I think the web matters more than ever.

Maybe I am just trying to feel self-important as a lil’ web-dev goblin, but it feels like something that once felt infinite is being boiled down to a few mobile apps with half-assed web-apps that I constantly refresh.

Ya’ll remember Stumble Upon?

If you don’t it was a website that would take you to a random, often funny, sometimes boring, sometimes interesting website for you to browse. It was like Google without a query. Just a series of results that might tickle your little fancy.

Not my idea, but it seems like that kind of website only existed when the internet was a place you visited and hung around in). Like you were online, at home, waiting for your crush to log on to MSN Messenger anyway so might as well checkout what the hell was on the internet today.

The curation was chaos and during it’s death rattle it got algorithm-ed and enshit-ified to hell like everything fun online, but for a while there, it was a portal through the dark forest of the internet.

It was a line on a random campfire to cozy up next to before moving on to another obsessed nerds personal passion project.

Money and the internet have always been at odds though. The web exists because a nerd gave it away for free. Tim Berners-Lee literally gave the technology (that most of our life runs on) away to the public domain. Since then he has advocated for a free and open web and been building tools that allow users to have better control of their own data.

So basically, the dude who built it… gave it away, took up advocacy, and believed in universal access. This was anti-capitalist as hell. Like by the definition of the term. It’s such a punk move. I have something that has the potential to change the world forever? Give it away. Everyone gets it.

God, I love a soapbox. I love screaming into the void.

We, as people who use the internet, the web, whatever, every day have a responsibility to care for it and uphold our rights and the rights of others online. The internet will suck if we let it. If we allow our reward centres to be mined, then they will be minded relentlessly for profit, regardless of the effect on well being.

Side note: Mark Zuckerberg believes there is no link between the decline in teen mental health and social media. How. How is that is his take? This has massive “Big oil denies climate change” energy.

The end result is an connected network where we have no clue if the people we spend time with (or fuck, or fall in love with), the music we like, or choices we make in life were really because we wanted them, or was it because a corporation decided that it’s the content we would spend the most time with.

There is a real key difference there. Just because we spend time with something doesn’t mean it’s fulfilling. It’s not necessarily what we want. It’s just want is easy to do, feels good, and at least correlated with something we give the smallest amount of a shit about.