The Extended Internet Universe

The darkness is the natural dual of the adtech web, the zone of extreme overactivity above the surface of the cozyweb, with businesses trying desperately to penetrate into private spaces past the open-to-private boundary marked by email.This makes poetic sense. The adtech world is neither utopian nor dystopian. It is pragmatically mehtopian. It’s t... See more

The current governing logic of the extended internet universe, I think, boils down to a pick-2-of-3 constraint triangle: {free, open to the public, quality}.

Unlike the main public internet, which runs on the (human) protocol of “users” clicking on links on public pages/apps maintained by “publishers”, the cozyweb works on the (human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams. Much of this content is poorly addressable, poorly searchable, a... See more

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 h... See more