A Theory of Justice for Web3

This piece originally appeared as part of the Harvard Business Review's Big Idea Series "Welcome to Web3" under the title Web3 Is Our Chance to Make a Better Internet. We're excited to get to share it with Means of Creation readers!

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One of the most powerful narratives surrounding web3—a decentralized, blockchain-based internet ecosystem owned and operated by its users—is that it is a movement toward a better, fairer internet. Specifically, web3 proponents envision an internet in which users can wrest back power from a small number of extractive, centralized institutions, and in which everyone with an internet connection can participate on a level playing field.

But web2, the current era of the internet defined by companies built on proprietary data (such as Facebook and Google), started with a similar promise of empowering individual creators and removing intermediaries—a promise left unfulfilled. Now, standing at the precipice of a new era, we should ask ourselves: Is web3 actually democratizing opportunity? And if not, how can we better design platforms and governance systems to promote fairness?

The social and political philosopher John Rawls’s thought experiment known as the “veil of ignorance,” proposed in his influential 1971 work A Theory of Justice, provides a useful framework for these questions. When creating the foundations for an ideal society, Rawls contends, we should imagine that we do not know where we ourselves would fall within it—that is, we should adopt a veil of ignorance. A just society is one “that if you knew everything about it, you’d be willing to enter it in a random place.” Rawls adds:

Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities.