Freshly inculcated from ETH Amsterdam, I am writing this blog to share my thoughts (forever, on-chain, indelibly) on transitioning to Web3 from Web2.

A preface for anyone reading this: burnout is real. It’s insidious, and it slowly leaches your motivation, sense of accomplishment and mastery, and ability to have a meaningful career. I finally decided to do something about my own burnout after more than a year, a woefully long period of time in which to languish.

A pearl of wisdom for anyone experiencing burnout, especially those of you who are earlier in your tech career, or any career: perhaps our most critical asset for both survival and a life meaningfully lived is our ability to productively engage. Let’s break this down. Does this imply that work is the most important thing in life? Absolutely not. Whatever is important to you is the most important thing in life. But your ability to productively and enthusiastically engage is an indicator of overall mental and occupational health. Creativity, flexibility, willingness to take good risks, and open-mindedness live in this place of meaningful engagement.

What this means is that burnout has a complex network effect that extends to many areas of a person’s life. Burnt out at work? You’re probably not the best parent/partner/community volunteer/friend/etc. right now. Getting un-burnt out is really difficult when you’re already burnt out. Most of the blogs and personal accounts I read suggested that burnout can take 3 months to two years to recover from…assuming you’re not working. If you are not independently wealthy, this may not be an option.

Which brings me to the fun part of this inaugural blog entry: Web3.

I heard about ETH Amsterdam (more specifically, DevConnect) while out having a drink with my best friend, who runs ZK startup risc0. Depressed, disengaged, and flattened by my stressful and chaotic startup job, I decided to come along to Amsterdam on a whim, expecting to attend one or two talks, and otherwise view some tulips and a museum or two populated with the art of the Dutch masters.

On day 1 or 2 of the conference, my head was blown off. What does this mean? I met other people who had web3 careers, worked for multiple DAOs, and seemed to love their jobs. Previously, I’d believed that web3 was solely for speculative investments and market manipulation plus illegal activities. Perhaps some of that is enabled by web3, but there were some far more important takeaways:

1. Anonymity on the blockchain allows us to make transactions in a hostile network, with people we don’t trust. Maybe you and anon3927455345 both donate to a cause that focuses on improving solar technologies, but anon3927455345 voted for a politician you really don’t agree with. We’ve just leapfrogged over our primitive, tribal ape brain to hack political polarization, one of the largest threats to stability and democracy. This alone is incredibly powerful: the ability to ensure certain actions regardless of who we’re collaborating with, because code overrules wetware, which hasn’t changed in tens of thousands of years.
2. The inverse of allowing trust with strangers we might have implicit bias against is that anonymity and pseudoanonymity allow people to participate without being discriminated against. This means that people who have historically experienced unfairness and discrimination can participate without being treated as less than human, leveraging anonymity and participation + action rather than what tribe or degree of normal a person might be branded with.
3. I was impressed with the degree of quality that protocols and primitives produced by developers and organizations. ENS is incredible, for instance. The EVM, atomic loans, and Geth validator software are all pretty amazing too. The velocity and quality of technological innovation is stunning, coming from Web2, where a handful of large companies (I’m looking at you, FAANG/G-MAFIA) act as brain trusts, sucking up the world’s dev talent to have them work on things like how to sell more ads, and how to hack your primitive human brain to increase shareholder return.
4. Speaking of the devs, I noticed the everyone at ETH Amsterdam was on the younger side. Probably 35 was near the top. I met plenty of really, really smart people in their 20s and early 30s, from nontraditional backgrounds, though plenty had dropped PhD programs or interned at Goldman. It would appear that the smartest, freshest talent is coming to Web3. I got the vibe that I would hope the early 90s DotCom bubble must have given off. I was too young to have participated in that boom, but had always dreamed of living on a technological frontier.
5. There was a shocking number of non-technical attendees. I met lawyers, a psychologist, plenty of finance people, product and business people, artists, NFT brokers, etc. Web3 appears to have a really solid cultural foothold across industry verticals, yielding something extremely valuable and robust: diversity of thought. Web2 suffers tremendously from a lack of diversity of thought. It’s a bubble. Developers aren’t exposed to as many people who are non-developers, and it shows. There isn’t as much innovation, and nothing really felt radical in Web2 over my last 8 years in the space. As a weird 12-year old with a subscription to paper Wired, I read about a glorious future led by intelligent, radical, creative, and visionary nerds. Much later in grad school, I realized that the cyberpunk future I’d dreamed about as a kid was going to look a lot less exciting when working for a large tech company. But I’m getting off-point. Diversity of thought plus anonymity plus greenfield equals thriving, innovative tech.
6. We’re setting sail for lighter-weight tooling, and backend’s not going to look the same. Web3 is web-native. Tooling lives on the web. IDEs like Remix are lightweight. Discord and Telegram are also dev tools to the extent that technologies evolve rapidly, and talking to the people that use a tool or made it themselves is faster than waiting for a documentation update. On this account, Twitter, the main Web2 platform that Web3 seems to embrace, should also be considered part of this ecosystem. As a backend dev, I was shocked to see that entire backends are being replaced with smart contracts, and I could not be more excited.
7. Did you get this far? I’ve saved one of my favorite takeaways for last. Smart contracts are written in a language of incentivization. Sure, it’s code, but transactions manipulate tokens and value. Anything with value can be incentivized. What if we write code that incentivizes a better world? This is maybe my favorite and most critical takeaway from my trip down the rabbit hole. If code can skip over greedy, biased human wetware, perhaps we have a chance at building a better future after all. I’d much rather pay some fraction of a dollar to avoid getting lambasted with brain-hacking, irrelevant ads based on predatory bulk data-harvesting practices. If we can incentivize fairness and humanist values via indelible, decentralized code, smart contracts have the power to overhaul society for the better. DAOs are already showing us how this is done with radical experiments in governance and culture.

Ok, these were my top takeaways--I’ll save critiques for a later post.

Thanks for reading my blog, anon, and I hope you found this interesting. Feel free to contact me on Twitter at @morganjweaver. I’m morganjweaver.eth in ENS, and my Telegram handle is the same as Twitter.