A Social Tech Perspective of web3
In April, 2022, I gave a talk to a Master of Science in Finance class at the Loyola University Chicago where a close friend is an adjunct professor. The theme of the class was crypto, and my friend thought I'd round-out the conversation. Reasonably, majority of the class was spent focusing on the financial aspects of crypto.
I followed another presenter from a large cryptocurrency exchange who had focused his time on discussing decentralized financial (DeFi) crypto markets, cryptocurrency exchanges, and trading concepts. In many ways, I zoomed-out quite a bit and asked the students to look at web3 more broadly. Sharing my social lens on web3 was no doubt jarring for a class accustomed to financially-focused topics; lucky for me they were good sports.
Below I've shared a YouTube recording of the talk, and the presentation visuals in Figma. As explained in the video, the presentation form is in the likeness of web3: a web-like structure of networked information. While I navigate one route through the content, there's many different ways to explore and short-cuts to take based on your interest in the topic.
Similar to my post "Web3 is Social Tech", I cover a bit of the evolution of the internet and the web (web 1.0 > web 2.0 > web3). In the presentation, I cover new territory around social tech: what is it? if social tech is the water we swim in, how do you know when you see it? I also talk about non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as social tools for communities and collaboration, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) as the primary social organizations of web3.