Comment by xpe
3 years ago
A smart, insightful interview of Doctorow, with a good interviewer, Michael Nolan. Reasonably optimistic, the framing is on target, dare I say inspiring.
Read it; it is worth your time. That's more useful than dwelling on thoughts such as "the Web is past its prime" and "even if we improve it, Big Tech will exploit it". Repeating the negative generalizations over and over can contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If so inclined, after you read it, find a way (small or otherwise) to help.
I did just that, years ago. I took a bet on the open internet.
I don't have to convince big tech to treat me right, there's already a whole big open internet where I can go and what I can connect to. Existing techniques from the 90's and before still work. Websites still work. Websites without third party code do work. Analytics from Google? Thumbs from Facebook? One can remove that with ease. Just to name a few.
So I ended up not with the most innovative approach (no blockchain, no NFT, no AI), but with a solid piece of software to build your own website with. One can connect to other independent websites via RSS. One can download it for selfhosting, one can take a subscription. You can design the thing yourself without knowing anything about design, all built-in functionality. Use it for business with a webshop, as a personal blog or photobook, or as an organization with an online info library and custom forms to connect stakeholders, etc. Oh, and visitor statistics without cookies and tracking.
Websites don't necessarily have to stay websites, they can evolve into personal online multi-tools that work nicely together with the rest of the open web.
My main concern - broadly speaking - is knowing that the future content of every website I deliver might end up 'raped' by some AI company and 'abused' as part of their product. But still, it doesn't stop me from betting on the open internet, because AI products don't exclude me and my customers from publishing our content on the internet.
I followed the link and gotta say, love the approach you took.
About AI, totally. I guess my hope is big publishers waking up and realizing they are too being ripped off by big SV tech that's just blatantly ignoring copyright.
Thanks a lot! It encourages me.
If you happen to start a free website at Hey Homepage, know that the 'Quick Design' module (that I'm pretty proud of) might not work over there (yet). I'm working on it.
What link is that, very curious?
1 reply →
>> Repeating the negative generalisations over and over can contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Very true, but it's also treacherous to go blindly in the opposite direction. We need to be capable of both modes of thought... even if they contradict occasionally.
Interoperability definitely has the potential to "save." It's very good to have someone focus in on that with optimism and conviction. OTOH, we also need to remember that there are (or at least may be) other factors at play.
At this point, "freeing the web" likely entails bankrupting FB and Google. Their ad businesses just do not work without dominant market share, control over user data and such. See Twitter, Bing, reddit, etc. They don't have pro rata earnings relative to the big boys.
Can Google and Facebook fail, without causing disaster, political mitigation efforts, recession, etc? I'm not saying this to contradict the arguments, just pondering the scale of the task at hand.
I think a usable middle road might be to focus on interoperability's direct, first order achievables... not the big picture. What, in the most practical and down to earth terms, can be achieved by and achievable step in the interoperability direction.
Agreed. I'd put the emphasis on avoiding dwelling and maximizing detailed system awareness with a bias towards doing something.