Meet Web3 Hype with Informed Skepticism

Increasingly apparent in the Web3 discourse is a kind of imaginative obsolescence: As one vision of the future rapidly replaces the next, the technologies and systems now in place suffer decay and disrepair. Our imaginations and resources are once again diverted from fixing or rehabilitating what exists. Elizabeth M. Renieris writes that we cannot hope to meet the challenges posed by the latest digital technologies with the same uncritical techno-solutionism and optimism that have failed us in the past.

Health communicators seem to be paying an increasingly high price for transparently and publicly delivering and debating information around the COVID-19 pandemic. Abuse directed at them, much of it online, has become a significant problem. As Heidi Tworek writes, the lessons so far are that platforms still have not prioritized those who provide our most reliable information, nor do they reliably enforce their own terms of service.

With the federal government set to reintroduce a version of Bill C-10, it’s important to understand the debate surrounding the bill in its previous incarnation. Opposition to the bill, and, more broadly, to governmental efforts to regulate the internet, was shaped in large part by ideological conceptions of how the internet and online speech should be treated. Blayne Haggart and Natasha Tusikov write that these conceptions operate as founding myths that deter meaningful public debate about internet regulation.