We’re building this wrong
There’s something that’s been on my mind for a while. The Internet has nearly unlimited potential for good in this world. I see a fabric we can use to connect people, to unite, to debate, to refine. We have all of the materials, we have so much of the infrastructure in place, but we’re building sideways.
Part of me wants to find some pithy way to pin this to Apple’s lackluster WWDC announcements but that’s not fair. Apple’s been building the world’s prettiest walled garden for years and we all know it.
I could lay the blame on Facebook trying to reinvent AOL keywords and consume newsrooms until they’re nothing but social media outlets. That would be a cheapshot. Everyone already points to Facebook’s yuck.
There are middlemen to sell you media, companies thumbing their nose at the law to give you a better ride to the airport, a whole class of investors gold rushing to exits without the end user in mind, and all sorts of easy targets. But let’s not take the easy way. Let’s own it.
We fucked up.
Twenty years ago the Internet was still niche. A GIF89a could make your head spin, and all sorts of exotic HTML tags were <blink>ing their way into our hearts. Things felt fresh and young. The web was uncharted territory full of optimism. It showed glimmers of what could be, superimposed against the AOL/Prodigy version of what was. But like all adorable small things it grew, and as it grew it got noticed.
So many of us who were there early fell prey to cults of personality, new brand jobs with new job titles, or to the task of trying to build the next big thing. The money poured in and found new ways to close corners of the web, to build new walls, to turn exclusivity into an artificial well of profit. MySpace would dominate, ad revenue fueled the boom of search giants, struggling music labels were propped up by iTunes, and even our news and weather rolled together in an increasingly tight and proprietary ball. We built paywalls and gardens, but forgot the infrastructure below.
The promise was of an interactive space, a home for ideas to be read and written. We built new components for the web, open and together, for all to use. We still do, but outpaced ten to one by closed solutions built for profit over user experience. You can accept payments, you can store a file, but to accept a payment for a stored file you’re going to pay a service in the middle. You can post your thoughts for your friends to see, but they have to pass an algorithm filter to get to your friends and they’ll definitely be used to sell you the case of toilet paper you just happen to need.
Trying to build a website for yourself without knowing how to code? Good luck. And apparently our answer to that is “learn to code.”
This space is sacred. This thing we built can change lives. It’s a sin to wall it off, to say it’s for programmers only, or to allow it to be the exclusive domain of brands and startups. The web, the beautiful idea that lies beneath every new cat photo you see in the morning; it’s still here. And it’s time we start building it the right way again.
We can’t settle for “learn to code” when we have “let me teach you to code.” We can’t settle for code at all when we should be working to make the web easy and accessible for anyone to read, write, or build on. It’s time we rethink what’s possible and rethink how we make it happen. Waiting for digital natives isn’t enough — we need a web that feels native to all, an extension of our own expressions.
That human native web only happens if it’s open. It only happens if we invite new voices to the table and think communally about what parts we need to build together to support a better web. This will still be a place for commerce. There will never be a shortage of opportunity for profit online. But unless we look beyond paywalls and exits we’ll never get to the web we need below. Let’s stop competing with open solutions for the sake of money, support common efforts, and remember to give back to the web.
All of us can do better. Let’s stop fucking up.
