Web End Gamed

I saw the link to Anil Dash’s End Game for the Open Web shared Friday, scanned it quickly. I’ve been a long fan of this man’s writing and staking a position. He sure outlined the ills of the game.

The open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think about how radical that is.

Now, from content to code, communities to culture, we can see example after example of that open web under attack. Every single aspect of the radical architecture I just described is threatened, by those who have profited most from that exact system.

….

I don’t say this lightly: it looks to me like 2026 is the year that decides whether the open web as we know it will survive at all, and we have to fight like the threat is existential. Because it is.

https://www.anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web/

Serious, right? Still I might have not read all the way through. When a good friend shared it by email with a note of it’s “stirring call to action” I re-read this end part again.

Huh? The action called for is to support the organizations making a stand (not that I disagree) and hold on to hopes of some kind of “Good AI“?

I feel less than stirred.

It was coming across Anil Dash’s novel style of web site in the early 2000s, you know the “blog thing” that I learned of Six Apart, and this made my own blog’s first home on Movable Type. And I sure was a big fan of Glitch (it’s game ended 2025). I had more connected memories and went into the text box of my favorite tool to type in my query… not some bot thing but my own blog.

Bear with the tangents that happened.

First I was in a run down of a crazy zany bit of travel stretch I did in 2013.

40 Days of Travel Stats

The hit on the search was in reference to one great stop in there was attending the Moxfest 2013 conference in London, noting “Keynoter I Most Wished To Meet But Did Not: Anil Dash at Mozfest.” I see him listed in the event web site (wow still alive), mentioned in a few blogs, but not sure what the talk was about. I’d guess it was on the heels of Anil’s 2012 post about the Web We Lost, so it was 14 years from that to end game.

Ahh, but wait a minute, I was there near the front of the room to get this photo (and for which, this 13 year old posted image registers a like from the subject)

But then I got myself distracted in the middle of my post scanning the talks, presentations, pocasts, etc I did in those 40 days. Sure its my vanity, but this is my own web page, and I was curious about the links that persevered.

The video from University of Alaska Fairbanks for the talk I gave. Gone. a Digital Beards podcast I did there. Gone. A video I recorded with Martin Weller posted on the OER Research Hub. Gone. An etherpad for some session I initiated at Mozfest. Gone. An Edutalk podcast recorded in John Johston’s kitchen. Gone.

Now here is what I found interesting. Of all the recordings of stuff I did, the most reliable source of this 13 year old content was the ones posted on YouTube. I ended up taking a bit of my day replacing dead links with ones from the Internet Archive, and found a few more where the media left alive… was on YouTube.

Now look, I am in no way denying that Google ins front and center with all the blame to heap on the web’s end game, yet here I am looking at maybe the most reliable archive of media. It’s so easy to get up and proclaim Googles evilness and urge everyone to jump off the ship, but when I see how much of the web has been abandoned by the organizations and individuals that originally made them, I am not quite confident of heaping all the web end game blame on the broligarchy.

I defend them not, but I feel individuals have responsibility here. It’s way I spend my own time here in the blog fixing old links, and scouring for lost media.

I am a reclaimer and a maintainer of my own stuff. The job never ends, but I won’t quit.

Digital Durability? My Money is on the Individual

Hang on, I am not done yet talking about Anil Dash. He personally stepped up in 2011 when I was faced with a hosting problem for this monster I created called Feed2JS, a web thing I cobbled from other’s ideas to do what now seems arcane- being able to include in a web site a dynamic widget.sidebar powered by RSS and added as cut and paste Javascript.

Some kind folks had run it for me for quite some time, but their company got bought, and my freeloading traffic eating abrge of a site had to find a new home. I put out a call for help on this blog, and added it to the output itself.

Red Alert for Feed2JS

I do remember that Anil directly contacted me by email and did financially contribute to help with the server costs. I went deep into my gmail and narrowed the search for just that year, but did not find his message.

The thing is I found tons of message from others, many who donated small and medium amounts of $, quite a few messages came via a link I had for a while on About.me. In combing through messages friom that era, I was rather overwhelmed at how interpersonal and generous email was then. There was not just the people who ponied some money but many more that expressed their gratitude.

Then it struck me again. I was there in the vile Google platform, able to do pinpoint searches on 13 year old messages.

One more time, I am not aiming to make a defense of all that Google does, but am finding this weird irony of getting this long running bit of my digital past. And I have not even cracked open the Google Drive,

The End End Game

I really want to relish Anil’s last message to his Web End Game post:

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.

https://www.anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web/

I do not find this true at all. We have been given choice, and predominantly over the last X years, most people have opted for the fast food of social media.

We are not just passive victims here, most of us gave in, caved in to the convenience of the Big Sites, It deserves a look in the mirror, Pogo. It’s more than one set of initials on the knife./

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Featured Image: 2009/365/127: The Earth Takes the Dead flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) edited by me to add a bit of the title text of Anil Dash’s Post, the dates 1989-2026 for the age of the web, and Open ClipArt image of a hunting knife by j4p4n.