Can Web3 create social sustainability, or are we facing the world's most advanced loneliness?

What is actually required to create social sustainability in a digital world? Is it safer systems, fairer economics, or decentralised power? Author Olivia Laing offers a different perspective. In her essay The Future of Loneliness, she argues that true community requires vulnerability—an ingredient that technology is often designed to filter out. 

She suggests that the charm of the internet lies in the illusion that we can construct ourselves exactly as we wish to be seen, without risking the rejection that threatens in the physical, uncontrolled encounter. 

Laing: "You can filter your image, concealing unattractive elements, and you can emerge enhanced: an online avatar designed to attract likes" (Laing, 2015). 

With these thoughts in the back of our minds, we reflect in this blog on the development of Web3: is the metaverse the place where we finally find each other, or the place where we hide behind perfect avatars? To not appear too cynical and to signal hopefulness, our reflections take off from a journey that began over 20 years ago. 

From angry activism to digital nostalgia 

In 2003, one of the authors of this blog served as a producer for the READ_ME 2.3 SOFTWARE ART FESTIVAL. It was a two-day festival focusing on themes like "community – software and people" and "guerilla engineering". The participants consisted of Nordic activists, artists, and nerds interested in new artistic expressions enabled by new technology. 

But there was also anger. We were furious at the tech giants (which were then named IBM, Microsoft, and Nokia), at globalisation, and the neoliberal politics that meant privatisations and cutbacks. It was shortly after the riots in Seattle and Gothenburg, and the air was charged. 

When one now, over 20 years later, follows artists and nerds into Web3 and various Metaverses, one is often filled with a joyful nostalgia. The promises echo familiarly. Here you can go to a concert without leaving the couch, stroll through art galleries built by others in code, or meet people from all over the world. You can try on digital clothes, create your own avatar, and participate in markets—all in real-time. 

Economic sustainability in a new world 

These phenomena are currently being explored in the ESF-funded project LUME. The project aims to "strengthen the innovation-driven, digital creative sector and support creators in building web services and products that are economically sustainable in the long term." Our colleagues from Arcada, Hamk, Humak, Metropolia, and Seamk have creditably mapped how artists operate and "live" on Web3. 

For freelancers hit hard by the pandemic, virtual environments offer new ways to earn money: decentralised worlds like Decentraland make it possible to organise events without traditional gatekeepers, while smart contracts open revenue streams previously reserved for large platforms. 

The transparency can (of course) be questioned. As critic and programmer Molly White meticulously documents in her project Web3 is Going Great, this landscape is filled with pitfalls where the promise of democratisation often clashes with speculation and centralisation. In the LUME project's podcasts, one sometimes touches upon these pitfalls, but primarily this new world is still about community, about the little person against the system, and about new artistic expressions. 

Digital worlds and the “messiness” of life 

At the same time, one is struck by how difficult it is for us to broaden our horizon when constructing a "sustainable" digital society. We risk getting stuck in the modern illusion that the market can disregard nature. 

This is a theme that human ecologist Alf Hornborg returns to repeatedly, where technology is about isolated objects without connection to the world at large and the physical, vulnerable human being. This echoes what Shoshana Zuboff describes in the popular book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: an order where human experience is expropriated and transformed into behavioral data. In the eagerness to build digital utopias, we risk forgetting that even the virtual world has material and human costs. 

It is here we return to Olivia Laing's warning. What she identified as the internet's magical promise—contact without risk—seems to have become a cornerstone in Web3 as well. Laing speaks of the "messiness" of lived life—the clutter of bodies, emotions, and unpredictability that constitutes real intimacy. The charm of the net, and now Web3, is the possibility to sanitise this messiness. Here, one seemingly has control. 

One can construct one's persona (or one's avatar) as one wants it to be, free from the physical world's flaws. 

If social sustainability is about trust and the ability to coexist with differences, we must ask ourselves if Web3 supports this. In a Metaverse where interactions are governed by "trustless systems," we remove the need for human friction. Sociologist Sherry Turkle has shown in her research how this risk-free design leads us to settle for companionship rather than friendship. In the book Alone Together, she describes how we sacrifice conversation for the more controllable "connection".

In the Web3 sphere, voices like documentarian Dan Olson (in the viral video essay Line Goes Up) have also shown how this is exacerbated when we "financialise" our social relationships. When community is linked to token ownership, friendship risks being reduced to a transaction. 

If Web3 is to be truly sustainable, we must "design for messiness" and dare to build in systems where we are forced to relinquish control, where we do not only interact with perfect projections of each other. Otherwise, we risk building the world's most advanced loneliness. 

By Tomas Träskman and Susanne Ådahl

References 

Hornborg, A. (2021). Kannibalernas maskerad: Pengar, teknik och global rättvisa i antropocen. Daidalos.

Laing, O. (2015, April 1). The future of loneliness: Internet isolation. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/01/future-of-loneliness-internet-isolation

Olson, D. [Folding Ideas]. (2022, January 21). Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs [Video]. YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Basic Books.

White, M. (n.d.). Web3 is Going Great. Retrieved December 7, 2025, from https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs. (Swedish translation: Övervakningskapitalismens tidsålder, Ordfront, 2020).