Web3 and Society

Join world experts and discuss Web3’s effects on governance, the financial system, fame, even private relationships! Alaka Halder and Wes Chow kick off a new interdisciplinary online salons series on Web3’s potential to transform society featuring star guests.

Web3 can seem like a niche bubble to those who aren’t intimately involved with building it or trading cryptocurrencies. Yet it has far-reaching potential in areas of everyday life such as land use, journalism, and solving inefficiencies in the labor market.

With this series, we hope to make Web3 accessible to all and create a forum for discussing its applications, potential, and challenges.

All episodes will feature special guests: Glen Weyl, Alex Tabarrok, Packy McCormick, Erik Hoel, Alex Masmej, Cat Huu, Alex Yao, Sari Azout, Joey DeBruin, Bradley Miles, Evan Miyazono, and more!

This series meets monthly on Saturdays—with some exceptions.

Already have a membership? Sign in to get your series ticket.

In addition to series tickets, members get access to our community Discord (with a channel for this series to chat between events)—as well as free salon tickets each month, discounts, free members-only events, and more.

#DateEpisode
1October 22, 2022Web3 and Society: Old Governance, New Governance with Kyla Scanlon and Jon Hillis

Web3 promises a fundamental shift in control from centralized to decentralized in all aspects of the economy, society, and how we govern our lives. What are some of the promises and pitfalls of this new approach? What benefits arise out of decentralized governance mechanisms, and what are real world lessons we’re learning as we experiment with these new systems?
2November 19, 2022Web3 and Cryptoeconomics: New Economic Fundamentals with Alex Tabarrok

Web3 and cryptocurrencies enable a toolkit from which we can build a new kind of economy. In this salon, we will discuss decentralized coordination, digital scarcity, property rights, Non-Fungible Tokens, smart contracts, Central Bank Digital Currencies, and other core primitives crypto unlocks.
3December 16, 2022Web3 and Plurality: Digital Democracy with Glen Weyl

Web3 leans on Albert Hirschman’s political framing of “exit”: the belief that ultimate freedom to port a person’s life data from one service to another leads to competitive platforms that maximize that person’s benefit. What if, instead, Web3 were to emphasize another of Hirschman’s concepts, “voice”? A pluralistic version of Web3 imagines a network of cohesive social groups with cooperation and governance as core participatory features. In this salon, we will discuss the pluralistic Web3, decentralized society, and their applications to date.
4January 21, 2023Writing about Web3 with Packy McCormick

Packy McCormick is an investor and prolific blogger and a top contributor to the excitement around Web3. His writing is infectiously fun, and dives deep into analysis and intellectual detours on current Web3 trends. In this salon, we will discuss how Packy has managed to cultivate his audience, its quirks, and how he has managed to keep up with the pace of Web3 development.
5February 18, 2023Web3 and Social Networks: Decentralization with Evan Henshaw-Plath and Nathan Schneider

Evan Henshaw-Plath (Rabble) and Nathan Schneider will discuss decentralized social networks and their future role in public discourse. Both are veterans in the decentralized space, but in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, their experience and thinking has become especially salient. We will discuss the technology of decentralization and differing philosophical approaches. What are the affordances? What are core features and usability problems? How do we deal with moderating the worst aspects of the Internet? Is the lack of centralized control likely to be net positive or negative, under what circumstances, and for whom?
6March 18, 2023Web3 and the Media with Terry Nguyen and Erik Hoel

Much has been said about what ails media and journalism: misinformation, weak revenue models, lack of diversity and representation, censorship, and declining trust from the public. Could Web3-based initiatives like Mirror and Dirt change the status quo? What challenges – old and new – do they face?
7May 20, 2023Web3 and Society: Building Consumer Tech with Sari Azout and Joey DeBruin

Startupy founder Sari Azout and Backdrop founder Joey DeBruin join hosts Alaka Halder and Wes Chow for a conversation on building consumer products using web3 technology. We think this will be an exciting and invaluable conversation for all designers, researchers, and builders in the consumer technology space.
8 June 24, 2023Web3 and the Frontiers of Funding

Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki and Protocol Labs Head of Research Evan Miyazono join hosts Alaka Halder and Wes Chow to discuss innovations in funding being explored by the Web3 community. In this salon, we’ll cover the theory and application of quadratic funding, the core idea behind Gitcoin, and emerging ideas in the retroactive public goods space.
Disclaimer: As we’re planning this series ahead for nearly a year, some of the titles, the order of episodes, or some of the special guests are subject to change.

Already have a membership? Sign in to get your series ticket