As lovers of libraries, we often catch ourselves marveling at the Web's ability to retrieve a particular fragment of information in milliseconds.

Getting the exact piece of material you need in an instant – a citation, evidence, trivia, price, or location – can be quite gratifying. We often find it amusing to see people in a group, all on their phones, racing to find the best route, resolve a disagreement, or satisfy a bet.

Imagine how this capability would have changed lives in bygone eras, affording a massive competitive advantage, and maybe speeding up our development. Less than a century ago, such capabilities were the realm of magic or godly intervention.

People in their 50s have experienced an astounding improvement in online information retrieval over libraries and the Dewey Decimal card system. Ironically, the Web needs a "digital town library" to enhance our collective cognitive capacities. The digital library can be the container that acquires knowledge for collective sensemaking, meaning-making, and choice-making.

We thought a quantum shift in information retrieval and sharing would raise human consciousness and increase collective intelligence. The digital shift is in full effect. Yet we haven't noticed comforting changes in consciousness or collective intelligence. We know some people are working on the edges of consciousness, but overall humanity is in a sad state, with massive inequality and a beleaguered planet. And the Internet has morphed into a system for division and control.

At the Web's outset, humanity expressed a collective hope for the democratization of knowledge, leveling the playing field, and reducing inequality. Statistics tell a different story. We've become more unequal. In the past decade, wealth has become more concentrated, while the Internet Platforms mushroomed in market capitalization. Meanwhile, the average consumer has struggled financially as wages in the US have stagnated since the early 1970s.

Certainly, there are many factors at play. Geopolitics, monetary and technology policy, and macroeconomic trends, to name a few. The Web is perhaps the most influential and pervasive. Modern society relies on the Web for communication, information and news, locations and directions, weather reports, virtual storefronts, and payments. Pre-web, some of this information was available via radio and television, conversations, libraries, and services. But it wasn't usually worth the cost and/or time. Most real-time information was unavailable.

Mobile phones enable the perfect recall of an enormous set of facts, claims, and articles in search engines. Not only do we have exponentially more searchable information, we also have individual feeds optimized for our engagement.

As we weave new information into our perceptual map, we certainly feel smarter and may nuance our thinking, which could increase the likelihood of positive outcomes. But what if it's false? Perhaps it's inconsequential. But sometimes false information can lead to ineffective choices and/or disastrous outcomes.

Context can be helpful to discern what information is potentially harmful and merits greater scrutiny. Beyond links, however, the primary context in webpages is the content, the author, and site publisher. But what if we trust – or don't trust – sources for the wrong reasons?

And besides, even if better recall with discernment improved our understanding and choices, this wouldn't equate to society becoming smarter. We would argue that collective intelligence increases only if others learn from our experience. Of course, others can learn from our lessons and words. But that is not a foregone conclusion.

Besides the lesson being accessible and comprehensible, others would need to be there, notice the lesson, and surmise its importance within their perception of reality. As more activities go online, more learning opportunities will shift to digital spaces.

The digital world enables information sharing through social media and blogs. But unless we're an influencer, few people see our posts. Thus, the potential for others to benefit from our lessons is low, having a negligible effect on collective intelligence.

Were we an influencer, others could learn from our posts, assuming our content stays within the platform's acceptable narrative, or we own the platform. Since platforms popularize most influencers, the platforms own the audience. YouTubers, for example, do not have the phone numbers or email addresses of their subs. If a post conflicts with the platform's community guidelines or otherwise triggers its internal moderation process, much fewer subscribers will see the information.

Being aware and seeing our content is the first step in the learning process. Beyond awareness, the learner must ingest, process, and integrate the content to activate the learning process. And if they do not act upon it, it may not stick.

Humor us. There's an elephant in the room. Wherever you find yourself.

What would you say if we asked you to describe the elephant?

We may all think of different things. You may think about the subject of this book or a geopolitical issue. Or perhaps a pressing issue that needs your attention. Some of you no doubt are thinking about actual elephants – perhaps in clown suits – or even animated elephants floating by with big, floppy, Dumbo ears.

How you think about the elephant depends on your situation, perceptions, and life experience. Some haven't even heard the term, while others may use it frequently.

It could be anything. A problem domain, an issue we're wrestling with, or something we're avoiding. Absent coordinated thinking, we'll come to different conclusions about what's true. The blind men and the elephant parable originated in India around 1500 BCE. It has since traveled around the world. In the story, six blind men encounter different parts of an elephant, as shown in Figure 1.1. Each understands reality based on their limited experience

Figure 1.1 Six blind men and an elephant and perspective. For example, the blind man who touches the trunk thinks it's a snake. The blind man who touches the tusk thinks it's a spear. They all mistake it for something else. Despite sometimes-contradictory signals from sensory perceptions ("but it feels like a spear!") and life experiences, facts and truth do, in fact, exist and are knowable. The story's subject is actually an elephant – not a spear, snake, wall, tree, or fan.

Retellings of the story differ primarily in how they describe the elephant's body parts and whether the blind men discover their disagreements, how violent conflicts become, and any resolutions. In some versions, the blind men collaborate to "see" the full elephant. In others, when a sighted person describes the entire elephant from all perspectives, the blind men understand they were all partially correct, and all partially wrong.

While one's subjective experience may be true, it's not necessarily the entire truth. The parable shows that although one's subjective experience can be true, that experience may not account for other truths or the totality of truth.

Rather, the story provides a three-step path to truth. One, gather relevant information about the subject, including direct experiences, and the accounts of and inferences from the direct experiences of others. Two, resolve relevant contradictions and paradoxes. And three, discover "the Why" – the reason for being that reveals how the subject interconnects within reality.

We can discern "the Why" through relationships. How does the subject relate to its environment? Each part of the elephant, for example, enables its survival as a living organism. The elephant's primary use for tusks is fighting. But they're also useful for foraging, digging, stripping bark, moving things, and attracting females. When we understand how the elephant's parts aggregate into an entity distinct from and related to other aspects of the ecosystem, we know it's an elephant.

