Web 3 and the material turn

Over the last two decades one fundamental paradigm was leading all strategic thinking in advertising, political communication and media production. In was not alway explicit or conscious, but the values and rationales of cultural theory after the so called "liguisitc turn“ held the guiding priciples for strategists.

Web 2.0 was the web of the „liguisitc turn“. It was about cultures, subcultures co-creation, relationships. Following constructivist theories we all thought: maybe there is no truth anymore – only there are only better or worse relationships. Maybe capital, ownership, and status are becoming less relevant and post-modern values like self-fulfillment through social interaction is the only currency that counts in the future.

Following Andreas Reckwitz, the Web 2.0 revolution did not „kill“ the industrial 1.0 society it followed. 1.0 processes of industrial optimization only gave up its place in public discourse. People stopped discussing industrial rationalization – it became an unterlying infrastructure. Amazon for example is an efficient industrial logistics machine – but this is not what we discuss if we are talking about Amazon. New levels of „Fordism“ have not been a topic of the Web 2.0 society (they have simply been „infrastructure". The new topics of the web 2.0 age had been liguistics ans social relationships.

We see the same process now repeating with Web 3. Web 3 takes over the discourse, while Web 2.0 becomes an underlying infrastructure that doesn’t need to be discussed anymore.

The our new discussions are circled around „ownership“, „stakes in the network“. Big state is back, we see wars over resources and NFTs are trying to distribute ownership far beyond every rational level. Social (media) relationships don’t make up for the "the whole world" anymore. We start to accept that ownership and capital matter (again). Most of the Web 3 materials might not be tangible, but they definitely aren’t as abstract as the bubbles of Web 2.0. Web 3 brands need to own themselves again. They are brands for a token based society. Swimming with the 2.0-swarm is still relevant, but not sufficient anymore.

-> Why do we write about that in todays newsletter: well, we only want to make sure, that you – our community, our stake in the network – have enough thoughts available in order top update your tinder profiles with the latest takes on social theory and are able to base your strategies in future discourse.