From ‘Snow Crash’ To Media 3.0 At Hack Seasons Singapore: How Web3, Decentralization, And AI Are Shaping The Next Era Of Creativity

by
Alisa Davidson

Printed: October 08, 2025 at 11:00 am Up to date: October 08, 2025 at 10:22 am

by Ana

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October 08, 2025 at 11:00 am

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At first of October, the Hack Seasons Convention in Singapore served as a global gathering for technologists, buyers, and innovators to debate the way forward for blockchain and Web3. A spotlight of the occasion was the fireplace chat titled “Joe Lubin and Neal Stephenson Current Media 3.0: Storytelling On-Chain.”

Moderated by Rebecca Barkin, Co-Founder and CEO of Lamina1, the session featured Joseph Lubin, Co-Founding father of Ethereum and Founder and CEO of ConsenSys and writer and Co-Founding father of Lamina1 Neal Stephenson. The dialogue centered on how blockchain expertise is remodeling media, artistic expression, and the narratives that form modern tradition.

The dialogue started with an summary of current developments at Lamina1, an interactive media platform owned by each storytellers and followers. Lamina1 just lately introduced a partnership with ConsenSys’s Linea blockchain and plans to launch a brand new mental property (IP) mission, “Artefact,” on the Linea community.

As IP more and more spans a number of codecs and is accelerated by AI, questions round possession, management, and validation have grow to be central. Neal Stephenson, whose writing has lengthy explored the social and cultural implications of rising applied sciences, highlighted present developments in AI as they relate to content material creation. He famous that the AI trade is very centralized, dominated by just a few corporations with the assets to coach giant fashions. This centralization creates a dependency on opaque techniques, limiting transparency and accessibility. Within the context of content material manufacturing, some advocates of AI have instructed lowering the affect or compensation of creators, but the writer emphasised the potential for AI to be leveraged to learn creators somewhat than diminish them.

Joe Lubin echoed considerations concerning the centralization of massive tech and framed the event of the Web3 ecosystem as a response to those buildings. He defined that for millennia, societies have operated beneath top-down command and management, the place authorities and intermediaries handle possession and privileges. Whereas efficient for constructing civilizations, such buildings can drawback the vast majority of contributors. Within the realm of user-generated content material, the prevailing mannequin might be described as authority-generated. Joe Lubin highlighted that the arrival of decentralized belief, first operationalized by means of blockchain by Satoshi Nakamoto, has created a basis for a brand new mannequin: a decentralized, user-driven civilization. This strategy doesn’t search to dismantle present corporations however to allow a extra distributed, community-oriented system. Lamina1’s integration with networks like Linea is meant to empower customers, fostering a golden age of user-generated and community-valued content material.

Joe Lubin additional expressed a deep dedication to supporting the humanities, music, and the broader creator economic system by means of decentralization. He emphasised the significance of IP in enabling artists to maintain themselves independently. Conventional techniques have usually favored organizations with authorized assets over creators themselves. By leveraging expertise, IP constructs can grow to be extra granular, composable, and fast, significantly by way of copyright and licensing. This shift strikes past scarcity-driven fashions and towards an period of abundance facilitated by automation, AI, and robotics. In such a system, creators can focus extra on creativity and content material technology, whereas neighborhood mechanisms can reward participation and contribution. 

The dialogue then turned to the origins of the time period “metaverse,” usually traced again to Neal Stephenson’s novel “Snow Crash,” and his reflections on how digital developments have unfolded since its publication. The writer defined that the e-book was written within the late Eighties and early Nineteen Nineties, a time when the web existed however was largely unknown to most of the people. When the novel was revealed, two main technological occasions occurred in the identical yr: the creation of the World Large Net and the discharge of the sport “Doom.” Each occasions performed transformative roles in making pc graphics extensively accessible. The net offered a platform for exchanging pictures, whereas “Doom” pushed the demand for extra succesful computer systems, increasing entry to immersive digital experiences.

Neil Stephenson famous that the early period of the web had a “hippie grad scholar” section, marked by idealistic visions of common entry to data. This era was finally adopted by centralization and consolidation, exemplified by Web2 platforms. In his novel, components of the metaverse are managed by centralized corporations, whereas others stay open and freely accessible. Some of the vital, but unexpected, penalties has been the rise of social media algorithms that monitor person habits and manipulate content material to maximise engagement, with far-reaching societal results that Neil Stephenson didn’t anticipate within the Nineteen Nineties.

Joe Lubin noticed that the dystopian parts described within the novel have been by no means the first focus for these growing new applied sciences or in search of enterprise capital. What stood out as a substitute was the writer’s vivid depiction of our on-line world, which offered a compelling imaginative and prescient for the capabilities of computing applied sciences as they started to mature.

The audio system shared views on the potential of rising applied sciences. Each emphasised the significance of harnessing one of the best facets of those instruments to learn humanity and create optimistic social influence as digital innovation continues to advance.

Lamina1 Unveils ‘Artefact’ On Linea, Mixing Storytelling And Fan Participation 

The dialog shifted to Lamina1’s upcoming plans because the platform prepares to roll out its first authentic IP, “Artefact,” instantly on the Linea blockchain. The mission combines a narrative world with a system designed to encourage fan participation and engagement.

Neal Stephenson shared that the brand new IP advanced based mostly on concepts he had beforehand explored throughout a chat in New Zealand. He famous the bizarre state of affairs by which giant numbers of individuals are growing AI whereas others warning of its potential risks. In nature, evolution happens by means of competitors, with no entity receiving particular privilege with out dealing with challenges. Neil Stephenson instructed {that a} comparable aggressive framework could possibly be utilized to AI, permitting techniques to evolve by testing their capabilities in opposition to each other. He additional thought-about a situation by which a centralized, impersonal AI would exist in distinction with AI deployed in a distributed method by communities of people, who use the expertise to learn themselves and their communities. This idea served as the inspiration for a collaborative world-building mission – Lamina1 – enabling artists and sport designers to start setting up a sport universe.

The panel concluded by offering attendees with a preview of the brand new IP, providing an early glimpse into the story world and its interactive options.

Alisa, a devoted journalist on the MPost, makes a speciality of cryptocurrency, zero-knowledge proofs, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a eager eye for rising developments and applied sciences, she delivers complete protection to tell and have interaction readers within the ever-evolving panorama of digital finance.

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