Our web
Gregory Bennett chronicles the enshittification of everything online in his piece Heat Death of the Internet. It makes for grim reading.
There’s a note of hope at the end. It’s the same note of hope that Charles Digges amplifies in his great piece, Viva la Library!:
Rebel against The Algorithm. Get a library card.
Molly White has also chronicled the decline of everything good on the web, but her piece has hope threaded throughout. We can have a different web:
Though we now face a new challenge as the dominance of the massive walled gardens has become overwhelming, we have tools in our arsenal: the memories of once was, and the creativity of far more people than ever before, who entered the digital expanse but have grown disillusioned with the business moguls controlling life within the walls.
And if anything, it is easier now to do all of this than it ever was.
Like I’ve repeatedly said, having your own website has gone being something uncontroversial to being downright transgressive.
Still, the barrier to entry remains too high for my liking. I wish more smart minds were working on making publishing on the web easier instead of just working on getting people to consume.
But even if you don’t have your own website, Andrew Stephens says you can still Save the Web by Being Nice:
The very best thing to keep the web partly alive is to maintain some content yourself - start a blog, join a forum and contribute to the conversation, even podcast if that is your thing. But that takes a lot of time and not everyone has the energy or the knowhow to create like this.
The second best thing to do is to show your support for pages you enjoy by being nice and making a slight effort.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, being nice “is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” Tell someone that you liked something they put on the web. You’ll feel good. They’ll feel even better.