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On the web, and optimism

At last year’s Web Directions Summit one of the attendees (I try to chat to as many as I can) and I had quite a long conversation. His concern was that the keynote talks in particular were a little ‘pessimistic’. 

In a sense I could see what he meant. They certainly weren’t unalloyed optimism. Not Techno–Optimism as framed by Marc Andreesen a few months later.

Maggie Appleton in “The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI” (watch free, no signup required) advanced the thesis that 

[t]he web we love is becoming an eerily lifeless place. Its public spaces are filling with a mix of bad faith actors and automated predators like bots, advertisers, clickbait attention-grabbers, and angry twitter mobs. Like a dark forest, all the living creatures are quietly hiding out of sight.

Generative AI systems are about to make this situation a whole lot worse: We now have tools that can churn out tens of thousands of words, images, and videos in seconds.

Yep. Not overly optimistic. But Maggie also considered our potential response to these possibilities, and new kinds of interactions and spaces that might emerge in response. Opportunities that arise when we acknowledge the realities of where we are, and how we got here.

Rupert Manfredi in “The mediated Web” [again watch free, no signup required] made a prediction

the web will soon be mediated by agents, not just rendered by web browsers. Every user will have their own AI interpreting information for them, and executing tasks on their behalf.

And he asked in a vein similar to Maggie:

What does this mean now, and what does it mean for the future of the web?

Rupert too is realistic, but I’d not say pessimistic. In many ways the opposite.

So what lay at the heart of our attendees critique of these talks as being pessimistic?

I’ve been using the web for over 30 years. And ran my first conference 20 years ago. In those early years I’d characterise my enthusiasm for the Web, and the prospects it presented as not so much optimistic, as naive. Closer to Andreesen’s techno-optimism than feels comfortable now. Someone who felt that technology alone by its very nature–connecting us all, disintermediating and disrupting established incumbents in business and culture–would naturally give rise to something better. As the authors of the Cluetrain manifesto put it

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter, …and getting smarter faster than most companies.

Web native companies started life with the aspiration “don’t be evil” (I mean in hindsight that set the bar about as low as you can get). But we ended up with technology impacting “like a bomb in Myanmar” as painstakingly (and painfully) documented by Erin Kissane in this hugely important series. And the distribution of information, personal and commercial, controlled by a tiny number of companies that aggregate attention, creating chokepoints like the robber barons of the Rhine half a millennium ago, taxing the flow of information.

Years ago I recall writing, goodness knows where, that the Web had emerged at precisely the time we needed, almost miraculously. A way to connect us globally just as we faced existential challenges globally as a species, and a planet.

Instead disinformation campaigns by state actors have fomented civil unrest, shaped election outcomes. Vaccination rates in the most advanced countries in the world are falling, diseases once almost eradicated returning. Science skepticism, toward climate science, and even basic cosmography have a validity that a generation ago would have been unimaginable.

In his techno-optimist manifesto (seriously he called it a manifest, but I guess so did the clue train guys–perhaps there with at least some irony) Andreesen writes

We believe that there is no material problem – whether created by nature or by technology – that cannot be solved with more technology

This belief has been the foundation of the last 25 years, almost entirely unquestioned. It is the water we swim in. It is profoundly naive.

So far none of this has been particularly optimistic. But I actually happen to be–not because I share Andreesen’s perspective, but because I feel we’ve perhaps learned some painful lessons, become less naive. And on this more realistic foundation, there’s a chance to build things differently this time.

Ben Werdmuller has also been involved with the Web for a long time. He’s just posted the meditation “It turns out I’m still excited about the web, which resonated with me a great deal. 

Forgive this longish quote, since it speaks so strongly to me

The web sits apart from the rest of technology; to me, it’s inherently more interesting. Silicon Valley’s origins (including the venture capital ecosystem) lie in defense technology. In contrast, the web was created in service of academic learning and mutual discovery, and both built and shared in a spirit of free and open access. Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, and CERN did a wonderful thing by building a prototype and setting it free. As CERN points out on its page about the history of the web:

An essential point was that the web should remain an open standard for all to use and that no-one should lock it up into a proprietary system.

That ethos is how it succeeded; it’s why the web changed the world. And it’s why someone like me — over in Scotland, with no networks, wealth, or privilege to speak of — was able to break in and build something that got peoples’ attention. It’s also why I was interested to begin with. “The internet is people,” I used to say; more than protocols and pipes, the web was a fabric of interconnectedness that we were all building together. Even in the beginning, some people saw the web and thought, “this is a way I can make a lot of money.” For me, it was always a way to build community at scale.

I feel this prospect is still there–in the possibilities of the Fediverse and ActivityPub, in interesting new protocols like Interledger (a W3C standard, you might think of it like tcp/ip for money, just don’t think of it in the same breath as cryptocurrencies!).

Perhaps we’ll look back on the last 30 years in time as the actual Web 1.0, and what comes next as the genuine promise of the Web fulfilled.

Or perhaps I’ll look back in some years or longer, and think–ahh, John, still so naive. Just don’t call me a pessimist, at least not yet.

Join us at Web Directions Next

If what comes next interests you, then we have a one day conference, Web Directions Next, in Sydney Australia, and online, November 29th. With an amazing lineup, we’ll challenge you to consider what comes next for your career, your work and more broadly. We’d love to see you there.

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Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney