The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web
> “That utopian leveling of society, the reinvention of the systems of debate and government—what happened to that?”Only speaking personally, what happened for me was that I noticed that these utopian online communities that we reinvented are not really particularly wonderful because a lot of the loudest people in such communities are really nasty people with really nasty things to say. On the other hand, the internet has proven incredibly useful for enabling people to keep up their deep high-trust relationships (usually forged offline) across longer distances and more life changes. It makes me a bit sad too, but it doesn't appear that being open and distributed is an important ingredient in building these types of communities, as Facebook, WhatsApp, and others have shown.It's always amazing to me how much more down on technology we technologists seem to be than the majority of people I know, who just think it's amazing that they can stay so connected with their friends and family all the time. If I told them that Tim Berners-Lee is bummed that they're sharing pictures and liking posts instead of creating their own web pages, they wouldn't understand why, and I don't think I could really explain it to them (or myself).