In attempting to describe a certain period of time yesterday, I referred to the late 2000s as ‘peak Twitter’: you know, the moment of time when the biggest concern on the web was Gowalla vs Foursquare; when people live-tweeted election results and you trusted the numbers; when you’d share actual photos of your family without thinking about who or what would be scraping that data for whichever particular perversion of humanity has the most commercial potential.
For a couple of years, I had the privilege of working at Build conference in Belfast and related events,1 when cool people from the internet would come over from North America to hang with cool people from the internet from Belfast and Dublin and talk about Web Standards like we’d finally achieved something as humanity. And I mean that: the web was exciting, democratic, and the sort of things that had seemed only vaguely possible a decade earlier, whilst pushing box edges a few pixels to one side on the Geocities interface, now seemed tangible. Wilson Miner’s seminal presentation, When We Build, held up the potential of good, honest, human-centred design in such a way that I ended up studying it.2
These memories are in my head having tried to digest Anil Dash’s terrifyingly prescient essay ‘Endgame of the Open Web’. Dash sounds like a prophet of doom and I fear he’s absolutely on the money.3 The overarching theme is the continual movement – sometimes gradual, sometimes rapid – of features of the open web towards the walled gardens of Big Tech for commercial gain. Money in itself is not bad – it can be exchanged for goods and services – but the typical outcomes are obscene profit which monetises people as the product, and subsumes smaller, more focused tech products which typically do one thing well, into bloated frankenservices which do many things badly. All the while, the things that made a standardised, open web beautiful become fodder for profit for companies (or nations) that are simply too big to sue.4
LLMs won’t destroy us, Skynet-style. It’s more depressing than that. They’ll simply railroad human effort and creativity, disregarding any kind of ownership or license, gobbling up mind boggling levels of finite natural resources so that people can make bland videos of celebrities fighting, or whatever slop comes to mind. They continue the brain rot and keep people welded to their devices, spending ever more time, effort and money on trying to understand why they feel so isolated, lonely, and bereft of purpose and meaning.
Dash’s reach means this might help to bolster the resistance online; but perhaps the best thing any of us can do is close our screens and do something else. I have kept my social media profiles, but rarely post.5 That’s not a niche thing: Ofcom recently brought hard figures to the assessment that more and more people are merely passive consumers of social media (even the name is a misnomer these days; when is the last time you opened a timeline – also a misnomer – on anything and were greeted by posts by anyone you actually have a human relationship with?) but nevertheless we continue to consume.
Perhaps if more corners of the web could be returned to the old paths – and somehow protected from obliteration – things might improve. I’m not holding my breath.
- Refresh Belfast and the original BarCamps were also fun days out. ↩︎
- To the credit of Andy the organiser, Build had a great lineup of people every time, but briefly meeting (and then labouring in the editing suite over) people like Craig Mod, Jeremy Keith, Erik Spiekermann, Frank Chimero… just a wealth of interesting people trying to do good through design and art.. ↩︎
- Jay Hoffman’s response on History of the Web offers some glimmer of hope, and its worth reading both pieces together. ↩︎
- I don’t think anyone ever pegged Holden McNeil as one of life’s optimists, but one could almost weep about how simple that character’s description of the Internet sounds, 25 years on. ↩︎
- As much as I’d close them all in a heartbeat, the one time I closed an account – a secondary twitter handle, maybe a decade ago – within minutes it had been reacquired by an impersonator. ↩︎