History of the Internet and Future of Building Inclusive Communities

This article is written by Network Capital CEO Utkarsh Amitabh and published by Observer Research Foundation. Utkarsh also writes for Harvard Business Review, World Economic Forum and is the author of Amazon #1 best-seller “The Seductive Illusion of Hard Work”. He will be teaching writing in the Network Capital Writing Fellowship starting on November 13.

History of the Internet and the Future of Inclusive Communities

Last year, in the middle of the pandemic, I quit my job at Microsoft to work full-time on Network Capital, a peer-to-peer community I had been building on nights and weekends for the last four years. I loved my job, but the more I reflected on my core values, the kind of life I wanted to build, and the way I wanted to use my skills, the more it became clear to me that community building was my true calling.

Recently Network Capital raised funding and strategic support from Facebook multinational as part of their community accelerator program. While communities have always been important to the social fabric of societies, their economic and business potential had been underexplored. To understand why, let’s explore the history of the internet and Web 3.0.

Web 3.0 and the History of the Internet

Web 1.0: The first era of the web about was about how we process and consume information. Yahoo, Netscape, Craigslist, AOL were Web 1.0 companies. Google “won” this era by democratizing information and building a solid advertisement driven business model on top of it.

Web 2.0: The second era of the internet gave birth to platforms that enable interaction, giving us Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn etc. Information, goods, and services were brought under the same umbrella. People started taking cabs, trips, dates, work partnerships with strangers. On Uber, you could hail a cab or make some side income driving after work. On Instagram, posting content and watching leaving your friends in a state of awe became a thing. And finally, influencer became a noun instead of a verb.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange of information was the defining characteristic of Web 2.0. It also propelled the GDP of the internet but most of the economic benefits went to large centralized platforms who set the rules and controlled data flow. This created a complicated relationship among the platforms, participants and policy makers.

The policy makers wanted to regulate the internet but weren’t sure how to go about it. The participants were happy with the economic benefits but disgruntled with the unequal distribution. The platforms felt they were attacked from all corners despite their contribution to the GDP of the internet.

The fundamental challenge of the Web 2.0 era was concentration of power, influence, data and capital.

Enter Web 3.0

A new type of digital product has started gaining traction around the world, one that is co-owned, co-created and co-run. This constitutes the third era of the internet and is defined by decentralization, declining trust in institutions and a new way of looking at value creation and value capture.

We are already seeing some of it in action in the media world. Take a look at Mirror.xyz. This is the way it describes itself -

“Joining Mirror does not only make you a community member. It makes you a co-owner of the platform. As a result, our platform is a sum of our contributors. While we’re eager to grow Mirror to a monumental scale, we’ll first be granting access on an individual basis to ensure a quality foundation”

On Mirror, writers can raise capital to do research, draw a monthly salary for expenses in advance from readers to write the book/article/novel they want to read. And these readers / investors get a bigger stake in the pie. Essentially it makes the relationship more well defined. The outcome is tangible, the terms are well understood and the scope of failure is reduced.

Organizations, digital products, media and social networks like Mirror would play a crucial role as the internet evolves in its third phase.

Network Capital and Web 3.0

Network Capital will be co-created, co-owned and co-run by our community members in the long run. I plan to use the funding and strategic support from Facebook to advance systems and structures that will get Network Capital ready for Web 3.0 world. While the exact roadmap is still being figured out, given below are some ideas for building equitable and inclusive communities. It is not an exhaustive list. I have picked three ideas on which I have collected significant amount of data over the years.

Community Design to Create a Level Playing Field

Creating a level playing field in any community involves creating a safe space for everyone. Out of our 100,000+ community members, more than 50% are women. This didn’t just happen on its own. We designed communication – both internal and external - in a way that women found a safe space online to learn with and from peers from other sectors, countries, industries and career aspirations. Through our weekly newsletters, podcasts, masterclasses and cohort-based-courses, we constantly reiterated the importance of gender parity to the future of Network Capital. With time, the message started to stick and people started thinking of our community as a gender-neutral platform to network and learn. The larger insight here is that community design needs to be intentional from the beginning, it can’t be an afterthought.

Business Model Adaptation

Network Capital is a subscription-based community. One way to ensure that affordability does not deter economically disempowered students and young professionals to join is variable pricing. Through the funds from Facebook and our endowment fund, we have now made Network Capital need-blind. If someone can’t afford our subscription fee but has the hunger to learn, we provide up to 100% scholarship.

In our school and cohort-based fellowships, there are hundreds of students and young professionals who are attending classes free of cost. We plan to scale this access program further and believe it will an important step towards bridging the talent-opportunity mismatch.

Scale Purposefully: Forget Cultural Fit, Seek Cultural Contribution

The question of scale needs to be addressed by every community. Even the most efficiently run communities tend to optimize for cultural fit, i.e., seek individuals who are like others in the network. That is a mistake. Culture must evolve and adapt with time, space and demographic shifts.

Once Network Capital created its school, thousands of teenagers joined the community. Their engagement norms were different from existing community members, they used technology differently and wanted different outcomes. Designing digital products and experiences tailored to them was one of the most important things we did in 2021. Integrating teenagers within the Network Capital ecosystem helped strengthen our culture by making it more inclusive.

Concluding Thoughts

Web 3.0 will be a unique opportunity to redefine the role of communities in economic life. With the right structural interventions, platforms, participants and policy makers can make co-owned, co-run and co-created communities the norm. Such communities will be relatively more equitable and egalitarian. Their members will have real skin in the game, i.e., equity and ability to influence key decisions. Web 3.0 communities might just make both Karl Marx and Adam Smith excited about the future.

P.S. See you at the NC Writing Fellowship