Everything is content now
The Web 3.0 Isn’t Blockchain: It’s the Era of Content
I call Web 1.0 “the Era of Information”. It was static and you could find a lot of stuff.
Web 2.0, I call “the Era of Discussion”. Comments, likes, interaction, and a bunch more.
Web 3.0 hasn’t been defined yet. I’d like to propose “the Era of Content”.
Everyone is a creator. Everything is content.
A few years ago, the term “Web 3.0” was being tossed around in tech circles as a banner for the blockchain revolution. It was a dumb marketing ploy and it didn’t happen. Instead, we’re entering an age defined by something far more pervasive (and real): a surplus of content, information, and entertainment on a scale we’ve never seen before.
Let’s borrow a metaphor from history. Once upon a time, humanity struggled with food scarcity. Then, agriculture evolved, and suddenly we had food surplus. That surplus changed society at its core: people could do things other than just hunt or gather food.
Today, we’re living through a similar shift, except now it’s not about food, it’s about content. More content than we know what to do with – except maybe drown in it.
Two things made this possible. TikTok, and computers.
TikTok broke everything. The mold was “sure, algorithm, but maybe it should have something to do with you”. TikTok replaced it with “you can reach anyone, just dance and we’ll show it to a lot of people”. More content + more reach = more views = more money.
This shift was so successful that the entire web started chasing it. Not just Instagram and YouTube, but X/Twitter and Linked In and everyone else.
Everyone is a creator. Everything is content.
TikTok was the roadmap, but the road was increased productivity. Similar to agricultural technology enabling the food surplus, information technology is enabling the content surplus. Computers have become pretty damn capable, and productivity in content creation has exploded. Anyone can do anything.
You’d be forgiven for thinking phones haven’t changed much in the past ten years. And yeah, sure, maybe nominal innovation isn’t what it used to be. Progress certainly is less flashy, but progress has kept progressing. And we’ve come a very long way from the “Internet Machine” of 2010. Today everyone has an entire freaking production studio in their pocket.
Desktops, laptops, web services and infrastructure have also democratized production and distribution so much that it has changed what it means to create. It’s not that everyone could be a creator with a bit of work and the right tools. No.
Everyone is a creator. And everything is content.
Note that I didn’t mention AI here, even as I used OpenAI to draft this article. I opened a voice chat, explained my ideas and reasoning in a five minutes uninterrupted mind dump, and it came back with a very decent article that understood and explained all the core concepts. I wouldn’t even call it a draft, just a different article. In many ways it’s a better one: more to the point, easier to understand. I’ll include it in full below. But my point is: of course AI is accelerating all this even further, significantly. It’s making it so much easier to create stuff, to create content, it’s absurd. This is so self evident I don’t even need to say it.
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