In 1769, in a small Scottish town, a mechanical maintenance worker named James Watt was pondering over a steam engine prototype that kept emitting steam.
At that time, the British handicraft industry was booming and was struggling to find a more stable and efficient power source that could get rid of wind and water power. Watt successfully made a key breakthrough in the steam engine and designed a separate condenser, which allowed the cylinder temperature to be maintained continuously. The first real steam engine was born. During the Industrial Revolution, mechanized mass production destroyed the thousands of years of handicraft workshops in the farming era, and machines were gradually intertwined with human civilization, acting as an extension of human limbs.
History never rests on its laurels, and the power of change has once again laid the groundwork: In addition to driving machines, can humans communicate with machines more effectively, listen to their voices, and even let machines act as human brains?
Two hundred years later, the first Arpanet, which allowed hosts to transmit information to each other, was officially established. Because computers at the time were incompatible, machines with different software and hardware were difficult to connect. Just a few years later, the TCP/IP protocol applicable to all operating environments appeared, which is the cornerstone of the modern Internet, and the era of "Internet of Everything" has begun. It took mankind two centuries to move from the industrial age to the information age. How changes occur and how humans respond, we have never given up exploring these propositions.
Before the Industrial Revolution, labor and land were the main production factors. In the Industrial Age, energy and capital became new factors.
Today, after years of global society running wild on the information superhighway, a new and more intelligent society has emerged, and the core production factor this time is data.
However, massive data itself cannot be directly monetized. How can a series of complex processes such as collection, analysis, calculation, and storage be completed? Where will the game between platforms and users over data go? When the public uses browsers and search engines as paddles to paddle into the vast online world, no one knows exactly where the next port is. With a huge amount of information coming at them, users can only be forced to accept it.
The lack of interaction and output mechanisms is a distinctive feature of the Web 1.0 era. Compared with the ecological pattern of this period with few content creators and many content consumers, the more open Web 2.0 era has finally released a huge amount of user productivity and the resulting commercial value through the endless emergence of social apps.
Content, traffic, and users have become the assets that every platform is vying for so far, but this has also quietly distorted the value relationship of the Internet: public data and even the right to speak and privacy have gradually been transferred to the platforms, which own, control, and distribute them, resulting in a series of big data "killing the familiar" and "cutting leeks" phenomena.
The power of change never stops, and a framework for the Internet world that can redefine user value and even roles has been outlined: from Web1.0's connection between people and information to Web2.0's connection between people and people. Now, everyone hopes to break the platform monopoly and move towards the decentralized Web3.0 era of "co-creation, sharing, and co-governance."
