The Internet needs to get much weirder. People out there are tired of deep-fried data, too, and want substance.

The anthropologist David Graeber called these "bullshit jobs", roles that even the people doing them suspect are pointless. But I think it's evolved beyond that. We've built entire ecosystems of mutual nonsense.

This observation generalizes: a LOT of the problems of the internet are due to much of it being simply too old. It wasn’t built to last this long even conceptually (ie in terms of atomic ideas like “comments”), let alone technologically. We need improvements, upgrades, and modernizations. The industrial world did that, and the internet world will... See more