“Free software enthusiasts should explore the blockchain”

On June 16,

published 20 Mint, its edition dedicated to Web 3 and metaverses.

On June 28, Primavera de Filippi, researcher at the CNRS and the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard, presented a keynote on the metaverse at USI events.

To push the reflection, we went to ask him a few questions.

You are involved in the Open Knowledge Foundation, which aims to promote knowledge and open data, you are a member of the Creative Commons association, which works to offer more open solutions than intellectual property… How does blockchain and the Can Web 3 help promote a free culture?

On today's internet, it is the platforms that control the resources.

Today, if I post on Twitter or Facebook, I create value for them but I get nothing in return.

The blockchain makes it possible to develop remuneration systems for our digital productions.

In Web 3, one can create a tokenization system (a token is a token, monetary or not, issued on a blockchain) where, because I created something, I receive something else in exchange - funds if we adopts a method of financial remuneration, the right to participate in the governance of the platform if we adopt the perspective of decentralized autonomous organizations, etc.

The Web 3 makes a form of property on our works and allows a very interesting disintermediation.

Is there not an opposition between the search for commons managed through decentralized networks and the most visible applications of the blockchain, crypto-assets, NFT, which seem precisely linked to the expression of a right of property on elements previously shareable?

The problem is rather in the speculative side.

The great difficulty with the creative commons is their business model: artists who use these licenses and want to make a living from their art must rely on the real world - by organizing concerts, selling merchandising - or else use non-commercial licenses to draw funding from their copyrights.

However, with the blockchain, NFTs make it possible to sell copies.

This is the revolution: anyone can sell and exchange copies of digital works, while the artist keeps his intellectual property.

It's like books: anyone can buy a version of the text, but the author retains his rights to it.

And if we want an authenticated and signed version of the creation, then we approach the model of the photographs or lithographs,

In fact, NFTs allow the creation of a system where content can circulate freely, but where artists can hold rights to digital copies and remain in control of the work of the mind.

Beeple, for example, is a creative commons artist: his works are accessible to everyone.

But what people seem to want absolutely is the unique copy signed by Beeple, to the point of paying 69 million dollars for it.

It's very good for the artist, and it doesn't impinge on freedom of distribution, freedom of reuse, etc.

What do you think the ongoing crypto crash says about trust in technology, in the web3 universe?

In my opinion, the crash reflects above all the problems of financialization of the environment.

It's a question of trust that people agree among themselves: if we expect our neighbors to sell their crypto-assets, then we sell ours a little earlier and so on... But that doesn't show nothing special about the technology itself, it's just a speculative bubble that has burst.

What this crash reveals above all is the fragility of certain systems in the field of decentralized finance (DeFi).

We realized that they were very well built for periods of rising prices, but that they did not know how to deal with sudden falls.

It sorts things out, but it's really an application problem, not a technology problem.

Some Web 3 applications, video games like Axie Infinity, have given the impression that they can help disadvantaged people out of poverty, but hacks and the current crash have only made things worse for these people.

How, in this case, to consider Web 3 as a space of liberation?

Doesn't it rather risk aggravating inequalities?

Liberation, inequalities… It's like the internet, both are possible.

The fundamental question rests on adoption: who will look into the blockchain, who will seek to use its potential and in which direction will their applications go?

Internet, for example, we cannot criticize everything: it has allowed a real democratization of information.

On the one hand, it's great, but in other spaces, there is fraud, manipulation, you can't escape it.

For Web 3 and metaverse, it's the same.

It's above all a question of: “how can we be sure that we're going in both directions?

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For the moment, it is clear that it is profits that attract new players.

It's kind of ironic, by the way, to have these theoretically infinite digital worlds, which allow abundance and sharing, and that the first use you find there is to create artificial scarcity, ownership, exclusivity.

We should explore the new modalities that these technologies offer us, invent new ways of participating and sharing rather than tracing the same constraints as those of the physical world in metaverses.

But the two poles are connected: it is also the profits that make things happen.

Once we achieve wider adoption of blockchains, we may see new applications emerge.

If adoption is driven by questions of profit accumulation, how can Web 3 not look like "Web 2" from the start, where much of the monetary value is captured by a small number of actors?

Talking to founders of the current internet, people who campaign for free culture, I see that many are against blockchains.

But it's a pity !

They are the ones who should seize these technologies!

I think it's because of this hypercapitalist image, this aura of speculation that they react like that.

But it is precisely because they are working on commons issues that they should get into Web3, metaverses, and create the applications they want to see there.

There are super interesting communities, like DADA, a collective of artists who launched into NFTs in 2017 and who are thinking about creating an "invisible economy", precisely to escape the speculative logic of the medium.

For me, to prevent Web 3 from becoming like Web 2,

How do you view the environmental cost of the technologies behind Web3 and metaverses?

Historically, we can understand that blockchains by proof of work like bitcoin worked: at the time, nobody knew, so there was almost no energy consumption.

But today, clearly, if someone tried to recreate a blockchain with this validation model, no one would adopt it.

The perspective of the proof of stake, on which Ethereum wants to pass, is more interesting, it aims for a form of carbon neutrality.

Afterwards, what should attract our attention are the positive blockchain experiments in carbon emissions: those that encourage sustainable activities, that test carbon tokens, that provide transparency on the energy spent...

There is, for example, a whole reflection on impact NFTs, which aims to integrate into the blockchain economic incentives geared towards the protection of the environment.

This type of project is interesting because it diverts speculative strategies to increase the value of NFTs when the natural resources to which they are linked are in good condition.

This kind of initiative brings together the two poles of values ​​we were discussing earlier: speculation and the commons.

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