What Happened to the New Internet?

The first thing I’ve come to learn is that pursuing something as open-ended as internet reform requires intentional scoping and goal-setting. The New Internet was never a single thing. It was fractured and messily connected from the jump. This messiness was used as feedstock to accelerate its consolidation under what became the crypto industry. It ... See more

The New Internet failed to provide a clear enough plot, a straightforward enough of a product, nor legible enough of a movement to fend off the effects of value drift. Young people especially want to work on material things that pay well and the New Internet never really had a clear career path attached to it.

It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting fores

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Today it feels like we’re living through another important cultural shift—the decline of Twitter—and a new generation of networks is experimenting with new structures to try and capitalize on it. If we want to understand what’s next, it helps to ask: what caused the culture shift? What new structures would be better? And what will it feel like to u... See more

"What initially seemed like a new way to transfer information turned into a revolution that rewrote the basic assumptions of society. Entirely new kinds of economic and social organization evolved on these networks, taking root faster than anyone would have thought possible. For an entire generation — my generation — that process is all we’ve ever ... See more