How does www relate to ww3? Can the web remain good and productive?

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New Thoughts (6/28/26)

I think that these old thoughts are largely pessimistic toward the past, present, future and I will express my optimism in future blog posts.

Old Essay

I argue the World Wide Web11I will conflate the web and the Internet throughout this post. has been and will increasingly be a form of war: an incredible disruption, except primarily not in physical space but in memetic space. But I also think it is a good form of war. This gar (short for “good war”) has at least as much creative potential as destructive potential. Most technically, the world wide web is a gar that already has begun and is a state of delaying World War 3. If gar breaks down, war happens. This gar will accelerate with the advent of AI. Preventing violent war is of crucial importance for the twenty-first century.

Precursor Ideas

I’m sure the idea of the web as a war is not new. However, I will discuss some more interesting precursors that influence how I present my ideas.

ww3 = www from prefix theory

I’ve been recently playing around with what I call prefix theory. It’s the study of how small bits of context interact to impact resulting meaning. This led me to the equation ww3 = www (technically a prefixial conflation), which I realized deserves serious consideration.

This essay is the result of exploring that simple slogan.

Science Fiction: Tenet and More

There are some science fiction ideas that World War 3 is already happening across time itself. While this is just science fiction, they are worth mentioning because they greatly influenced how I think about World War 3 and about “wars” as sometimes being gars that are never physically fought.

Tenet

I will spoil Tenet, so go ahead and watch the movie if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s a great film only marred by occasional inconsistent use22This blog post is not an elaboration of the plot holes that I feel do exist. of its main gimmick: that objects can have their flow of (thermodynamic sense of) time reversed by the use of “turnstiles.” Using turnstiles, people and things can travel backward through time in a way that breaks the second law of thermodynamics (and the conservation of energy at turnstiles themselves).

Tenet posits that World War 3 basically is already happening and is a war about who gets to reverse time. Some people want to reverse time and others don’t. The Protagonist of the film gets caught up in that War and takes part in a series of pivotal battles.

”The Hundred Light-Year Diary”

Greg Egan’s short story “The Hundred Light-Year Diary” (again, spoilers) essentially discusses a world where informational subterfuge across time causes entire wars and histories to be fabricated due to the ability to send information backward in time.

While we cannot rule out that any of these ideas from Egan, Nolan, and others are real due to unforeseen physics, to seriously treat them in this blog post would be to undermine my much more real assertion that the primary elements of what historians may consider to be (possibly “good”) World War 3 are already in place and active: it’s just the web.

Cold War

Besides WW2, the Cold War is the most important precursor war to World Web War. The Cold War drove incredible advancements such as space race, nuclear technology, and semiconductor industry as two styles of government competed. The Cold War is not a gar because it included much violence.

However, if we consider the alternative history where Cold War violence was erased, we could have had Cold Gar instead of Cold War. And we could have transitioned from Cold Gar to Web Gar. This hypothetical provides some intuitive evidence that good wars can transition into other good wars.

The Web as a War

Let’s now directly discuss the present idea: that the web is an evolving war that could become World War 3.

The Web as a Conflict of Ideas and People

Clearly, the web is a humongous conflict of ideas. But people (and increasingly AI) create those ideas. So people are indirectly conflicting. It is more like a cold war in that sense, but it’s not really a cold war as Internet discussions can get very heated and can in several cases spur real-life violence. But overall, there has been relatively little real-life violence compared to how much productive Internet discussion there has been, so I believe most people consider the Internet itself a positive development so far.

The Web War is Already Happening

The World Wide Web is already a thing. So by extension the World War Web (a.k.a. World Web War) is already happening, if we want to consider it a web of wars or a world web war. I claim we should.

World Web War = World War 3?

I don’t think the World Web War is World War 3, per se, but instead is an important precursor that could segue into World War 3.

Let me discuss some loose lemmas to explain how the World Wide Web has some elements of catastrophic world war.

Lemma 1: AI foundation model training relied on Internet data

This means that all the developments in AI are part of the development of the World Wide Web: foundation models producing artificial intelligence were trained on vast amounts of web data. This is not to say there isn’t another route to artificial intelligence besides Big Internet Data, but we chose the route of scaling AI on Internet data after all our little bitter lessons trying other approaches.

Lemma 2: AI might destroy the world

AI might actually destroy the world.

Combined with the first lemma, this means that the development of the web might be the pivot point that directly leads to the destruction of humanity.

Counter-Lemma: But it could all be good in the end

But we don’t have to destroy ourselves! The possibility can be completely avoided as long as the war remains a gar: as long as the “war” never actually leads to violence.

Reverse QED: But it’s a gar?

Because of the tension between the idea of World Web War as a state of war with the traditional notion of violent, kinetic war, I think it’s better to combine our points to argue that World Wide Web is better seen as “good war.” A state of gar disrupts, creates, and at its best productively prevents kinetic warfare.

World Web Gar

Accepting this notion of World Web Gar, let’s explore it. What does it mean if we are already “fighting” in a memetic gar? Is that a good thing? Is war inevitable?

Do gars precede all wars? (No.)

Historically, World War II began with a series of appeasements to Nazi Germany in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent war. Was this gar? Do all wars begin with gar? I don’t think so.

Remember, fundamentally, a gar must be productive at about the same level its corresponding war would be destructive. A memetic gar such as the web is also a conflict: in memetic space, not in physical space.

So I think we might be experiencing something genuinely new here: an evolving state of gar. An evolving good war. A widening world web.

Must all gars end in war? (No!)

Does every gar evolve into war?

I don’t think so. I think we can be the exception.

We can accept that this is already a gar and it is the gar that may become World War 3 if not mitigated. But we do not have to accept that World War 3 must happen.

The true “war” is not when violence happens but whether violence happens. The real battle was and is always in keeping the existential violence forever in the future.