Oh No, Technology!

The Era of Three Websites

There’s something wrong in the state of the web, and we’ve all known it for some time. From “if you’re not buying a product you are the product” (isn’t that quaint) to Cambridge Analytica, ever since the 2000s there’s been something off. Recently it seems, we’ve discovered that part of the problem was the low interest rates internet, when any bad idea no matter how dangerous or cruel or stupid could have a $15 million Series A. But I think another foundational failing of the web2.0 was to abstract away the user from the job of creation. To be a content creator today, you must find a walled garden to put your content in, but the internet was built for and is able to accommodate more than that. To crib Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message” and when that medium is TikTok or YouTube or Facebook, the content that gets produced and promoted looks a certain way, acts a certain way, and expresses certain beliefs.

Compare this to what existed just prior to web2.0–or even before that to things like radio or public access tv—and you can see that media, creativity, content are all more closed off than ever before. By pushing all of the creativity into just a handful of places we’ve killed so much of it. Sunlight doesn’t just disinfect, it sterilizes.

This blog is, in part, an answer to the question posed by this post; I’ve been asking myself and worrying about what the future of the web could be, what I liked about the old and what I wanted from the new. In short, I want to use the internet to connect to people like me and to share my ideas, and I want to do it on my terms. This is not a message or a goal that appeals to everyone, and that’s ok, but I do hope it appeals to someone. The era of three websites is over, what we do next is up to us.