HTML Is For All of Us

tags
Software vs Capitalism WWW

Notes

it seems that even most people who are adept with the relevant technology consider it irrelevant for the average person to have good answers. Yet having answers is precisely what is necessary for saving the Web and restoring its role as an equitable and democratic commons.

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a website is an HTML file with a unique global address. This comes in the form of a URL.

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Though numerous explanations exist for why the home server movement failed to gain traction, a significant factor in its premature demise was a different movement in the tech industry that was unfolding at the same time: “Web 2.0.”

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The sites built by these companies replaced the simple “webpage as file” formulation with complex applications that twist the basic technologies of the Web beyond their intended use, subsuming an intrinsically open architecture into privatised systems governed by more restrictive logics.

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“Network effects” are “created” by using that portal to mediate interactions between users, capturing relations that might otherwise happen directly via the intrinsic network architecture of the web. The resulting “architecture of participation” is used to track and monitor user behavior, producing data that can be sold for profit to advertisers.

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cf Surveillance and Capture

Web 2.0 was simply a playbook for consolidating power on a platform long celebrated for its democratic potential.

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how the paradigm was able to achieve hegemony in place of the competing home server movement. Web 2.0’s strategic edge can be found in the final phrase of O’Reilly’s definition: “rich user experiences.”

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strips agency from users by placing Web technologies out of reach— complex entites suitable only for management by experts— while at the same time enabling those “experts” to build specialized infrastructure for providing the experience of a few easy clicks.

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if the fundamental technologies of the modern Web are indeed too complex to be accessible to the average user, then that complexity only exists because a professionalized class of programmers (or, perhaps more significantly, the companies for which they work) have stretched the Web to include an ever-expanding set of features.

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Hidden behind its careful “just-so” story, Web 2.0 was effectively a venture-backed coup, without any intrinsic economic advantages over alternative paradigms and with a much less democratic structure.

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if naming the internet as a complex subject willed that complexity into existence, then perhaps constituting systems as democratic and widely knowable can likewise transform them in self-fulfilling ways.

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