Web3 and the Trap of ‘For Good’

(Photo by iStock/BlackSalmon)

On February 2, 2022, World Wildlife Federation-UK set social media on fire by announcing “Tokens for Nature,” a fundraising campaign that would sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to ​support efforts to protect thirteen of the world’s most endangered species. WWF-UK planned to run the campaign on a so-called layer 2 blockchain network called Polygon that they claimed was an “environmentally friendly” version of Ethereum. Only Polygon is no such thing: buying crypto-tokens to exchange for Polygon’s own currency means relying on the energy hungry infrastructure that surrounds and supports it. The backlash was so fierce that WWF-UK’s program went extinct in just 48 hours.

Tokens for Nature is just one of a rapidly growing group of “for good” projects or campaigns seeking to capitalize on the momentum of “Web3, an umbrella term for a panoply of decentralized models, protocols, and technologies—blockchains, DeFi (decentralized finance), NFTs, crypto coins, and more—that has attracted both innovators and scam artists. The mere mention of Web3 is enough to send a stock price up (or down, lately), so everyone from celebrities to central bankers is scrambling for a strategy. Its development is happening so fast that it can be difficult to take it all in; on any given day (and depending on the initiative du jour), it’s hard to decipher if Web3 is flourishing, scaling, or metastasizing. People are building, using, and exploiting its models, often without a clear understanding of the potentials and pitfalls, and certainly without a set of standards or models of accountability and governance.

The application of a “for good” framework to Web3 brings its own complications. “X for Good” projects within the tech and social impact sectors are essentially built on the theory that the right tool applied to the right problem will result in large-scale social benefits. The “X” in these projects has historically involved tools such as artificial intelligence, data, virtual reality, or games, or social media and communications platforms, among others. At its best, the “X for Good” framework allows for community-led development of appropriate tools that help create positive social impact in areas such as poverty alleviation or social justice movements. Too often, however, it results in tech solutionism and the imposition of tools on a community, neither designed with nor by communities. As Mark Latonero says, “​​The deeper issue is that no massive social problem can be reduced to the solution offered by the smartest corporate technologists partnering with the most venerable international organizations.”

The social sector is still grappling with “for good” efforts in the context of established technology tools and platforms, with few settled answers. So why should the social sector bother with Web3 now when it may just be another fad, or has gotten off to such a questionable start? This is a good question.

If the history of the Web over the past 30 years is any guide, the actuality of Web3 is not an “if.” Developers have been working with blockchain concepts since the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto introduced the world to Bitcoin in 2008, and the idea goes back even further. Even the NFT concept, which feels as if it erupted only last year, was first realized in 2014. Billions of dollars have been invested in the development of this proposed next wave of digital infrastructure. It’s entwined not just around so-called creator economies, but macroeconomies and the rails they run on as well, through the work of global banks, software companies, media empires, and hundreds of thousands of developers. So, it’s reasonable to stipulate: Web3 is here to stay.

However, any new frontier of innovation can and does include messy failures. The range of applications of Web3’s building blocks ranges from the state-backed to the spontaneous bedroom project, and motivations and quality of governance behind these projects are likewise diverse. Some of these technologies and platforms making up a Web3 world will indeed fail, or fail to live up to the massive promises offered.

Like social media and the “connection” tools of Web 2.0 before it, Web3 is being represented as a means of wresting control away from corrupt or malign political interests held by the techno-dominant. But there is nothing inherently magical about Web3. Merely aiming it towards at-risk economies through the application of a “for good” frame is tantamount to what media activist Olivier Jutel calls “blockchain imperialism.” The problems that plague the real world, the original Internet and Web 2.0 also inhabit Web3, and these problems can travel at the velocity of cryptocurrency trading, creating (and recording) damaging power asymmetries as they do.

So the question we are interested in is this: How do we build a Web3 world where “X for good” isn’t a separate effort, but a foundational ethos of everything built, distributed, and used? While we’re at a point in Web3’s development where exploitation and inequality might become hardwired and sclerotic, we believe that we still have a chance to usefully shape it for shared prosperity and justice. The best way to approach that is to slow down, take a proverbial minute for an examination, then intentionally and proactively build protection, privacy, and equity systems as part of the scaffolding.

Three Challenges

There are three linked challenges baked into Web3 that any proponent of positive social impact must solve.

