Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again
Elon Musk said that as time passes, technology continuously degrades, not improves, if people don&#x27;t make a hard effort to keep improving it. The Egyptians knew how to build giant pyramids, and forgot how. The Romans built fantastic aqueducts, and forgot how. We built vehicles that landed on the moon in the 60s, and the next vehicle we built could only go into earth orbit, and then we no longer even had a vehicle that could do that.<p>Today, for some reason, everyone thinks that writing software for a platform on a platform on a platform with no interconnecting standards or protocols is a great idea. Instead of trying to improve people&#x27;s lives, we&#x27;re just making things needlessly complex, buggy, and bloaty. You need 8 gigs of ram minimum just to browse the web, and god forbid you want to do something like back up your data. I was just in a meeting where nobody could get Google&#x27;s video conferencing to work.<p>Instead of building <i>internet</i> technology, we build <i>web</i> technology. The web is harder to write software for. It&#x27;s an ephemeral, inconsistent, difficult thing. But if we try really hard, we can turn the tide on the unnecessarily complex box we&#x27;ve forced ourselves into.<p>The proposed fixes are good ideas, but they&#x27;re bandaids on axe wounds. There are much deeper problems going on that won&#x27;t be fixed by a feature add or a pivot. We need a re-evaluation of all internet-based technology, how we develop it, how we incorporate it into our lives, and what we want as a society from it.