Endgame for the Open Web
Anil Dash makes the case that we’re running out of time to save the last vestiges of the open web from the big-tech robber barons’ multifaceted (but mostly AI-shaped) rampage, which probably isn’t news to anyone who actually understands what’s at stake, but his post does a good job of enumerating and describing the threats for those who don’t.
Creators who fight hard to stay independent are often choosing to make less money, to go without winning awards or the other trappings of big media, just in order to maintain control and authority over their content, and because they think it’s the right way to connect with an audience. Publishers who’ve survived through year after year of attacks from tech platforms get rewarded by… getting to do it again the next year. Tim Berners-Lee is no billionaire, but none of those guys with the hundreds of billions of dollars would have all of their riches without him. And the thanks he gets from them is that they’re trying to kill the beautiful gift that he gave to the world, and replace it with a tedious, extortive slop mall.
I appreciate Anil’s efforts to educate, and I hope he’s right that collective action can turn the tide, and I hope he’s right about this, too:
Ultimately I think, if given the choice, people will pick home-cooked, locally-grown, heart-felt digital meals over factory-farmed fast food technology every time.
But… I just don’t believe that, and I’m not sure Anil does either, given this point he makes earlier in his post:
[The robber barons] see their chance to run the playbook again, and do to Wikipedians what Uber did to cab drivers, to get users addicted to closed apps like they are to social media, to force podcasters to chase an algorithm like kids on TikTok.
I’m always rooting for the open web, but it isn’t dying because people were pried away from it, and Uber and TikTok and ChatGPT aren’t successful because people are forced to use them. Like fast food, which exponentially outsells cookbooks and CSA shares, the closed platforms are simply more convenient. The weaponization of our personal data against us is apparently an acceptable price to pay for that convenience, and the unscrupulousness of its manufacture is generally shrugged off or ignored.
The information age, for all its triumphs, has been subsumed by the cult of convenience, and until we can figure out how to deprogram that cult at scale, it will continue to fall victim to whichever bad actors can most effectively exploit it.