1. Decentralized tech doesn’t equal distributed power. Web3 has become synonymous with the decentralized web, and one of the selling points of Web3 technologies is decentralization or shared ownership of web infrastructure. But in reality, ownership is too often centralized by and for those with resources already, the wealthy (even if only coin-wealthy) and corporations.

As the example of NFT marketplace OpenSea demonstrates, risks are too easily distributed onto the users, even as the gains remain very much centralized for platform owners and a small minority of participants. Even Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin has issued warnings about power concentration in Web3 token-based economies, saying crypto “whales” can have too much power in these economies. Systems become inherently extractive unless ownership is shared and distributed by a majority, particularly by those who are traditionally most vulnerable to exploitation.

For this reason, equitable power structures must be proactively designed in Web3 systems.

2. A significant percentage of existing power holders are already building their Web3 business models on exploitation and extraction. At present, these business models mine energy and other resources to the detriment of our climate and environment and of energy-poor communities, in some cases actively resuscitating wasteful or harmful power projects. They do so without addressing these concerns in their core business model (or even by creating offsets, a less desirable alternative but still better than nothing).

These models are meant to avoid accountability to platform users or vulnerable communities in either economic or environmental terms. But they nevertheless ask for our trust?

3. Building community trust takes more than decentralization. Those who are building over distributed technologies often claim it as a solution to a trust deficit, that "trust" is inherent to the systems. Except that it isn't.

Building trust requires, among other actions, deep listening and honest engagement. As Molly White writes:

How will this technology be used to harass and abuse people?’ is [a question] that too often goes unasked, particularly given that the demographics of people who are most at risk for abuse and harassment tend to be underrepresented in the industry.”

Or as Sydette Harry puts it:

Opportunistic tech creators, never missing a chance to make the same mistake multiple times, have built tools… which scrape and curate Twitter lists and accounts of those outside users’ traditional milieu. With articles and products like these, one can ‘diversify’ and collect ‘new experiences’ rather than hire Black writers or cover Black experiences in context. The message becomes: ‘You need to be aware of what Black people are doing but you don’t have to talk to them.’”

Exploitation—especially of those who have historically been marginalized—has taken place in many forms on existing web platforms, examples of which include: surveillance; unchecked hate speech, harassment, and calls for violence; failure to protect vulnerable users; attempted silencing of critics of the tech industry; extraction and manipulation of data without informed consent and for profit; appropriation of work product and processes without compensation or attribution; among others. Why should we automatically trust those who have historically profited off processes, products, and pain of communities, especially when the exploiters of Web3 look so much like the exploiters of Web2, or in some cases are the same people?

Too many of those who are building Web3 haven’t addressed this question. There are no accountability systems or means of remedy (whether peer-to-peer or institutional) for those who could be exploited on Web3 platforms. Remediation of the effects of platform and process design flaws is often attempted by processes developed after the fact, and those seeking redress are heavily reliant on using media headlines, or fear of them, to create pressure. All of this is in addition to the fact that distributed systems have allowed billions to be shifted to hate groups without transparency or accountability.

What can communities—especially those which are the subjects of “for good” initiatives—do when Web3 initiatives endanger them, backfire, or betray their trust? Very little, except to point to a transaction ledger and hope for some form of repair. Technologies that recreate the power asymmetries of previous technologies are not systems with trust baked in. Having a decentralized ledger of these issues doesn’t magically do that.

No Space to ‘Fail Fast’

If there is one thing we should have learned from the toxic Web 2.0 spillover we are struggling to mop up today, it’s that “X for good” is often, ironically, a bad strategy for the planet and the living beings on it. Social media companies’ hasty cleanup in Russia, for example, has been just the latest in dangerously hindsight-driven self-regulation. In Web 2.0, “doing social good” was used as cover to do “whatever”: Whatever made the most money, whatever drove the fastest growth, whatever qualified as too-big-to-regulate.

At the moment, Web3 is in danger of following the same path. We are already seeing vague social impact initiatives, ranging from NFT galleries that share proceeds with charities to social fund auditing on the blockchain to a social good coin (cleverly named SocialGood) that purports to share some of your spending with charities. Whether attempting to provide transparency in financial flows or protecting IP or just automating altruism, there seems to be a rush to prove Web3 has a public good side, and isn’t just about the accumulation of new forms of wealth in newly digitized ways.

However, this mission to do social good—along the way to expanding the crypto-frontier—reads like an opportunistic afterthought, using social impact or social good (however foggily defined) as a reason or cover to jump into Web3, often with little or no prior experience, while unguided, poorly informed, and lacking in common sense, ethics, and empathy. Beyond WWF-UK’s misstep into energy consuming technologies, take for example charity water’s offer to turn your crypto donation immediately into fiat currency... and then use that to fund clean water projects, without any mention of the energy required that erodes the environment and… well, you understand where we’re going.

From cringe-inducing PR stunts to the same tone-deafness of the infamous “Homeless Hotspots” of 2012’s SXSW Interactive, too many of these early initiatives crudely appropriate the pain of others as “content" and end up as nothing less than poverty porn on a distributed ledger.

Take for example Floydies, an NFT project that purported to be about expressing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. It was, however, nothing short of racist exploitation of George Floyd’s image for the creators’ own profit and aggrandizement. The NFTs were eventually delisted from OpenSea.

Another example is SaveTigray.net, a series of NFTs of images of the ongoing conflict and massacre in Ethiopia. The group behind this effort originally planned to create NFTs of fair trade art produced by women artisans in Tigray, but war conditions hindered those plans and they converted to selling NFTs of images of people in distress from the conflict. Whether any funds have been raised through these sales for the community at risk is difficult to determine. Regardless, the underlying image and the NFTs based on it are paternalistic and disempowering to the local population.

In another more recent example, the AP placed an iconic image of a rubber boat carrying migrants across the Mediterranean Sea in their NFT marketplace, to raise funds for their own non-profit newsroom. The Mediterranean is essentially a mass grave for migrants from East and North Africa, the Middle East, and beyond. The AP’s announcement on the same day as Russia’s 2022 attack on Ukraine—an invasion that predictably has caused the displacement of millions of refugees—was met with criticism of profiteering and exploitation. The AP took down the ad.

The world doesn’t have time for these kinds of projects. We don’t have time for a bifurcated web: that is, tech for bad/neutral vs tech for good. This is especially true as we stand at the precipice of intersecting societal collapses brought on by climate emergency, displacement, inequality, authoritarianism, and the erosion of democracy. Social good is not a “nice-to-have” bolt-on to current and future technology systems.

Imagining a New Web

So how do we finally fulfil the promises of Web1 and Web 2.0 in a way that social, cultural, and economic norms of Web3 are set by artists, activists, creators, and workers who have been historically left out or exploited? How do we get to “think first, then make things” instead of “move fast and break things”?

If Web3 presents a chance to fix our collapses, it needs a value system that is integral, not optional. This means that social good must be integral not only to the ethos but also to the architecture and rule-sets of any new Web or technological paradigm. This is especially critical and necessary when we think about the application of digital technologies to social good, or, more importantly, in a world where Web3 technologies are a part of life, how we transform our present into a future that is equitable, just, joyful, and generative.

There are already some good inquiries and projects that point forward towards progress. For example, WITNESS, an organization with decades of experience at the intersection of human rights and technology, has partnered with the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web to uncover ways for activists and laypeople to use decentralized ledgers to safely and authentically document human rights abuses in places where the centralized web has put them at risk. In another realm, culture shapers such as Ingrid Lafleur, Founder of the Afrofuture Strategies Institute, has been applying a lens of distributed technologies to questions of inclusion, ownership, and platform control by communities in lower-resourced regions. Similarly, the DisCO Project has set forth its DisCO Manifesto to support the worldwide development of distributed cooperatives and “prototype new and radical forms of ownership, governance, entrepreneurship, and value accounting meant to counteract pervasive economic inequality.” And there are signs that the Web3 community just might react to injustices faster than its Web 2.0 predecessors: The recent surfacing that the most vocal delegate of the .eth ENS address system is an openly staunch bigot was met with swift calls from Dame.eth, a leading figure in the Ethereum community, and others to address this toxic leadership through community stewardship.

