to be newly evaluated – maybe, it really could be reached through this. But what exactly do we end up with after this? If analogue and digital world are aligned under liberal democracy? Actually, I don‘t know, but at least in the last decades, it provided a long time of stability and peace. I think, we will end up with a new human: the homo digital (who has digital agency) and we must try to get up to that stage as many people as possible (in the sense of post humanism). And let‘s see what we will develop from that on.

In the social web, we will all become digital nomads and in web4, will become true digital citizens, or: homo digitalis (human will full digital agency); or we will at least be able to.

So the question is: this Homo Digitalis- will the Digital End of History mark the actual End of History for Homo Sapiens as well? Maybe liberal democracy was the best thing for humans to come up with – but homo digitalis will come up with something better, let‘s see. But for now, while we are not homo digitalis, liberal democracy on the web seems like a decent goal.

The highest skill of humans, in which regard we are also better than AI is that we have so great social skills that we can form complex social structures. This will be the basis for the next development step of humans.

We thrive for the Digital Renaissance Human, who acquires a wide range of skills like the renaissance human.

And with that, we enter the age of the digital renaissance and the eventual emerge of the collectives. These dezentralized communities will be like their own cities or civilizations on the web, with AI and mixed reality playing some role, sure some collectives will also try out to apply big planning systems in the socialist tradition based on big data and maybe even crypto; and humanity will develop on from that. The point is: it gives humans and human society the space it needs.

And let’s face it: the big if misguided dreams behind the web3 and the Metaverse that basically promise all of that, will never fulfil that dream to even a basic degree. They are in their understanding of what societies look like and have always looked like, incredible stupid. There will no giant crypto-DAOs and nothing of this will lead to a democratization. What will actual lead to a democratization would be the thing that, not so surprisingly, also managed to do that in the real world for decades: liberal democracy with its roots in the age of enlightenment. Maybe crypto will play a part in that, I don’t want to out rule that, but certainly it will not be the single driving force. Don’t believe the people that promise to turn stone into gold. Believe in human’s gift to build societal structures and one of its best practices that has been applied successfully countless times before: liberal democracy.

Now, all of that doesn’t mean that we will actually reach the next evolutionary step. I could be that after the social web, we move back to web2 again and enshittification starts again. Then, it really will have been only an iteration and an evolutionary step forward. It could also be that we never take this step forward toward the social web and just stay in web2. Meta decides to recoil and the whole show continues.

Why isn’t that the usual pitch of your favourite silicon-valley-bro? Well, because like an increasing number of people, they don’t have a very high opinion on liberal democracy or actual liberal values that are about positive liberties instead of negative liberties. Also, because often they have a very limited or even stupid knowledge of societal processes and that they don’t know that they thank their innovative power to the liberal democracy. Of course, it’s also about giving up power here. They don’t like societal structures and want social forces kept little, just as they want sociological agency only to the degree where it happens in their own defined spaces.

So maybe, we should think building a new Silicon Valley that values liberal democracy. The Fediverse could be a good place to start.

Basically, it could have been expected: that people will at one point start to build their cities and bigger societal structures on the web. The silicon valley bros just don’t want to believe that we are capable to do that, or that we even want that.

In this sense, the collapse of the uni-polar world order led by the US is not a contradiction of the theory and the end of liberal democracy as the best of all systems, but only a symptom of the same battle but in the digital; and hopefully, at the end of this process, liberal democracy will come out successfully out of it again and, with analogue and digital world aligned, lead to a new age of prosperity for the western model.

The current upheavals in the west are therefore only the pains of birth to an updated version of the same thing and what the Trump-US, some conservatives (and also in parts, if not quite in its intensity, the liberal left) tried to do in the last years politically is the desperate attempt to prevent this update (which will probably result in disaster if tried too hard on both sides). However, let’s hope we manage to do the update successfully after all. That of liberal democracy 2.0. And maybe, it will be the final one for the homo sapiens. At this point, the US could still acquire a comfortable position in it and save it from failing. But the window is already beginning to close and who else should take up the mantel? But for this also traditional liberalism needs to think bold again and apply the same standards that it holds for the analogue world also in the digital! And I think it will be able to do that, because in contrast to the big political movements (socialism, conservatism and liberalism), it’s the only one that has a build-in mechanism of renewal: it continuously re-invents itself; it questions former high-held truths of earlier thinkers, re-evaluates them and thinks them anew: if now, societal institutions that were taken in the last decades for granted, we need to think how to rebuild them and maybe re-evaluate them in their importance in relation to the economy attributed to them in liberalism newly. But liberalism itself holds all the tools necessary for this. It doesn’t demand for itself that it already holds the whole truth like socialists (and also libertarians), but it tries to thrive for it as best as possible. And, with its universalism, it also holds the current best solution to eternal conflicts that we see us in the face of again these days.

Sure, the west, led by the US did mistakes in the past. The answer of left-liberals is here that the west doesn’t work, and it should be replaced with something else; when asks what, they quickly run out of arguments just like libertarians. Traditional liberals would answer: yes, we need to improve, but our the system is the only one that got the potential to get better and renew itself from within without violence over long amounts of time, because it’s inadequacy is constantly assumed rather than ignored and therefore doesn’t need to be overcome with violence. Also, this makes it the most uncomfortable political stance, because there is never the security or even the prospect of “having made it” that all other political streams offer: instead, there is eternal learning and re-invention, which does induce a form of existential dread, but which has to endured as long as possible; for the single human and for humanity in general; because otherwise, only darkness awaits.

In any case, I hope that I could give you a glimpse into this giant universe that I find and that we will probably get sucked into in the next couple of years; and you understand what big potential it could hold for society – if you want to explore the topic further, you can read the other posts on my blog, or search for the Fediverse on the web. Have fun and all the best in the Fediverse!

Currently, people feel lost – the homo digitalis though, always feels a sense of belonging. We will look back on our former selves … and feel deeply sad for them.

By @buntspecht