new internet

Also, much like a small homestead on a hundred acres, websites were closed ecosystems and isolated. There were no social networks or marketplace platforms to tap as a firehose channel for building an audience, and there was no real mechanism for ‘going viral’.

You had to grow your traffic the old fashioned way – by asking your digital neighbors for... See more

We’re in the midst of a significant evolution in what it means to be an individual. This experience and confluence of forces is what I call post-individualism — a term intended to capture the ways computers and the web have changed our sense of self and how society is changing in response.

I recognize these attempts, yet I know for a fact that the internet — this home and caretaker and teacher and friend will never return to its prior state. Everything only experiences infancy once. But in the same way you return to your hometown after years of absence and see it evolve and reconstitute itself, the vestiges of beauty on the web have... See more

I think we see a decline in the big "open sea" social networks, replaced increasingly by fragmented silos. I don't know what will happen to Twitter, but if Elon's shenanigans cause it to fail I don't think we'll ever see anything quite like it take its place: