Since the early days of mass internet, it seemed obvious to me that there was a need to "translate" into the digital world the legal principles that we enjoy in the physical world.
Concepts like the privacy of a "home", of "mail", the need for warrants to reach any private item, or general manners like not snooping too intimately over a customer in a shop (you may watch what they do, where they go etc., but probably not strip-search them to the bone, at least not all of them all the time).
That's why instead of going straight into tech, I studied law to have a shot at one day solving this problem, among others. We're talking constitutionalism, indeed property rights, and a slew of red lines to draw in digital terms (the sec community knows what "boundaries" mean as far as preserving the integrity of a person or system is concerned: big tech happily triple-violates those boundaries, not on occasion but as a business model and moral ethos).
The inception of "social networks" a decade later only confirmed my initial worries, especially given the psychological profile of their executive leaders (they should know, as I do, that being socially weird means you probably shouldn't decide how people get to live their social life. Just sayin').
The real battle is ahead, it'll be played in congresses and courts around the world come a generation of digital natives in power (my guess is millennials, but history is being stalled by the oldest generations alive-and-well in human history, as you all know; so the beginning of a "legal update" process that should already have been done by now is probably still a good ten-fifteen years away).
The tech part is trivial. There are 1,001 ways to implement privacy-abiding systems, should we choose to.
You are right. Web3 is just useless tokens and speculation, there aren't any actually useful projects.
My point is really that people say no token is useful but they only know about 10 out of 10,000. Imagine only knowing about 10 failed startups and then proudly claiming: the business model is broken!
Bitcoin also has its own limitations compared to smart contract platforms. And not everyone is cool with buying the bags of Michael Saylor and Nayib Bukele.
We have multiple social media platforms and multiple search engines. We can have many cryptocurrencies.