July 12, 2018
Does the Web need reopening? Let’s start with one more thought from Survival of the Richest: Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. --Too bad that’s all over and can never come again. Oh, wait. The web had failed to serve humanity: Tim Berners-Lee was crushed when Russia used Facebook to meddle in U.S. elections World wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee said he was “devastated” by recent abuses of the web, in an interview with Vanity Fair. He is working on a new platform, named Solid, to re-decentralise the internet and take power away from monopolies like Google and Facebook. He still has hope that the internet can become a something that serves humanity well. The Decentralized Internet Is Here, With Some Glitches An attempt to do this was also the major story arc of the last two seasons of Silicon Valley. What will a re-opened web look like? More like the original blogosphere? What will we do with it? How will we use it differently? WT 456-773 Eternity Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) | Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0 Image from Pixabay.com
