Sublime

This stems from the structure of the web — it’s a tangle of links, a jumble of interconnected ideas. It fractalizes our attention, nudging us to leave fragments of our mind trapped in open tabs like a thousand tiny horcruxes — open loops feeding off our attention until they wither away, replaced by our latest distraction.

There’s a bottleneck here:

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Whatever we do, the internet isn’t returning to old-school then-common interfaces like FTP and Gopher, or organizations operating their own mail servers again instead of off-the-shelf solutions like G-Suite. But some of what we need is already here, especially on the web. Look at the resurgence of RSS feeds, email newsletters and blogs, as we disco... 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

The client-server relationship is arguably the crux of the worst problems with the contemporary internet. Examples include having to manage many different login credentials, being exploited by algorithms outside your control, the inability to own your data, the inability to customize interfaces, and constant political battles over what servers shou... See more