Web3 as ‘self-infrastructuring’: The challenge is how

Abstract

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?’.