Web3 as 'self-infrastructuring
The challenge is how
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5261065 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kelsie Nabben (0000-0003-4684-4113, RMIT University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2023-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Big Data & Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2053-9517 • E-ISSN: 2053-9517 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/20539517231159002 |
| OpenAlex | W4321602927 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
| References cited | 28 |
The term 'Web3' refers to the practices of participating in digital infrastructures through the ability to read, write and coordinate digital assets. Web3 is hailed as an alternative to the failings of big tech, offering a participatory mode of digital self-organizing and shared ownership of digital infrastructure through software-encoded governance rules and participatory practices. Yet, very few analytical frameworks have been presented in academic literature by which to approach Web3. This piece draws on the theoretical lens of infrastructure studies to offer an analytical framework to approach the emergent field of Web3 as an exploration in 'how to infrastructure' through prefigurative self-infrastructuring. Drawing on qualitative examples from digital ethnographic methods, I demonstrate how the origins of Web3 reveal the intentions of its creators as a political tool of prefiguration, yet its practices reveal the inherent tension of expressing these ideals in coherent technical and institutional infrastructure. Thus, I argue that one of the fundamental challenges Web3 is negotiating through technical and governance experiments is 'how to self-infrastructure
Business · Citizen journalism · Corporate governance · Engineering ethics · Governmentality · Knowledge management · Negotiation · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Social science · Sociology · World Wide Web · Computer Science · E-Government and Public Services · Engineering · Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting · Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing
Algorithmic autopoiesis and the operational closure of law
Governable Spaces
Shifting from Web2 to Web3
The exchange theory of web3 governance
Cryptoeconomics as governance
How cryptomarket communities navigate marketplace structures, risk perceptions and ideologies amid evolving cryptocurrency practices
Law and Infrastructure
Imaginaries of decentralized media and rights infrastructures
Moral Entrepreneurs of the Mastodon Migration
Fields, Institutional Infrastructure and Governance
Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure
How the Internet Became Commercial
The web of value
Constructive activism in the dark web
Toward Information Infrastructure Studies
Enacting Research Methods in Information Systems
The Blockchain as a Narrative Technology
What was Bitcoin, what will it be? The techno-economic imaginaries of a new money technology
Infrastructure Time
Imaginaries and Crystallization Processes in Bitcoin Infrastructuring
Hacker-engineers and Their Economies
Not Not but Not yet
Utopia of abstraction
Big Data and surveillance
Emerging models of data governance in the age of datafication
The Ethnography of Infrastructure
Hacker Politics and Publics
Code Is Speech
| Unique citing works | 9 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3 |
| Citation span | 2023 - 2026 (4) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 8 |