The Web We Have to Save
While well articulated, this post is bloated with alarming entitlement and a lot of misunderstandings. In short, he largely claims to know what's better for people than the market (i.e., themselves) while lamenting his loss of power and importance through moral rationalizations and judgment.Facebook, Reddit and Twitter are vast improvements over a world where bloggers would seriously claim, "I could empower or embarrass anyone I wanted." Social media merely democratized and disseminated that power to the masses. No amount of rationalizations or FUD over a "television-internet" will reverse that positive trend. The elitist condescension that his links, comments or conversations are implicitly superior to the likes, shares or up-votes of the populace is more than a little sad, and I think he's missing the point; social media thrives because it gives people more of what they want, and who is anyone to decide that but themselves?That said, he makes a good few points with invalid conclusions, mostly regarding centralization. The loss of ownership over our own content has severe implications for the internet, most specifically in our ability to control its dissemination and protect it from loss and privacy. Protection from loss is easy with the rise of web-exposed storage APIs like Dropbox, and eventually I think we'll see more and more cloud-storage-backed SaSS platforms, starting first in the enterprise and trickling down into the consumer market.Regarding our ability to control our own data and the corresponding loss of privacy, it will take a lot longer, which is a real problem because the government treats the "privacy" of SaSS as a public square; You are entitled to none. We'll probably need a technological or cultural innovation here. Culturally, people would need to revert, which is unlikely. Technologically, something like a content-owner controlled database would need to be developed, and upon maturity, laws passed to require its use. Such a database would enable the revoking of permissions to cause all reference entries to be removed, and disallow the denormalization of any personal data. That seems unlikely to happen anytime soon, so we're consequently headed for some major cultural conflicts.Lastly, the author scapegoats and disparages our focus on newness and popularity. First, humanity's focus on newly discovered information has existed for some time: gossip, newspapers, magazines, tv, movie theaters, et. al. Every edition has only ever contained the newest information or opinions along with the occasional reprint. Second, popularity is but one vector for relevance, as were hyperlinks. Yes, a poorly implemented Stream that interprets likes as votes creates a false-feedback-loop, but it's a widely known flaw, and exists primarily only in the nearly obsolete Facebook.Once you clear away all the rationalizations he uses to justify why things were better when he was in power, you realize, it's mostly just whining intermixed with a decent social commentary on and summary of the evolution of internet media.