Criticising the web as a tech grump

Douglas Adams’ 3 rules of technology:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

@tom and I came to the web as group 2 in the era of Web 1. So when I talk about the horrors of the modern web, I’m coming at it with the nostalgia of the early web promise, but am now firmly in group 3, Adam’s tech-grumps. But does that make us wrong?

Thinking back to Web 1: there had been a tech giant: AOL and we’d all run away from it into the open web while it was gobbling up Time Warner, and there wasn’t another threat to the web until Microsoft, whose principle crime with Internet Explorer was writing shitty HTML and installing it by default on Windows, which the EU was able to stop. The next threat was Rupert Murdoch buying MySpace which we dodged by running to an Ajaxy site run by some kid from Harvard, which was, um, less successful.

But still, compare AOL/Microsoft/Murdoch of the early web to Google’s monopoly with search today. You’re pushed into using the Chrome browser on billions of smart phones, it defaults to Google search, it has Google ad tracking built in, in a way that’s hard to prevent, 66.6% of the world use it (!). And this is the same Google that has 98% of the video player market, 90% of search.

Whats more, this search monopoly is now used to stop sending you to useful sites, as it once did, but instead to serve up AI answers, stolen from the content Google indexed from those sites under legitimate copyright exemptions, so you don’t even need to visit them any more and risk supporting them. Google’s future vision of the web is free data to train its algorithm that dominates its search page. Bing, Duck and the rest have been quick to copy this, and of course the original culprit is Chat GPT which is increasingly used in place of search, with answers similarly stolen from the web using search indexing exemptions.

Still, if your first phone was an Android, if you’re Adam’s group 1, maybe everything I just said sounds like questioning Catholicism in rural Italy a few centuries ago. The response may be somewhere between “shh Google might hear you and this blog could be blocked” and “burn the heretic”…

I try to hear myself as I might have done if I was 19 today…

“What, we have a TV channel we can post to and a dozen different ways to reach billions of people? Sounds like you don’t like democracy mate, can’t handle the chaos that brings. Sounds like you want to put the genie back in the bottle.”

Or – perhaps – “yeh social media makes me depressed, I try not use it too much. But also it passes the time, I feel less alone. Look at this cat making pizza. And this person who says what I think but even better.”

But it doesn’t make the criticism less wrong. The web was never meant to be like this, where a few companies get to define truth for the majority. The web was meant to prevent a world like this.