I’m old enough to have lived through the advent of the World Wide Web. I was so enthusiastic about the potential of these technologies. It was going to finally democratize information and do away with misinformation and pseudoscience, and promote critical thinking, freedom and democracy. I crafted an entire career around my optimism about this stuff. It’s now obvious in retrospect that none of that happened and we have collectively regressed on all those fronts. I’m not making a causal claim about damage that the internet might have done. I don’t know if this stuff would have happened anyway. But, it certainly didn’t deliver on the promise we were so excited about. IMO it all went wrong when we handed the keys to the whole thing over to commercial entities.

How much can one attribute the skill of the worker to the tools available to them?

A hatchet can cut down a tree or kill a man. Do I attribute either action to the hatchet?

I see the forces as more or less balancing, while there are many other aspects that have happened in the same space of time.

I would argue that authoritarianism and neo feudalism are the inevitable outcome of the shift to venture capital, although the alternative of a military spending based economy is worse.

Imagine the internet as you would dynamite. It is very powerful. You can use dynamite to clear land and build roads or kill others and take their stuff. The internet is simialar in different ways. It all depends on the bent of the users.

I think it’s nuanced. The internet did democratize information and even societies. It allowed communication. Twitter was a key part of the Arab Spring but Facebook was used to spread misinformation during multiple genocides.

Really, when the web was young — “Web 1.0” — it was all decentralized and required some knowledge to use. Then, social media companies created closed networks and governments were able to fight back (or co-opt them). That was “Web 2.0” (which isn’t a technical term). I think it was a huge mistake. “Web 3.0” won’t ever involve the blockchain, which is useless except for naive people. But the concept of decentralized communication platforms is a good idea.

Basically, we need a better version of “Web 1.0” without the VCs, Monopoly money, and NFT horseshit. Give users control of who they follow, break up monopolies, and let censorious governments play whack-a-mole while still being able block harassers and bots.

I think that the web had great potential to help, but I think that it has had that potential heavily damaged by the profit-oriented web 2.0. The vapid ad-and-clickbait-saturated web we’ve created is exponentially less knowledge-dense than it was before. We really do need to go back to a web that’s built by communities of people rather than profit-crazed tech giants.

I also feel like the bloating of CSS and HTML code, video-sizes, and uses of servers has been a bad idea. It feels like we’ve done these things for consumerist reasons rather than for genuine benefit.