The optimism of Web 2.0 rested in large part on its pure excitement about the web as a fundamentally open-ended technology. In Free Culture, permissive intellectual property and remixing would unleash a wave of as-yet unimagined discourse and expression.

While the Web3 space may be perceived as a financialized playground for scammers, there is a small but growing subculture of leftist labor activism emerging.

Leading “solo capitalists” manage more money than many funds. Oren Zeev manages more than $1 billion without additional investment support. Elad Gil, Josh Buckley, Harry Stebbings and Lachy Groom manage funds in the hundreds of millions with similarly lean structures.

DAO bounties: For workers, it’s a way to get a taste of working in crypto, to help their favorite project move forward, or to earn tokens that will give them ownership in the new Web3 economy. For crypto start-ups and DAOS, it’s an affordable way to source cheap labor for development or marketing without having to hire full-time employees with bene... See more

The second structural problem with the VC industry is that most venture firms are selling a product that is fundamentally an undifferentiated commodity — capital.

Second, emerging fund managers tend to be made up of a smaller group of GPs or solo capitalists with strong industry insights and personal brand in a specific industry or trend, often when this is still nascent and overlooked by the established players.

GP partnerships are highly time and attention constrained, making them the opposite of scalable. Most processes are run manually, and there is rarely much use of software or automation to help source, assess, or execute deals.

Near the end of last year, I asked myself:What do you want from the internet, anyway?

One of the reasons that Here Comes Everybody holds up comparatively well in 2022 against its contemporaries is Shirky’s willingness to recognize how broader social forces might thwart the “inevitable” effects of a technology on society.