slowly at first, then all at once: web2 to web3
Ernest Hemingway: Cuba, 1952
“Slowly at first, then all at once.”
— Ernest Hemingway, 1926 (kind of)*
While it may seem that the changes in digital media and marketing are swift and unexpected, they’re not if you’ve been paying attention.
The web, Internet and Internet culture have continued to change and evolve. These changes are often hard to discern in the present. It’s only when we look back that we can contextualize events.
There’s a lot more to Web3 than blockchains and NFTs. Here’s a timeline detailing the transition from Web2 to Web3:
2009: The Bitcoin genesis block is mined.
2013: Facebook attempts to buy Snapchat for $3 billion but fails, instead replicating Snapchat’s Stories feature across Instagram and Facebook . Snapchat marks the first successful platform to pivot away from traditional social media toward ephemeral content.
2014: The first NFT is minted.
2015: Ethereum is launched, introducing smart contracts.
2015: Voice assistants like Alexa rise in popularity, shifting away from traditional keyword search. This marks the decline of traditional, visual branding with voice and audio media.
2019: The "World Record Egg" becomes the most liked Instagram post of all time, effectively jumping the shark and signaling the cultural peak and decline of traditional social media.
2020: TikTok becomes the dominant social platform in terms of cultural relevance and content style, steering further away from social media as a personal narrative and highlight reel.
2020: The COVID-19 pandemic acts as a global digital accelerator, compressing a decade’s worth of digital growth and adoption into a two-year period.
2021: NFTs go mainstream, with Bored Ape Yacht Club emerging as the movement’s poster child.
2022: Facebook rebrands as Meta.
2022: Elon Musk buys Twitter, rebrands it as X, and significantly reduces its value, driving away advertisers and users.
2022: OpenAI’s ChatGPT goes mainstream, ushering in the AI era across major tech platforms and companies.
2024: Google prioritizes AI as the top result in search queries. Sixty percent of all Google search queries no longer result in link clicks, signaling the decline of traditional SEO.
Ernest Hemingway* never said, “Slowly at first, then all at once.” The actual line, spoken by the character Mike Campbell in Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, was: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly,” referring to bankruptcy.
Ironically, the misquote is apt in two ways. First, in our current era, truth is increasingly malleable—a phenomenon known as the Illusory Truth Effect, where repeated falsehoods become accepted as truth, even creating false memories in individuals.
Second, the misquote reflects the cultural and functional bankruptcy of Web2 giants like Google and Meta. It’s certainly happened before - Web1 powerhouse Yahoo! was the most valuable company in the world ($125B) in 2000. Today, it’s been broken up into several pieces and ceases to exist. Google and Meta are now completely tied to advertising revenues structured around surveillance capitalism and are struggling to adapt in the face of rapid technological shifts and societal disillusionment with their practices and platforms.
