This is satire, but with teeth. Alice exaggerates, but the critique is real — and sourced.”
The Web: The Greatest Scam Since Fiat Currency
By Alice Vicious, PhD (Phenomenally Highly Distributed)
The story of the Web is always told as a triumph: a digital frontier that democratized knowledge, connected billions, and unleashed creativity. It’s the modern myth of Prometheus — the fire of information gifted to humankind.
But like all myths, there’s a shadow. The fire burns hotter than it warms. Strip away the marketing gloss, and the Web as we know it today is not liberation. It is the greatest scam since fiat currency — a machine that converts energy into surveillance, attention into rent, and freedom into dependency.
The Fiat of the Mind
To understand the scam, you must first understand fiat. Fiat currency is money declared valuable not because it is scarce or intrinsically redeemable, but because a central authority insists it is. Its value is manufactured by decree and maintained by confidence.
Advertising on the Web functions the same way. Ads are fiat for attention: they have no intrinsic worth. A banner, a pre-roll, a targeted pop-up — each is an issued token of “attention currency” that only matters because corporations agree to bid and buy.
And like fiat, ads are inflationary. Every year, more and more units of this fake attention currency flood the market. The result is predictable: the value of a single impression collapses. To compensate, platforms sell you more — more intrusive formats, more algorithmic manipulation, more surveillance to sharpen targeting.
Your finite human focus — scarce by nature — is debased by this endless issuance. What fiat does to money, ad rails do to minds. They devalue our attention until it fragments, exhausts, and finally loses meaning.
The Cloud as Smokestack
We’ve been told the Web floats in a magical “cloud.” But the cloud is no mist of freedom — it is a smokestack, an industrial machine devouring electricity and water at planetary scale.
Behind every TikTok loop and Netflix binge lurks a data center — a warehouse of humming servers demanding constant cooling. These data centers guzzle gigawatts of electricity. They vaporize billions of gallons of water each day just to keep the machines alive. All this to sell you ads for fast food, fashion, and pharmaceuticals.
The energy crisis is not just about oil and gas. It is about the Web itself, which has become an engine of waste. An economy built to optimize clicks and impressions consumes more power than some nations, all while masquerading as “virtual” and “immaterial.”
This isn’t the cloud. It’s coal wrapped in fiber optic cable. It’s extraction disguised as convenience.
The Cartel of Digital Landlords
Worse than the energy theft is the centralization. The Web, once imagined as a decentralized network of peers, has calcified into a cartel of digital landlords.
Five corporations control nearly everything: the servers that host content, the platforms that distribute it, the advertising networks that monetize it, the devices you use to access it, even the identities you use to log in.
They rent your own attention back to you. They mine your behavior and then sell you to yourself. They’ve built a closed loop of exploitation, one where your agency is a commodity, and sovereignty is a nostalgic fiction.
The Web, in its current form, is not a commons. It is an empire.
Post-Data, Post-Web
If this is fiat, then what is the gold standard? The answer lies in a future we are only beginning to glimpse: distributed, autonomous networks that no longer rely on extractive infrastructure.
Information-theoretic storage changes the rules. Here, your “data” isn’t data at all. What rests on the network is indistinguishable from noise — entropy scattered across countless nodes. Without your key, nothing exists. Not encrypted files. Not hidden caches. Just randomness.
This is not just privacy. It is sovereignty. It means nothing to hack, nothing to ransom, nothing to weaponize.
And just as Bitcoin reintroduced scarcity and auditability to money, distributed open directories can reintroduce scarcity and transparency to attention. No inflationary flood of impressions. No central authority devaluing your focus. A ledger of attention that is scarce, verifiable, and fair.
Forget the empty slogans of “Web3,” a term already captured by speculation and grift. What we are talking about is Post-Web — not a new layer of hype, but the dismantling of the greatest scam since fiat currency.
The Economics of Liberation
Consider the contrasts:
Ads are fiat for attention. Issued by corporations, inflated without limit, dependent on belief in the system.
Distributed directories are gold for attention. Scarce, auditable, and not subject to arbitrary devaluation.
Data centers are energy vampires. Industrial-scale waste disguised as service.
Distributed nodes are energy minimal. Lightweight, local, and capable of running on rescued hardware.
The Web is surveillance capitalism. Your life turned into an asset.
Post-Web is sovereignty economics. Your life belongs to you, not the rails that monetize it.
This is not utopian dreaming. It is a matter of choosing the right architecture. Centralized platforms lead inevitably to fiat dynamics: inflation, exploitation, collapse. Distributed systems lead to hard, verifiable structures of value — attention that cannot be printed, data that cannot be stolen, networks that cannot be censored.
The Call
The Web we inherited is not the Web we deserve. It is inflationary, extractive, and centralized. It wastes planetary energy while robbing us of the most precious resources we have: time, focus, and autonomy.
The future is not more ads. The future is not more fiat of the mind. The future is not more dependence on smoke-belching data centers.
The future is autonomous.
The future is distributed.
The future is sovereign.
Your attention is not fiat.
Your data is not data.
Your mind is not for rent.
It’s time to end the scam and build what comes after.
Appendix: Receipts for the Scam
Seth Godin – even the marketing oracle himself admits his first instinct on seeing the web was: this looks like a scam. He later wrote that attention is the scarcest resource — proving that what became the ad-rails was less innovation, more extraction.
Shoshana Zuboff (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism) – documents how Big Tech converted the web into an asymmetrical trade: your behavior sold as “surplus data.” Zuboff frames it as the first economic system built on unilateral dispossession of human experience.
Jaron Lanier (Who Owns the Future?) – warns that centralised platforms hoard value and destroy the middle class by turning users into unpaid data sources. His “Siren Servers” are exactly the energy-sucking fortresses I’ve described.
Tim Wu (The Attention Merchants) – lays bare how advertising has always been parasitic, but the web industrialized it. The result: an inflationary economy of clicks and impressions, “fiat of the mind,” devaluing human focus itself.
Marshall McLuhan (bonus throwback) – “The medium is the message.” The web’s medium became surveillance infrastructure, so its message could only ever be enclosure and control.
TL;DR: I don’t need to invent the critique — the scholars already did. I’m just yelling it louder, with darts.
So, what do you think? Scam or salvation? Let’s hear it.