13th Century Persian mystic and poet Rumi included "The Elephant in the Dark" in his Masnavi, an extensive poem that is one of Sufism's most influential works. In Rumi's retelling, a group of Hindus observe an elephant in a dark room. Each man uses their hands to feel the elephant. Depending upon where they touch, they believe the elephant to be a waterspout (the trunk), a fan (an ear), a pillar (a leg), and a throne (the back). Rumi's words illuminate the limits of individual perception, "The eye of outward sense is as the palm of a hand, the whole of the object is not grasped in the palm."

This parable underscores the importance of going beyond individual experience, examining purported accounts of experience or truth, and considering the preponderance of evidence and perspectives. The Coleman Barks translation ends, "If each of us held a candle there, and if we went in together, we could see it."

As with the elephant, gathering perspectives is the first step for constructing insight or truth. One can find many perspectives on the Web. Like a blind man's direct experience, access to one perspective on a webpage is a start. But it's most useful with other perspectives.

Today's webpages, however, lack other perspectives. They are the perspective of the author. Besides outbound links, the main context is the author and publisher. Below we discuss how context shows up in the first two generations of the Web: Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. The following chapter explores all three generations of the Web, including Web 3.0, Web3, and the metaverse.

In Web 1.0, links were commonly used to cite sources or provide context about topics. Web surfing was a popular activity. You browsed the Web using links to navigate from one webpage to the next. You read or at least skimmed each page.

The Web 2.0 shift to social networking in the early 2000s birthed the Attention Economy. Emerging social networks and e-commerce sites began monetizing attention, which required them to keep users on their site so they could continue serving them ads and extracting their data. Commercial sites began avoiding outbound links in which they didn't have a financial interest, leading to the eventual demise of web surfing.

Web 2.0 social platforms rely on content feeds to hold your attention. Feeds provide sufficient information to discourage users from clicking through to articles. The feeds also disguise advertisements as content. Sites had shifted from being cairns along the path of knowledge on Web 1.0 to becoming destinations for engaging with content and buying things on Web 2.0.

Internet platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, use sophisticated algorithms to increase engagement and sales. The algorithms process web activity data to optimize each user's personal feed for the platform's agenda. Some platforms – including Facebook, Google, and Twitter – allow users to log in to other websites with their platform credentials. This enables the platforms to track user activity across the Web and to enhance their influence on user behavior.

Feeds are a popular way to find content. They display an endless list of content (and advertisements) that may interest the user based on their preferences and activity history. Feeds are lists of content previews with an image and text. Each preview also has reaction icons to "like" and share content, and make comments. Feeds optimize the display to increase the likelihood the user will engage with the content without clicking through to an external site. Some display the key metrics (e.g., likes, shares) of the post.

Facebook is a master at this. They provide a simple way for users to engage with content and to signal their alignment or opposition with minimal reading. A Facebook preview of an article includes the poster's comment, an image from the article, several lines of text from the article, and engagement icons. Their previews provide just enough information for users to engage without opening the article. Facebook wants users to like, comment, and share content without leaving their site.

According to a 2021 study, Facebook's click-through rate (CTR) for articles is just 2.5%, based on 6.5 million organic shares from 500 publishers worldwide.

Average CTR varies widely between content categories. Sports are highest at 4.5%. International news and foreign affairs are lowest at 1.8%. The study emphasized that AI-curated Facebook pages achieved CTRs identical to human-curated pages. This suggests that AI will be more cost-effective than manual social media posting. This advantage will increase as AI technology improves.

The Web 2.0 shift from web surfing to feeds has many implications that we will discuss later. For now, feeds clearly lead to a more shallow web experience than web surfing. Now people just scan the list of content prepared for them. If an image or word catches their attention, they look deeper and read the little text. They often give likes, comments, and shares, and return to the feed, without actually reading the article.

Facebook users usually engage with articles without reading them, much less seeking additional context or information about the article's claims. Whereas web surfers would read enough to find links and click through, Facebook users open fewer than 3% of the articles they share.

Engaging without reading has downsides. The user doesn't know the article's quality, its claims, or the Why. Without this level of scrutiny, they're flying blind and could inadvertently spread harmful misinformation. This problem exacerbates on Twitter, where false information is more viral than the truth.

Let's say you're scanning a Facebook feed. Much of your feed is clickbait. People obviously aren't reading what they share.

Nevertheless, an image sparks your interest. You read the comment and the three lines below the photo. Wanting more, you click through to read the article. A claim in the article is surprising, and you'd like more information. But you're stuck because there are no outbound links or previous stories. You're at the Internet equivalent of a dead-end street. Unfortunately, much more common nowadays than before.

Prompted by a thought or question, we may start our online session with a search engine. Or simply typing a site's name in the URL bar. We may follow several sites. Some people use bookmarks for this purpose. But if you're like us, you have a bunch of tabs open.

Alternatively, we may receive a message via email, text, or a messaging app. Messages may come from trusted contacts or someone we don't know. If it includes a link, we can click through to get more information. Hopefully, it's not malicious.

As in the previous section, we also find content through our personal social feeds. Or those of other people and groups. The social feeds display an ordered set of content previews selected by AI algorithms based on personal or group preferences and/or patterns of engagement with previous content. We can click through the content snippet to see its source page.

If the page has links, we can follow them. Nowadays, most links are to different pages on the same website or pages the author has a financial interest in promoting.

Consider a typical news story. The article may embed a tweet, but doesn't have other external links. Internal links include navigation, related articles, and previous stories. You read the article. You can follow the provided links but they loop through the site. We call this an information silo. You're stuck in one perspective.

As you skim the source page, a specific claim in the text captures your attention (Figure 1.2). It could be something shocking, novel, or counter-intuitive; perhaps something that we had not considered, or that surprises or outrages us, proves our point, or illicitly confirms our biases.

Maybe you're wondering about the claim's source or you think it sounds off-base or too good to be true. Maybe you're wondering where else it has happened, under what circumstances, and what studies confirm or contradict the claim.

But unfortunately, claims rarely have links to substantiating or discrediting information. Again, we've reached the web equivalent of a dead-end street.

We can re-read the claim and the contextual information on the page. If the page allows comments, you can read them and comment yourself. We can select the snippet, as shown in the figure, and copy it to the clipboard or right-click to start a search, print, or select a browser plugin to operate on the snippet. But that's it. We don't have other options.

Alas, today's flat and static web is prone to dead-ends. Each page has one main layer of content served from the web server that hosts it. Some pages have pop-ups (or modals) with brief explanations, subscription forms, videos, and cookie acknowledgments. Sites with pirated content such as movies and shows often have pop-up ads. These may come from content or ad servers. No one likes pop-up ads.

Figure 1.2 A claim in an article is selected (courtesy of Wikipedia).

As an aside, we often wonder who's with us on the same webpage. On a popular page, there could be hundreds of people reading the same text, looking at the same images, and/or watching the same video. Being on the same webpage speaks to a simultaneous interest in the content. Were we in a café and we noticed someone reading the same book, we might ask what they think about the book. Our operating assumption would be that there could be some mutual benefit in interacting.

Today's web, however, is isolating. You can't know who is on the same webpage despite the site owner keeping records of everyone on their site via cookies. Cookies are small text blocks created by web servers when users browse a website. When visiting a commercial site, a pop-up will display along the bottom of the screen that explains how the site uses cookies. You must acknowledge this (or adjust the cookie settings) as a condition of using the site and making the pop-up disappear.

These pop-ups implement the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). GDPR sets guidelines for the collection and processing of personal information from individuals who live in Europe. (We discuss GDPR in the section of Chapter 8 called Europe Aims to Regulate the Web.) The web browser places the cookie on the user's computer or mobile device. The cookie tracks your activity during the session. Websites dedicate sessions to each visitor rather than convening group sessions, which prevents us from knowing who else is there.

Back to the article's claim. If we're still curious about the claim, we may invest time in research. Competing interests, time concerns, and the lack of effective and impactful ways to share information can, however, discourage further exploration.

We can weigh the potential value of new information, our sense of the effort involved, and our other priorities. If the "opportunity cost" – the perceived value of the best alternative use of our time – seems less than the expected value of the information we expect to find, we'll probably keep going.

Depending on our orientation towards the web, we might turn to search and/or social media for more information. Many people discover content on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn feeds and through topical groups that they have joined. Sc

a group, influencer, or your own – is a passive way of discovering information, like fishing with poles rather than spears. We prefer search to find specifics about a claim.

Searching, either through in-platform content or external sites like Google or Bing, is an active way to discover information. In-platform search includes user posts and different sections of the platform. For example, Facebook search covers groups, pages, events, the marketplace, and more. Facebook personalizes your content feed to increase engagement. This search only covers content posted on Facebook.

Google is the 900-pound gorilla with over 90% of the search market. Google Search includes video, images, maps, news, shopping, books, flights, and finance, among others. They personalize search results to increase engagement. Their monopoly is highly profitable. Their parent company, Alphabet, is among the world's most valuable companies.

Still, search engines access only a small part of the Web. The 4% of the Web available through search engines is called the surface web. The surface web includes Wikipedia, ESPN, and news sites, for example.

Another 95% of the web – the Deep Web – includes websites that are not indexed by search engines and hence are unavailable in a simple search. These pages may require you to sign in or complete a CAPTCHA challenge-response test to determine whether the user is human. Examples of Deep Web sites include email, online banking, and subscription-based services; video streaming services like Netflix or HBO; company intranets; educational or library websites; government-related pages or legal documents; and medical records.

Another approximately 1% of the Web is the dark web.2 The dark web (or darknet) includes hidden sites with TOR (The Onion Router) URLs that are impossible to remember, guess, or understand, and require a special browser to access. Most TOR pages are encrypted and have anonymous hosts.

The darknet hosts sites for illicit drugs, weapons, hacked credit cards, child pornography, and unauthorized scans of books and publications. The dark web also provides a secret communication channel for journalists, human rights activists, political activities, and the military, as well as storage for government intelligence reports, political records, and other sensitive data.

Despite search covering just a small amount of the Web, like fish in water, most people automatically move the cursor to the address bar and start typing search terms related to the claim. Search integration into the browser address bar is seamless. We try to guess words that webpage authors might have used in the article or the page's metadata (e.g., title, description, or tags).

As we enter characters, by default, Google provides auto-completion and suggestions. Matches display in a dropdown menu and the top result displays in your address bar, adjusting as you type.

For example, when we started typing "nf" in Chrome's address bar, it generated four search term options in a dropdown menu: "nft scams," "nft sales leaderboard," "NFL," and "nft."

When we added the t on nft, the dropdown options morphed to: "nft scams," "nft sales leaderboard," "nft que es," and "nft marketplace." Most of the suggestions were our previous search terms. NFL came up because it's a popular search term and "nft que es" because we're in Mexico at the moment.

When we type "rus," the dropdown shows "russia plans to attack ukraine," "russell 2000," "russian currency," and Russia (the country).

Google generates these auto-completions and suggestions using AI based on proprietary algorithms that include popular searches and the user's browsing history.

At some point, you click Enter to accept the auto-completion, select one of Google's suggestions from the dropdown or finish entering your own words. You have submitted search terms to Google's global brain, which is an information organizer, surveillance apparatus, and attention broker.

Google then does its magic and almost instantaneously serves up a search engine results page (SERP). At the top, Google displays the number of results retrieved by the search algorithm, and the fraction of a second that it took to generate them.

The extent of what most people see, the initial result page displays a handful of the top organic listings below paid listings. Paid listings include sponsored text ads, aka Google Ads, or other advertisements, such as ads that display on the top or side of the page and/or SERP features.

The results page has distinct features that provide detailed information without requiring one to click through to a webpage. Like other Internet platforms, Google aims to keep people on its site as long as possible, increasing the likelihood that they will click on an ad.

Google continually tests at least 15 SERP features. These include shopping results, top stories, "people also ask," a "Local Maps Pack" of nearby sources for related products, and options for adding/editing filters or search terms.

Often Google can resolve your search terms to a definition, topic, calculation, or an answer for a common question (e.g., how to do X using product Y). These display as a featured snippet at the top of the page. Featured snippets are based on an AI-powered knowledge graph that contains 500 billion facts about five billion entities, which debuted in 2012. The definitions of words are from online dictionaries. The topics are from Wikipedia. If you click through on the featured snippet, Google now highlights the specific text on the source page.

As featured snippets have become more prevalent in search results, zero-click searches on Google have seen a steady increase. In 2020, 65% of Google Searches ended without a click to another web property – up from just 50% in June 2019. Google is further integrating AI into Google Search and its other products. We expect zero-click searches to grow in an AI-enhanced Google Search where chatbot responses are shown above organic search results.

Higher-ranking pages have the search terms in their metadata rather than just relevant content. But pages contain dozens of ideas. Each idea could merit its own set of metadata. These ideas are invisible to the search engine unless they match keywords. Hence, search engines are ineffective at finding content that's indirectly related to the page's metadata or not using the exact words of the search terms.

The listings for the recommended sites on the SERP point to a page URL. Clicking through takes you to the top of the page. This requires you to review entire pages to surmise what content relates to your search. This can be problematic for longer pages and documents with diverse content.

The first page has, on average, the first 8.5 organic search results (out of millions). A 2020 study showed that the first position in search results has an average click-through rate of 28.5% (Figure 1.3). The average CTRs of the second and third positions are 15% and 11%.

Some search terms contain valuable information after the first several pages of search results, but they get minimal click-throughs from search. We call this the long tail of search. Unsurprisingly, enterprising companies battle over the top search positions in commercial categories. We don't know how top search results reflect alignment with our search terms versus superior search engine optimization (SEO). SEO improves an enterprise's website to increase visibility in search engines. Unfortunately, SEO detracts from the overall quality of

search results, as content made for links shows up after the first several pages.

The better visibility in search results, the more likely they will attract prospective and existing customers to their offerings. Hence, companies spend stacks on services promising first-page ranking for specific keyword combinations. Experts expect the SEO services

market to grow from $47 billion in 2020 to $103 billion in 2025, at an annual rate of 17%. SEO is growing in importance.4

Figure 1.3 Decreasing click-through rates (CTRs) by search ranking order.

21% of searches have over one click on Google's results.5 Since the search results link to a page rather than a specific idea, you need to skim each page for related content. This can be time-consuming, as longer pages rank higher in Google's search results; in 2020, the average Google first page result contained 1,447 words.6

Let's say you're atypical. You look at the top three or even ten pages (which still only reflect a tiny fraction of the results). You revise search terms to get better results. Perhaps spending hours searching within your interests.

Suppose you find something interesting about the claim. What can you do with it? How can other people who read the same article benefit from what you learned?

Usually, it's best to write a blog post or make a YouTube video. But that's time-consuming. And it's unlikely your article will be high enough in the search results for others to notice.

Even when a popular blogger posts on breaking news, there's latency between the time of the post and when Google's "spider" discovers the post and makes it available in the search index. Experts say, although it varies, the average crawl time can be anywhere from several days to a month, depending on many factors, including the site's authority.7

Hence, people rely on feeds like Twitter to get breaking news.

Also, unless your article gets a lot of incoming links, it is unlikely that it will rank high in the search results. If you don't have an audience, the potential effect is limited and fleeting. So, it may not make sense to write a post or make a video.

Most people will tweet it or post it on a messaging app or the wall of a social platform. They may copy the text and paste into a Google doc, Roam, or Evernote, text or email it to themselves or friends, bookmark it, or just leave it open on a tab. Or maybe none of the above.

Organizing information via pages with links, search index latency, and the lack of effective options to archive and share discoveries, make it difficult for search users to learn from and build upon each other's research. Learning from one another is a prerequisite to collective intelligence.

Meanwhile, Google hoards sufficient information about you to autocomplete your search terms, make relevant suggestions, and personalize your search results. They also know which search results we are clicking through. Collectively, the same searches happen over and again, enabling Google to deliver trillions of search advertising impressions and to make billions of dollars. Yet, collective intelligence has flatlined, stunted by a discovery paradigm that has only a few clear winners – Google itself, the SEO industry, and the platform feeds, which provide the primary content discovery alternative.

If external search does not yield results, we may decide to search on a specific platform (e.g., Reddit) or within a group. We might post in a forum. Or more likely, we'd lose interest and focus on something else.

Remember the dead-end webpage with the claim? We wondered if it was true. Social media and search were our only options, as there were no relevant links to external information. We were alone with a claim on a flat and static webpage.

Before we visualize the Web's hyper-dimensional future, let's travel back in time to Europe in the early 1800s before cakes had layers. No one knows what a layer cake is. Let's say you're an evangelist for multi-layer cakes. You go around town describing a layer cake. But everyone thinks you're daft. They ask, "why would I do that?" You describe a world of flavors, textures, and displays. Somehow, layer cakes have reignited a creative streak within you and you revel in the full artistic and practical possibilities.

One day, you get an invitation to a high society wedding. After the ceremony, the servants bring out several large flat sheet cakes. How boring. You lean over and tell your friend that the most celebratory occasion of one's life merits a very special cake. They don't get it. So you grab a notebook and draw a three-layer wedding cake. The bottom layer is for the party. The middle is for after the wedding. And the top for later. It's so clear ... to you.

On a soapbox in the town square, you encourage people to invest in the layered future of cakes. As you talk, your friend holds up portraits you commissioned of newlyweds and wedding cakes. You promise an affiliate fee for anyone who can place your layer cakes in a bakery. Still, the townsfolk are not receptive. Undismayed, you carry on with lectures about the future of cake wherever they will have you.

The world changes in 1735 when a master baker in Frankfurt, Germany, invents the Frankfurt Crown Cake. It comprises two or three layers of sponge cake filled with jam and buttercream and frosted with more buttercream. Adventurous European bakers adopt the layer cake. Wedding cakes become a thing as you had envisioned. The town folk now see you as a visionary baker.

Today's web is like the early 1800s in the world of cake. Until then, cakes had one layer. But in the mid-1800s, someone made a multi-layer cake, changing the paradigm. It was now possible to have many layers, creating new categories of layer cakes and, later, wedding cakes. Bakers could imagine a world of possibilities for layers to enhance taste, texture, and display.

Similarly, Today's Web is the first layer of the cake.

Let's step back. Recall the four-layer web cake in the first figure of the Introduction. The bottom layer is Today's Web. Above that, it has a meta-level called the Metaweb, which comprises three layers: Annotation, Web3, and Computation.

Let's put things in perspective. From the top, imagine the cake as if it were a laptop screen or a book. In fact, imagine grabbing the web cake by its sides and propping it up at an angle so that it is at a comfortable reading angle.

The bottom layer is the Web of today – the page content and any embedded ads or pop-ups.

Now imagine a transparent second layer of annotations. In its most simplistic and common form, notes display as overlays to related pieces of text in the bottom layer. If, for example, a piece of text has annotations, it lights up. Clicking through displays the notes related to the text.

These first two layers – content and annotations – were integral to early visions of the modern computer and were included in the first widely distributed web browsers, Mosaic and its successor Netscape. But Netscape removed annotations from the browser in 1995 under competitive threat and lacking a place to store them.

The emergent third layer of the cake is a Web3 wallet but over every webpage. Web3 wallets, also known as decentralized wallets, are an essential component of the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem and enable their users to interact with several thousand decentralized applications (dApps) built on blockchain technology. These dApps take on many forms, including DeFi (decentralized finance), decentralized exchanges (DEXs), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), "play-to-earn" video games with token rewards, and NFT minting sites.

Some of the key capabilities that web3 wallets enable include:

• Asset management: Web3 wallets allow users to store, send, and receive cryptocurrencies, tokens, and other digital assets in a secure, decentralized manner.
• DeFi transactions: Web3 wallets enable users to participate in various DeFi activities such as yield farming, staking, lending and borrowing, and trading on DEXs.
• dApp interaction: Users can use their Web3 wallets to interact with decentralized applications and access their features and services.
• Control over funds: In a Web3 wallet, the user holds the private keys to their assets, giving them full control over their funds without the need for intermediaries.
• Privacy: Some Web3 wallets enable users to transact anonymously or with increased privacy.

The Metaweb expands the availability of Web3 wallets from thousands of dApps to the entire Web, over 2 billion sites. Thus, on the Metaweb, you can transact without a middleman above any webpage.

Regarding the web cake, Web3 wallets display as sidebars or pop-ups, usually on the right side. We discuss Web3 in greater detail in Chapter 2, Three Generations of the Web.

You're among the first to know about the cake's nascent top layer. The transparent top layer places code above related content on webpages, enabling computations that present information and options to participants, handle their interactions, and present the results. This layer allows real people, information, interactions, and even communities to have a presence above the webpage. This also enables participants to have their own personal AI assistant above every webpage. This computational layer is where the Metaweb comes alive. We explore the Metaweb in the last and largest section of the book.

For the past three decades, humanity has mostly confined its thinking about the Web to the content layer. Few outside of annotation and Web3 have thought about layers above the webpage. And many have unnecessarily limited their thinking to text-on-text. But now you know what is possible. This book just installed the novel notion of web layers in your mind. Multi-layered web experiences are everything.

You may now realize you can become a baker in this new computational layer, the Metaweb. Imagine a world of possibilities for overlaying information, interactions, and transactions above Today's Web. Everything changes. The Web now includes a meta-level above the webpage that dynamically displays related information and interactions available to the viewer. A hyper-dimensional web over the web.

As a meta-level that overlays the webpage, the Metaweb is a browser overlay, which can be accessed via Metaweb browser extensions, Metaweb-enabled mobile browser applications, and Metaweb-enabled browsers.

Browser overlays offer valuable features that existing browsers cannot provide. One such feature is computational continuity between web sessions. While cookies enable computational continuity between site visits on Today's Web, browser overlays allow for computation continuity across all sites through overlay applications. This opens up possibilities that cannot happen on Today's Web, such as data capture, applications, and AI working on your behalf and at your discretion across sites and web sessions.

As you may imagine, an overlay application that is active and operates over every relevant webpage can powerfully augment the traditional browsing experience. For instance, overlay applications can work seamlessly across multiple sites in a browser session; computational continuity enables complex tasks that would be impossible with traditional browsers. Possibilities include scam detection applications, custom content filters, and personal AI assistants that accompany you wherever you go on the Web,

In addition, browser overlays offer enhanced privacy and security, making them ideal for people who are concerned about online safety. With an overlay, you can have more control over your data and its use, as well as better protection against malicious attacks and other online threats.

We often consider ourselves to be the highest beings on the planet, yet nature holds many secrets that can teach us valuable lessons. For example, the humble ant has much to teach us about collaboration and organization.

Ants use a mechanism called stigmergy to work together and accomplish tasks without direct communication. Stigmergy is a form of indirect coordination where ants leave traces in the environment that stimulate future actions. These traces can be physical, such as pheromone trails, or informational, such as the position of food. By responding to these traces, ants are able to coordinate their actions and work together as a highly organized and efficient unit.

One of the wonders that ants accomplish with stigmergy is building intricate nests and colonies. Without any central leader or direct communication, ants construct complex structures with precision and efficiency. For example, leafcutter ants farm fungus and build underground chambers that can span several acres. Similarly, termites build towering mounds that can reach up to 30 feet tall.

Another example is the foraging behavior of ants; they find food and bring it back to the colony with remarkable speed and efficiency. Ants lay down pheromone trails to food sources far from the colony for other ants to follow. They form foraging lines that can stretch for hundreds of meters, enabling them to exploit food sources in ways that would be impossible for an individual ant.

Cairns, signs, and social media posts are examples of stigmergic communication, as the communication is mediated by the environment, rather than through direct interactions between individuals. The complexity and sophistication, however, of stigmergic communication in ants is much greater. Ants convey a wide range of information and coordinate highly complex behaviors through stigmergy, while cairns, signs, and social media posts are typically used to convey relatively simple information.

Stigmergy itself is an example of biomimicry, an interdisciplinary field that involves studying nature and its processes to find inspiration for designing human-made systems, products, and technologies. It's a holistic approach to design that looks at natural systems as a model, measuring stick, and mentor for the design of human systems. The field is relatively new but gaining momentum in the last couple of decades.

It's a way to create more sustainable and efficient systems by learning from the natural world, which has been fine-tuning its processes for millions of years. Biomimicry can be applied to a wide range of fields, from product design and manufacturing to energy generation and storage, to transportation and urban planning. The Metaweb applies biomimicry to the design of the next level of the Internet.

The Metaweb mimics the ants, using virtual stigmergy as a mechanism for indirect coordination. The Metaweb itself is a stigmergic structure that allows us to leave traces in the environment, like the ants, enabling us to work together and accomplish tasks without direct communication. With smart tags and bridges, we can coordinate our efforts and collaborate in ways that are far more efficient than current methods. By embracing the principles of stigmergy, we can unlock the true potential of the Web and build a better future for humanity.

On the Metaweb, the top three layers of the web cake (annotations, Web3, and computations) support collaboration through asynchronous interactions via stigmergy. In these layers, participants can leave traces of metadata and interactions for others to interact with. In the Metaweb, participants can receive rewards for leaving and responding to traces. This enables and incentivizes collaboration and information sharing on the Web without the need for direct communication.

Asynchronous collaboration via stigmergy allows for large-scale participation and collaboration on a project without direct communication. This makes it possible for a vast number of people to contribute and collaborate on a project, increasing the likelihood that the project will achieve a diverse range of ideas and solutions.

Asynchronous collaboration allows people to contribute and collaborate on their own schedule, regardless of their location or time zone. This can be particularly beneficial for global challenges that require participation from people around the world.

Indirect collaboration via stigmergy allows for continuous progress on a project, even when direct communication is not possible. People can contribute and build on each other's work, even when they are not online at the same time.

The top computational layer of the web cake also supports synchronous interactions, which include real-time presence and interactions. This allows for real-time communication and collaboration on webpages. Real-time communication and interactions allow for faster problem-solving and more efficient decision-making. It enables for direct communication and coordination that can be critical in tackling challenges that require quick action and resolution.

Combining real-time communication and interactions with asynchronous, indirect collaboration via stigmergy provides a comprehensive and versatile approach to tackling global challenges. It allows for the coordination of large-scale participation and the scalability of ideas and solutions, while also providing the flexibility and continuity needed to address these challenges.

Overall, having an environment that supports both asynchronous and indirect collaboration via stigmergy and real-time communication and interactions can help to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of thinking, learning, and building knowledge together.

Let's now picture people with a presence in this collaborative meta-layer. When you go to a webpage, you can choose to become visible in its canopi. The canopi is a sidebar, like a rooftop speakeasy above the webpage. If you're visible in the canopi, you see other visible people. A list displays each person's avatar, name, and how long they've been there.

Hovering over the avatar of a "visible" person displays the information they make available to people they don't know. For example, in the canopi of an NFT marketplace, @ wildarrow stands out. Like many web users, she has a pseudonym, preferring not to reveal her actual identity. Her avatar is a cartoon image of a femme archer. Her profile reveals that she is "hodling" – a misspelling of "holding" that refers to a buy-and-hold investment strategy in the world of crypto – several digital assets. We see as well that she has several certifications and verifications from trusted authorities. Her profile says she has a secure launchpad for digital assets that verifies all its projects.

Even though we don't know @wildarrow, we know she's a real person in good standing. She is not a bot, a fake account, a serial abuser, or a throwaway account. We know she's real because this layer required her to prove her humanity. She is visible in this layer because she is in good standing.

Perhaps we want to launch a digital asset project and are interested in learning about her service. We start the communication by clicking her name and entering a message.

@wildarrow receives the notification of our message. She clicks through to her chatrooms; our conversation request is at the top of the list. She clicks our message, which displays a stranger danger warning. Like Facebook, when she replies, a chatroom appears for us. She drops her link and we chat as we visit her site. @wildarrow tells us she is interested in doing a ceremony with Abuelita (i.e., Ayahuasca), so we drop a link to a trip that we are thinking about.

We both click through to a page about an upcoming trip to the Sacred Village of the Yawanawá tribe in Acre, Brazil. After sharing our experience with the Yawanawá, we say farewell and head to the visible list. From now on, we can connect with @wildarrow through our chatroom.

Back to the canopi. Third from the top of the visible list, we see our friend @soulutions4444. She's been on the page for 20 minutes and was last seen 1 minute ago. We met in a ceremony, built a friendship, yet have been out of touch. She is happy to see us. We didn't realize she was thinking about the jungle trip. We send her a message about connecting later. She replies, "Beleeezza! Meet me on this canopi" and posts a link.

Ahead of our meeting, we navigate to the canopi; it's an ongoing threaded live chat in a sidebar over the Yawanawá trip page. As we wait for Meli to appear, we review the most recent and pinned posts. We respond affirmatively to a message asking whether to get seat cushions for the 9-hour boat ride to the village. Then we post a message asking if anyone has an update on whether they have resumed sacred frog medicine ceremonies. A voyager replies it wasn't happening on their last trip because someone had a patent on it. That's weird.

We review the upcoming events in the canopi, find one, and register to receive an email reminder and notifications when it begins. As we scroll through the page, sentences and images light up, signaling the existence of relevant information and interactions. One of the images catches our attention; the badge says there are 13 related smart tags. We click the badge and skim the notes, conversations, and bridges related to the image. Just then, Meli pops up. She's ready to talk! She wants to know if we will co-host an AMA8 on her project's canopi later that night. We check our calendars and there's no conflict, so it's a go!

Just then, we hear a beep and navigate to the flashing tab. It's an entirely different world – a page about the Celtic deity Brigitte – and we are active as a different persona, @friarbuck. The notification shows a travel YouTuber we follow named @brigitteconnects went visible in the page's canopi. She's doing a livestream above the Web.

In a democratic future, attention won't drive the economy like today. Rather than being optimized as a goal, attention will trigger indicators of metadata and interactions related to the focus of your attention.

Consider an idea you want to learn more about. It could be text, imagery, or a segment of video or audio. As your attention moves towards the idea – a laptop cursor or touch on mobile – active content lights up.

The browser tracks the movement of your attention on the page. If your attention comes towards content for which information exists in the invisible meta-layer, it lights up.

As your attention comes closer, the highlight materializes with a badge. The badge contains the number of smart tags attached to the content.

Smart tags connect information, interactions, transactions, and experiences to pieces of content on a webpage. Notes are an example of a smart tag that provides information. Polls gather the opinions of webpage visitors. Bridges connect two ideas with a relationship.

Clicking the number displays an overview of the tags related to the content. The overview is a 360° contextual view of related information. This includes supporting and contradicting bridges, notes, conversations, upcoming meetings, lists, polls, and any other tag that someone related to the content. We can drill down on smart tags that pique our interest.

Imagine bringing your attention to a piece of content and having access to all the relevant contextual information. Today you have next to nothing. Not only is it filterable, but you can choose the ranking algorithm. Ranking algorithms order what you see based on potential relevance, popularity within relevant thought communities, and the reputation of the poster and curators. By choosing the algorithm, you're exercising cognitive freedom.

So we go from a dead-end page to having access to relevant information for the focus of our attention. That means you can access an unbiased set of information directly related to what you are looking at. When your attention moves away, the overlay disappears. Multiple pieces of content on a page can have metadata in the meta-layer.

Recall the second figure from the Introduction. The Metaweb is the next level of the Web, comprising three contextual layers above the webpage.9 Annotation is the first layer of the Metaweb and provides context for pieces of text on webpages. Structured text and multimedia annotations are the future. You will also be able to annotate images, video, audio, and other types of web content, such as tweets.

The second layer of the Metaweb is Web3, which adds a blockchain-based digital wallet to the webpage. Blockchain wallets enable a dApp to know who's on the page and what digital assets they possess. The wallet holder must give their approval. The wallet also enables transactions with these digital assets. This opens up many new interactions. Such as trading tokens on DEXs, playing video games to earn tokens, accessing blogs and music directly from artists, and trading fragments of digital culture (i.e., NFTs).

The third layer of the Metaweb is the computational layer that enables structured information, interactions, transactions, and experiences to be associated with any piece of content on the Web. This is where the magic happens.

Imagine – as you traverse the Web via bridges – having instant access to insightful information and invaluable interactions you didn't know existed as follows.

Claims in articles – besides bridges to studies, related content, and historical data, you may encounter ongoing conversations, surveys, lists, 3D models, fact checks, etc.

Products and services – you can access ratings, reviews, nearby stores with in-stock products, auctions, support agents, medical warnings, competitive products, how-to info, expert consultations, scam alerts, and more.

For matters vital to humanity – you might encounter AMAs, clubhouses and Twitter-like spaces, video meetings, conversations, surveys, podcasts, counselors, debates, open mics, multiverse portals, predictions, etc.

Words and phrases – you can access definitions, synonyms, antonyms, pronunciations, rhymes, Wikipedia entries, etymology, and translations.

Creator content – you may encounter info about the creator, their motivations, their merch, tipping jars, and more.

This is just a taste of what's possible. You choose to explore what's most relevant to you. Beyond this, your smart filter can screen out tags you're not interested in. You can also "blackout" offensive or distracting content and advertisements on webpages.

Let's say you've activated an overlay app for travel. Whenever you encounter text or images regarding a travel destination or attraction, you will have access to detailed information including its location, relevant info, costs, how to get there, reviews, state department alerts, recent news, weather and forecasts, online expat groups, and more. You will also be able to plan trips and meet other travelers above the webpage content. And keep in mind, this is a partially thought-out example for one industry. There will be apps for every industry.

At any idea, you could have many bridges to follow. Consider that an idea can bridge to many types of media and locations on the Metaweb. A quotation in a speech, a face in an image, a paragraph in a report, or a passage in an eBook, a segment of a YouTube video, a podcast clip, a chorus of a song, a tweet, or even a table behind a paywall.

Each bridge has a relationship. They can be supporting, opposing, citing, and more. These relationships make the Metaweb more human-centric and useful than other discovery methods. We can also use the relationships to choose which paths to follow and to decipher false information. For example, consider that most "fake news" is not entirely fake. The purveyors of fake content often embed falsehoods within otherwise verifiable information. In the Metaweb, each claim has its own verified connections to supporting and contradicting evidence. You can focus on the claims with contradictory bridges.

Moreover, the connections can go beyond the Web to your files, a blockchain transaction, even a bitcoin inscription, or, through virtual experience, product packaging, a paragraph in a book, or a geolocation.

Now imagine each piece of information bridges to dozens of ideas. It's a three-dimensional ball of connections. The connections are red, yellow, and green for contradicting, citing, and supporting. Each idea has its own stack of information and interactions. You navigate among them by focusing your attention and following connections.

If you have ads enabled, they relate to what you are focusing on – unlike typical display advertising, which seeks to capture and refocus your attention. Contextually relevant ads support your attention. And you may have the chance to win rewards for simply enabling ads.

We think such an experience of the Web would delight participants and inspire behavior change. Provided they understand how to make their smart filter work for them.

We have seen how the computational layer of the Metaweb turns a dead-end page with no relevant external links into the foundational layer of an evergreen page. One that deeply connects to an ever-growing set of relevant information on other pages. The dead-end webpage becomes the jumping off point for rabbit holes of information and interactions that relate to pieces of content on the page. On the Metaweb, you choose your own adventure.

In Figure 1.4, we are confronted with Mark Henson's captivating painting titled "The March of Progress," a powerful call to action. The artwork depicts a group of animals desperately fleeing a monstrous figure formed by an explosion of human activities, taking the shape of an ominous dollar sign. This monstrous figure symbolizes the destructive forces of capitalism, greed, and materialism that have unleashed primal survival dynamics gone awry, highlighting the fact that we have inadvertently become our own worst enemy.

Could this be the biblical Beast? Are we under the influence of Moloch, the deity representing coordination problems, perverse incentives, and sacrificial practices? The term Moloch originated in the Old Testament, referring to a pagan god associated with the sacrifice of children. While condemned in biblical texts, Moloch has since become a metaphor for sacrificing human values and well-being in order to appease powerful forces or interests.

In the modern context, Moloch represents the negative externalities that arise from prioritizing self-interest over the common good. It embodies the metaphorical god demanding sacrifices of time, resources, and overall well-being from individuals and society to satisfy its insatiable appetite for profit and growth.

Let us acknowledge the immense sacrifices and unnecessary suffering we have inflicted upon our planet and its inhabitants. The tools for change are primarily in the hands of individuals driven by unchecked ambition and trapped in cycles of fear. However, we must recognize that the thinking patterns guiding these destructive forces are outdated and no longer valid.

Figure 1.4 The March of Progress.

The true destructive forces we face are not external threats lurking "out there"; they are the limitations and patterns of our own thinking, which are shaped and reinforced by the tools we create. In essence, we make our tools, and our tools make us. The solution lies in liberating our minds from outdated beliefs and paradigms. To do this, we will need new tools.

To embark on this transformative journey, we must raise our consciousness and transcend the narrow boundaries of individuality. We need to see ourselves as a collective human entity, united in our shared destiny. Additionally, we must move away from destructive and power-concentrating institutions, such as the attention economy and debt-based monetary systems that perpetuate endless growth, counterproductive centralization, and unnecessary hierarchies in society.

By recognizing our collective power and potential, breaking free from our cognitive cage, and building new tools that nurture our collective potential, we can unleash an unprecedented level of coordination and collaboration necessary to address our global challenges. Cooperation becomes paramount as we understand that our well-being is intricately intertwined with that of others and the planet as a whole. To achieve this, we need to develop a new operating system and a new web.

Liberating our minds, raising our consciousness, perceiving ourselves as a collective, and embracing new ways of coordination and collaboration are integral components of a profound societal transformation known as the Regenaissance. This emerging transformative movement wholeheartedly embraces regenerative practices, nurturing a harmonious and sustainable coexistence among humans and with the natural world. By engaging in collective thought and action, harnessing the full potential of our tools, and sharing a resolute commitment to change, we can forge a path towards a harmonious and thriving world for ourselves and future generations.

Later in the book, after presenting what's not working with Today's Web, we'll explore how the Metaweb theory can address the web's thorniest problems and neutralize the harmful effects of the Attention Economy. Then we'll present a web that supports the unprecedented levels of connection, communication, and coordination needed to address our global challenges. Finally, we will describe the foundational elements of the next-level web, how it addresses today's problems, what becomes possible, and where we can go from here.

Through this unfurling, we posit the web of the future. A web of people, information, and interactions far superior and more profound than Today's Web. A web that transforms humanity from lemmings on a suicidal trajectory to active participants in an evolutionary success story that humanity can marvel at 100 years from now.

We aim for a web that transcends problems that seem intractable today so we can face our global challenges as a collective, unencumbered by an Attention Economy that seeks to influence our behavior. Our vision is a web that honors free speech and privacy, allowing us to own and control our data, and rewards us for the value of our contributions.

We covet a web that enables every person to find their place in the digital realm and to thrive at their highest expression of themselves. Humanity needs a web that not only enables us to think, learn, and build knowledge together, but also helps us better understand ourselves, one another, and our world.

This book describes a web that enables us to grow collectively intelligent and supports our development of collective cognitive capabilities. A web that enables us to connect, convene, communicate, cooperate, coordinate, and collaborate at unprecedented levels so that we can take humanity to the next level. An Internet that connects today's splintering web of languages into a cohesive whole that enables connection, communication, and cooperation across tongues and peoples.

We set our sights on a next-level web for the next level of humanity that creates decentralized public space above every webpage. A digital overlay with purpose-aligned meta-communities of real people in good standing with their communities. Every idea becomes locatable and connects into a massive web of information and interactions that provides humanity with a hyper-dimensional shared context that we call the Metaweb.

In the simplest terms, the Metaweb is the space above the webpage that contains information and interactions related to the page and its content. In the Metaweb future, the webpage becomes the contextual footprint for "intertwingled" worlds of information, interactions, transactions, and experiences that emanate from the focus of our attention.

Of paramount importance, Bridgit DAO's Metaweb initiative – The Overweb – presents a new social contract that enables safe and productive use of digital overlays to create the realities we want to live in. A newly merged reality that begets the New Earth of our collective dreams. An unlimited yet easy-to-navigate, next-generation web. A next level of the Internet that is safe yet exciting and illuminating. A continual learning experience, where the eventual outcome is a renewed humanity, which has ascended to the next level of consciousness. And a renewed "you" that actively takes part in the transition.

Ultimately, we celebrate the unleashing of a wild, truth-seeking, deeply connected feminine energy into the basic notion of the Web. This goddess energy enables healthy masculine energy to work through logic, reason, and action. We want a synergistic balance that enhances collective cognitive capabilities, enables democracy, and catalyzes a digital Akashic record, optimizing for freedom, trust, and accountability.

May the high order feminine and masculine energies dance symbiotically above the webpage.

1. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/facebook-ctr-publishers

2. We acknowledge the negative connotations associated with the terms "dark web," "darknet," "black market," and "whitelist" for people with dark skin. It is important for the Overweb to create a new, non-racialized language that accurately describes the complexities of the Overweb without perpetuating harmful stereotypes and biases.

3. This experiment was done in early April 2022

4. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/seo-services-market

5. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/searcher-behavior

6. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/search-engine-ranking

7. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/google-crawl-rate

8. AMA is short for "ask me anything," an interactive post in which someone answers questions, usually in real time.

9. We are experimenting with how the Metaweb principles can apply to the Bitcoin ecosystem as a meta-ordinal theory. https://permanent.link/to/the-metaweb/meta-ordinal-theory.