Questions and Cancers

The creation and sharing of knowledge was at the core of the initial vision for the World Wide Web. But as the internet became widely popular, big tech adopted a business model relying on ads. This catalyzed a massive race for our attention; resulting in anxiety, lack of depth, and general content collapse. There’s information everywhere, but it’s ... See more

Rather than hold on to technostalgia for a time when it wasn’t this bad, sometimes it is worth asking what it would take to uninvent social media, so that we can chart a course for the web we want—a web that promotes democracy, knowledge, care, and equity. Otherwise, every unexplained decision by tech companies about access to information potential... See more

Like a raging river, information courses along faster than ever before.The maelstrom will never cease. In fact, her gales will blow harder, her raindrops grow fatter with the bits and bytes that make up our digital deluge.We have too few hours to comb through too much information. Not to mention, it takes real, hard, honest work to separate the whe... See more

There is no end of theories for why the internet feels so crummy these days. The New Yorker blames the shift to algorithmic feeds. Wired blames a cycle in which companies cease serving their users and begin monetizing them. The M.I.T. Technology Review blames ad-based business models. The Verge blames search engines. I agree with all these argument... See more

The web creates new challenges for information retrieval. The amount of information on the web is  growing rapidly, as well as the number of new users inexperienced in the art of web research. People are  likely to surf the web using its link graph, often starting with high quality human maintained indices  such as Yahoo! or with sea... See more

If we take the metaphor of the wood wide web seriously, it’s hard not to see an analogy here to the context collapse endemic to social media. A few corporations control the lion’s share of public cloud infrastructure, and monopolistic ISPs exploit everyday users. Tech and social media giants have clear-cut the web, privileging high-value crops—vira... See more

or an entire generation, the imagination of people making the web has been hemmed in by the control of a handful of giant companies that have had enormous control over things like search results, or app stores, or ad platforms, or payment systems. Going back to the more free-for-all nature of the Nineties internet could mean we see a proliferation ... See more

Does this have to be a bad thing, though? If the web as we know it changes in the face of artificial abundance? Some will say it’s just the way of the world, noting that the web itself killed what came before it, and often for the better. Printed encyclopedias are all but extinct, for example, but I prefer the breadth and accessibility of Wikipedia... See more