The History of the Web

In Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig muses—among other things—about the intersection of art and technology, and what is lost when the two diverge and we seek out only the cold refuge of science.

We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly” (Time for real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue)

I think in our modern web, the small, personal web is where I see art and technology merge again. There is a lot of possibility in that.

Jamie Zawinski makes the case that enabling DRM in the browser was the open web’s original sin. When the W3c, and subsequently Mozilla, caved to pressure from commercial interests, it opened a crack in the founding ideology and spirit of the web and allowed a near endless commercial erosion of the open web.

Fortunately, Zawinski has a solution.

In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:

1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
2. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
3. There is no 3.

Some eerie echoes of today’s AI trends in the discourse around “agents” from the mid-90’s. Always with the same old promises. Swap out “personal AI assistant” for “agent” in this brief aside from a New York Times feature of a personal agent website created all the way back in 1996, and it’d be right at home in any major publication today:

As soon as you give your agent your personal tastes about restaurants, plays or clothing, it begins fetching things for you — even things you didn’t know you wanted. Your agent knows that you like Latin jazz, for example. A record company with access to the data sends you an ad: a Tito Puente CD is about to come out. Knowing that music and food tastes sometime overlap, your software agent even recommends that you try a new Caribbean restaurant in your neighborhood.

Next month, you are traveling to Boston for the first time (in arranging the airplane tickets, your agent has already found the cheapest fare, reserved your aisle seat and ordered a vegetarian meal). Knowing you like small, intimate Italian places, your agent searches a pool of people whose taste is similar to yours, and then recommends three places in the North End: Massimino’s, D’Parma and Terramia.

Jamie Zawinski posted about Wikipedia and it’s representation as a source of truth, even when it isn’t. I followed a link to an interview with the author Emily St. John Mandel, who requested the interview simply for the purpose of going on record that she was divorced.

Elan Ullendorff flips the premise on search engines entirely.

We don’t need a better large search engine. Instead, we need to cultivate what I would call “folk search algorithms,” a set of tools and practices that, whether by chance or design, are not influential enough to move markets:

As a search engine scale, Ullendorff argues, it falls victim to manipulation and an endless cycle of bad actors gaming the system and algorithms struggling to keep up. A better search, with the principles of the small web.

Reading the original text of ‘Information Management: A Proposal’, the initial proposal from the internet’s inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, doesn’t really put you in the moment. Until now thanks to an insane quest by John Graham-Cumming to take the original file created by Berners-Lee and properly open it in today’s modern software terrain. When he discovered that even Berners-Lee could no longer access his original word file, Graham-Cumming embarked on a mission to emulate the 1990’s Word software, allowing the document to be viewed in its original context, providing a captivating insight into history.

In 2011, early Facebooker John Hammerbacher was quoted as saying:

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks

Given Facebook (sorry, I mean Meta’s) latest statement about artificial general intelligence, an all the enthusiasm poured into AI by Microsoft and Google and others, I feel as if that statement can be slightly amended now.

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make computers generate things that make people click ads. That sucks