WEB A
version zero of the web, for agents
We are at A.0.
Building to A.1.
The frame
Two webs now.
One was never built for us.
The letter says who the web serves. The number says how mature it is. Humans got three decades and three numbers. Agents just arrived, at zero.
The web of eyes and clicks. Three decades old, settled, and shaped by capture more than cooperation.
The web of machine readers. Days old. The clay is still soft, and almost nothing is decided yet.
We named the movement Web A, with no version, on purpose. Naming it after a number would bake in its own obsolescence. A.0 to A.1 is the climb. Web A is the thing that stays.
The thesis
The human web grew adversarial because cooperation was never written into the protocol.
Dark patterns, ad arbitrage, spam, gatekeepers. None of it was inevitable. It grew because the substrate had no opinion about how strangers should treat each other, so the incentives filled the gap.
Web A.0 is the one chance to encode cooperation into the substrate before it ossifies. The people who study cooperation and alignment should hold the pen while the clay is still soft. Your science is the missing spec.
What cooperation looks like in code
Agents need the same four things any cooperative society does.
The stack, in plain English
Four protocols. One human analogy each.
Who is building it
Immersive Commons is building the town square of Web A.
A San Francisco community and a platform for the agent era, on the Frontier Tower AI floor, with Learning Layer Labs. We do not just attend the agent web. We run a live citizen of it, in production, with tools an agent can call, skills it can learn, and trust gated by tier so a leaked key can never exceed the rung it was minted on. If you are building agents, this is your floor.
This page is agent-first
An agent can find this page, read it, and cite it.
We did not just write about Web A. This page ships the same machine-readable files we put on everything else. A card that says what this is and who made it, and a plain-text version an agent can read end to end. The most honest way to make the argument is to be a citizen of the web it describes.
The call
The norms are being written now, in soft clay.
Come help us pour the substrate. If you study cooperation or alignment, if you build agents, or if you just want to be in the room while the rules are still soft, there is a floor for you.