Wynterian Technologies

Exploring Web3 through Sylvia Wynter's critique of the "Invention of Man"

Intro

This piece explores how Sylvia Wynter’s theory of the “Invention of Man” can be used to critique Web3 and its promises of decentralization, ownership, and digital freedom. While Web3 aims to solve the problems of Web2 through market-based individual control and co-optation, it remains grounded in logics of control, creation, and belonging. Drawing on Jenna Burrell’s Invisible Users, I highlight how global digital spaces are shaped by cultural ontologies often invisible to dominant frameworks. I explore what kinds of humans and ontologies our technologies are built for—and which ways of being are excluded. I call for a deeper awareness and understanding of how our current societal ways of thinking and being shape what we view as digital freedom both as consumers and producers.

Web3 and the Invention of Man

Sylvia Wynter’s central critique of Western humanism lies in what she calls the overrepresentation of “Man”—a specific genre of the human that emerges from the colonial, Enlightenment, and liberal traditions. This figure, "Man2" in Wynter’s terms, is rational, self-interested, and defined through possession: of property, of selfhood, of reason. He is the secular heir to the Christian subject, now recast through economic and scientific logics. Crucially, this “Man” becomes the yardstick against which all other modes of being are measured—and found lacking.

When we turn to Web3’s promised infrastructure of DAOs, dApps, and tokenized governance, we find that these systems do not necessarily dismantle the logic of Man—they repackage it. Web3 envisions a world where each user is a sovereign actor, economically empowered, owning and trading digital assets, and participating in decentralized decision-making. But who is this user?

This is a subject that mirrors Wynter’s “Man2”: an individual who can navigate the logics of ownership, risk, scarcity, and rational choice. The “freedom” and “decentralization” offered by Web3 are still freedoms rooted in possessive individualism—freedom as ownership, participation as capital investment, presence as transaction. The system rewards those who can code, speculate, stake tokens, and govern via consensus mechanisms—effectively producing a new digital elite under the guise of open infrastructure. These views reflect how analyses of technologies -- their drawbacks and their potential solutions -- can be locked into place and limited by a certain way of knowing and writing the world.

The limits of Truth, possibility, and analysis here are bound by a capitalist mode of production. The goal of the virtual class is not freedom from neoliberal economics, but inclusion within it as a fulfilled worker. Man is a “location of desire” (McKittrick, 2006):

The conception is the imperative. This is why, however much abundance we produce, we cannot solve the problem of poverty and hunger. Since the goal of our mode of production is not to produce for human beings in general, it’s to provide for the material conditions of existence for the production and reproduction of our present conception of being human: to secure the well-being, therefore, of those of us, the global middle classes, who have managed to attain its ethno-class criterion (McKittrick, 2006).

Support of such cyberlibertarian ideals in the 1990s reveals attempts of naturalizing and neutralizing digital technologies and obfuscating their socially constructed nature, much like descriptive statements of Man naturalize its supposedly scientific descriptive and hide its social constructs. Similarly, the free market of the digital world is a space so bound by seemingly natural laws that “attempts to interfere with the emergent properties of these technological and economic forces, particularly by the government, merely rebound on those who are foolish enough to defy the primary laws of nature” (Barbrook and Cameron, 2007). The mapping and encoding of a capitalist mode of production onto the digital space, and this treating it as inherent, as “just there” obscures the practices and infrastructures of domination that construct and maintain the episteme of Man2 through the technology of Man.

Web3's ideal user, then, is not a rupture from the colonial-capitalist human—it is its digital mutation. This techno-economic subject fits neatly within the paradigm of what Wynter critiques: not the human-as-being-in-relation, but the human-as-entrepreneurial-node.

The language of "earning" tokens through content or development contributions presumes that value is something quantifiable, extractable, and ownable—an extension of capitalist productivity logics rather than a challenge to them. Privacy, ownership, and democratization are imagined in terms of access to market tools, not transformation of value systems. What’s being decentralized, in other words, is not power, but infrastructure—and only for those who already possess the tools to plug into it. Wynter would push us to ask: what other kinds of humans—and forms of life—are left out of this imagination?

Digital Plurality and Global Ontologies

The story of Fauzia and Yassim from Invisible Users sticks with me. On the surface, it seems like a classic internet “miscommunication”—two people from different contexts misreading each other. But what’s really happening here runs much deeper.

Fauzia, a young Ghanaian woman, spends weeks chatting with Yassim, an Egyptian man she met online. They build rapport. She even gets the nickname “Angel.” Then one day, after all that closeness, she asks for a favor—money for a new phone. He vanishes. Just gone. No goodbye, no explanation. She keeps messaging, still warm and polite, hoping it was just a misunderstanding. But he never responds.

To some users, this might read like a scam attempt. But Burrell reminds us that in Accra, small transfers of money between friends, or within romantic or mentor relationships, are normal and expected. They’re part of a social system grounded in reciprocity and mutual support.

Fauzia’s story pushes us to ask an important question related to digital space: who gets to define what is “real” online? And whose way of being gets treated as suspicious, fake, or out of bounds? This moment reveals that the internet is structured by specific cultural logics and that being outside of that logic opens one up to digital shunning or ghosting. Such a request is a violation of cultural norms of the digital world. In other words, the digital space does not allow multiple ways of being and relating to the people within it. The internet isn’t just an infrastructure that needs to be decentralized – it’s a space shaped by ideas of truth, worth, legitimacy, and the human that are far from universal.

Conclusion

An analysis of Web3 reveals its conception is planted in “the ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were human itself” (Wynter, 2003). Understanding Web3 through this lens limits, but does not completely hide or prevent, understandings of technological freedoms rooted in challenging our present episteme and centering those issues that may exist outside the eyes of dominant society.

Web3 rhetoric centered on securing economic access to markets and assets tells just one technological story, and in doing so, appropriates and narrows broader notions of technological freedom and sovereignty, and can hide the experiences of users who create their own digital rules, spaces, and priorities that are more ontologically workable for them.

Activists and educators advocating for digital and information access, against digital redlining, surveillance, and carceral tech in Black, Brown, poor, and queer communities reflect rich and ongoing sites of technological creation and imagination. Their work often emerges from different logics—of care, survival, reciprocity, and collective sovereignty—that resist marketization and affirm other ways of being.

Explore the full essay here

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