A twofer for you on the modern web.
The first paints a grim picture of what the Internet has become.1
You want to watch the trailer for an upcoming movie on YouTube but you first have to sit through an ad. Then you sit through a preview for the trailer itself. Then you watch the trailer, which is literally another ad. When it ends, it cues up a new trailer, with a new ad at the start of it.
The first page of Google results are links to pages that have scraped other pages for information from other pages that have been scraped for information. All the sources seem to link back to one another. There is no origin. The photos on the page look weird. The hands are disfigured. There is no image credit.
Your coworker sends you a PowerPoint pack to support a presentation you are giving to the executive committee, but you can’t make heads or tails of it. You call them over Zoom and they tell you they used ChatGPT to write it. You point out that it is near-unreadable, and they ask what specifically is wrong with it. You mention that, for starters, there are too many words on each slide. They tell you they’ll take care of it. They send you a new pack within the hour saying they asked ChatGPT to remove 30% of the text. It makes even less sense. You tell them you’ll just rewrite it yourself.
— Gregory Bennett, Heat Death of the Internet
Then follow that up with this lovely and optimistic manifesto on how we can make a better web.
If we wanted, each of us could escape those walls and set up our own spaces within the limitless, fertile soil beyond. Some of us might opt to leave those walls permanently, while others might choose to split our time between our beautiful, messy, free world outside to maintain smaller, meticulously-groomed simulacrums within the enclosures that hint — without angering our landlords — at the creations beyond. We can periodically smuggle seeds and plant cuttings beyond the walls, ensuring that if the proprietors decide to evict us, our gardens will live on.
We can develop protocols — more resilient versions of those early footpaths — that inherently resist the tollbooths and border crossing gates established by the businesses with the walls. We can even develop our own community gardens with spaces for tenants that have their own models of governance far beyond the single benevolent platform dictatorship model — that inevitably grows less benevolent as money changes hands.
While some of the early gardens that we reminisce about didn’t survive the shade of the large platforms or the dwindling flow of visitors that were rerouted within those walls, new gardens can be cultivated to their specifications. People can experiment with combining the things they loved about the old gardens with the tools and models of the ones that have grown since then, or return to the spirit of experimentation and try new things altogether. They can draw on the population explosion within the digital expanse to bring in new people with new ideas and new energy to revitalize what once was, and make it better than before.
— Molly White, We can have a different web
Both of those pieces are outstanding, and I hope you read them both in their entirety.
No one likes to hear an “I told you so”, but I’d be remiss not to point out that as the “walled gardens” began their rise, many of us did warn the world that this was going to happen, including little old me. ↩︎