You can’t click without hitting the proclamations of the web being dead/useless/broken/unusable. Why the web is bad? What happened to the web?
And no shortage of Dead Internet Theories. Definitely the most palpable one to me is well enshrined as a word of the year, with Enshittification is so well explained by Cory Doctorow (I cannot recommend enough his new CBC podcast series Who Broke the Internet?).
Or lay it on the Rot Economy (aromas of heavy f-bomb spice). The Broligarchy. Heck, why not hostile extra terrestrials?
I have my own theory, not based on any real evidence or deep analysis, just my own internally churned, likely paranoid imagination.
It turned when the web became people’s jobs, sources of incomes. Maybe it was the inflection for that terrible (to me) word… “Monetization”
As the story goes, Tim Berners-Lee invented the web to be a tool of use for research scientists, who’s job was doing science. My own path onto the web in the early 1990s was in my job of supporting the educational use of technology at the Maricopa Community Colleges.
But now, the enterprises, vast ones, that offer web infrastructure, content, call it the Web Industrial Complex, requires companies of hundreds of people. The web as a business for itself means it has to somehow extract money to pay salaries, rent buildings, buy machinery.
I am not saying making a living from creating, building the web is bad. Commercialization was unavoidable once the web sparked usage, created a “market”. Heck, I made it sort of my living for 10 years as an ed tech consultant. Was it the first web banner ad (1994)? Can’t really put it there. Likely the zenith of the GooglePlex, which shifted from making the world’s content findable to making it profitable? Were it not for the incentive of rankings, would we have paywalls, pop up ads, ads that cover content to make it virtually unreadable, then the war to fight back with ad-blockers, then the return fight to disable ad blockers?
So yes, as one person, making web stuff either in the context of other paid work, or just on my own, I have made a rather large, likely questionable value, virtually of no financial gain– as one person. Sure, I am a small fry, a virtually zero on the global scale of web popularity/action. I publish as a one person operation a podcast for my organization, and then I listen to podcasts that open with calls for sponsors, paid ads, and lists a teams of managers, producers, etc to publish.
There’s no going back, and my theory has not much relevance. it just makes sense to me.
I never want to be part of the web that is adding to it to get money from it. That’s also why I never was terrible successful, that I do not have a Lear jet, and do not even garner attention for web sites to track where my jet is located now.
I am a web business failure.
Proudly.
And yet, for all the bemoaning of the “death” “useless” of the web, I have to disagree. The web itself, as a machinery of information converyance, works remarkably well, at least in my daily experience. All those packets whiz around, bring me stuff, take my places, entertain me.
The proclamations of web death are focused on the Big Loud Large Scale part of the web. It is not the whole web itself. Rather, there is a vibrant, bubbling culture of web creativity in the IndieWeb, the small web, the places where people write, share, create not for profit, bust just because they can, and it fuels their main work.
Take a few clicks around Hypertext TV. And there is the Big Button to visit the Useless Web sadly ironic in being plastered with ads.
The joy is the “useless” being fun sites made by individuals, just for the sake of making the web, and putting it online for others.
Yes, the Big Web is foul, smelly, toxic, rancid, covered in poop, but do not understate the breadth and joy of the Small Web. These both co-exist. The web itself is not broken, it’s more what many have done tot it, or that we have sadly bought into.
There ain’t going back to the web that was, but there sure is a sane way (for me forward) out there. It’s not dead yet.
Featured Image: An image that has no direct relevance but is also one not extruded synthetically from a machine. I stopped on a highway likely in Arizona to enjoy the juxtaposition of a iconic geologic formation and a road machinery moving rock, to play with the idea of wild, baseless, yet fun theories. New Geology Theory flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
I just started listening to the CBC – Who Broke the Internet – Cory Doctorow podcast last week and it’s pretty good. Also, there’s an EFF podcast called “How To Fix the Internet” and this week’s episode features Molly White. There’s good stuff out there, we just need to keep pointing to it.