A bit hesitant to blog about web3 because, like cryptocurrency, it seems to be a topic which drives people to a kind of monomania even if they're opposed to it. But I've poked fun at bitcoin on this website in the past so here goes.
I have been trying to make a good-faith go of seeing a positive side to web3, including reading this Wired article, and the question I was left with at the end was this: a lot of the enthusiasm seems to be for ways to engineer incentives so that Good Things will happen. This is coming from a notionally libertarian or anarchist crowd, the sorts of people who pour scorn on the idea of a centrally-planned attempt to make Good Things happen.
What I don't understand is why a cleverly-designed system like quadratic voting (which the article doesn't bother to explain, but the details don't matter to my argument) is any less likely to go off the rails than a cleverly-designed system of central planning. It feels as if the word "incentives" is treated as a get-out-of-jail-free card here: it's a shibboleth that says, relax, this utopia has no hidden dangers because I did an economics course one time.
Especially as the environmental footprint of Bitcoin seems like a glaring example of the sorts of unintended consequences which can come from an incentive system.
I'm aware that "unintended consequences", like "incentives", is neoliberal cant. Hypercapitalism may be going so far into the weeds that it leaves old lefties like me sounding like The Economist.