Based on our own decades of experience (in technology development, foresight, and social change, rights, and global development), we see the necessity for four basic tenets to be the building blocks of any Web3 initiative, most importantly for those who have any ambition of directly or indirectly improving the condition of humans and the planet:

• Intentionality
• Accountability
• Mutually affirmed norms
• An ethics framework

These tenets might be perceived as idealistic when literally trillions of dollars in value are up for grabs, and the opportunity to resituate power in many industries and sectors beckons. And objections without counter-proposals can too easily be swept away in the false binary of “optimism/pessimism.” But we’re not interested in counter-proposals. We’re proposing a completely new paradigm, a new social contract that acknowledges that those trillions of dollars in value mean nothing in the face of what is happening to the planet and the people on it. Let’s remember, we all live here too, and the least powerful for too long have had the smallest voice in determining how such a paradigm shift plays out.

This has to change. The discussion—no, the demand—for something different has to start here.

In the interest of convenience, we’re setting out our recommendations and calls to action in the form of “dos and don'ts” for those contemplating, or even already rolling out, a Web3 initiative for social impact.

Don’t:

• Don’t ignore or try to sidestep Web3’s inherent energy consumption problem. The downstream impacts of Web3 hit vulnerable populations the hardest now and in the future. Until this critical issue is fundamentally and concretely addressed, Web3 will continue to export environmental damage into the future and push not just ourselves, but next generations as well dramatically closer to irreversible climate catastrophe.
• Don’t create human offsets as a way of absolving negative externalities your work creates. Social impact isn’t an indulgence framework to be used to counterbalance other negative impacts Web3 projects create.
• Don’t create new financial risks for already at-risk populations. Pushing the poor, precarious, underbanked, or otherwise economically vulnerable groups into greater uncertainty by introducing volatile, speculative financial instruments into their economies may do far more harm than good. People who live in precarity don’t have the privilege of HODLing for promised gains.
• Don’t impose new technologies on populations who already suffer from historical tech debt. Technology colonialism is rife with examples of friendly airdrops of new innovations into communities that can’t afford to maintain them long-term. Security vulnerabilities emerge rapidly even in the most advanced user groups.
• Don’t use technology to reduce or eliminate the exposure of “donors” to the reality of the causes they are supporting. While this might be the intent of your initiative, this is highly likely to be an unintended outcome unless the donor is also informed about the need or crisis they hope to contribute to improving. 
• Don’t support poverty porn, even if it’s packaged in an NFT. This is particularly critical when images of suffering or vulnerability are appropriated without the explicit and informed consent of the creator or the portrayed. 

Do:

• Leverage current social impact frameworks and networks that have been designed by activists and advocates with lived experience of the harms they are addressing.
• Demand the transparency promised by the technology and its enthusiasts: Audit, audit, audit. Verify, verify, verify.
• Demand the privacy and security for—and informed and affirmative consent of—community members who the technology is meant to support.
• Examine whether immutability and “smart” are desirable features in the context of the communities you’re trying to help.
• Call out harmful or “social-washed” projects, in meetings, conferences, panels, and on your platforms.
• Support human rights activists around the world who are exploring how to leverage the benefits of distributed ledgers for privacy, protections, and verification/attribution
• Listen to and design for and with—or step aside for—those who are historically marginalized and calling for change.
• Invest in “laboratories of worldmaking,” a concept defined by Olivier Jutel in his conversation with Evgeny Morozov of The Crypto-Syllabus. The entirety of our global societal issues require us to think about what it’s going to take to transform towards shared prosperity, justice, and equity. We don’t have the solutions, processes, or communities of practice built yet. As Jutel says in that same interview, “We have to embrace experimentation as an acknowledgment of our lack of answers at the moment.” Set up, support, or participate in this larger inquiry.
• Keep learning, exploring, and asking questions: We’re at a point where we can no longer afford to ignore the very basic mechanics of distributed ledger technologies/the blockchain space. These have to be taught and learned if we’re going to have a chance to stem the wave of the major Web 2.0 entities taking advantage.

Cut these guidelines out, and stick them by your nearest crypto-mining rig. If you bear them in mind as you consider your strategy, you may find yourself truly making a positive impact, rather than ending up as yet more digital roadkill on the way to the Web3 watering hole. 

We believe it’s possible to get from “for good” sideshows to wiring positive social impact into the fabric of Web3: economic liberation, yes, but also racial and gender justice, equality, inclusion, participation. It’s a huge ask, and one that goes against much of how we’ve learned too many technologies operate in the real world. All the more reason why it’s an ask worth making explicit.

Read more stories by Scott Smith & Lina Srivastava.