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[10][thumb] [11]Ben Werdmuller [12]
 

[13]It turns out I'm still excited about the web

Passion led us here

I’m worried I’ve become cynical about technology as I’ve gotten older. But
maybe technology really is worse.

Someone asked me the other day: “what [in media and technology] are you excited
about right now?”

We both agreed that it was a surprisingly difficult question. And then came the
follow-up:

“Do you think it’s just because we’re older now, or is the web really less
exciting?”

And to be honest, I’m not sure.

I used to be so excited. If you sneak a glance at my high school yearbook,
you’ll see that I wanted to be a journalist. Telling stories was my first love.
It’s still where my brain feels the most comfortable. I love the flow state of
writing more than doing just about anything else. That’s why I keep writing
here, and why my long-term plan is to pivot from a technology career to one
where I get to write all the time.

But in 1994 or so, I got distracted by the web: what an amazing medium for
stories. Many of us share the experience of trying out a browser like NCSA
Mosaic, discovering voices from all over the world, and getting stuck into
writing our own HTML code without having to ask anyone for permission or buy a
software license to get started. I vividly remember when we got the ability to
add our own background images to web pages, for example. For a long time, I was
a master at table-based layouts.

In the UK, where I grew up, you were effectively forced to pick your university
degree at 16. You were required to choose three or four A-level subjects to
focus on for your last two years of high school; then you had to apply to do a
particular degree at each university, knowing that each degree had subject
requirements. If you wanted to study English at university, you needed to have
chosen the English A-level; good luck getting in if you hadn’t.

Specifically because I was distracted by the web, I put myself on the Computer
Science track. Even then, I kept a Theater A-level, because I couldn’t imagine
a world where there wasn’t some art and writing in my life. Most British
universities correspondingly dismissed me for not being focused enough, but
Edinburgh took me, so that’s where I went. Even while I was doing the degree, 
[14]I built a satirical website that got over a million pageviews a day - in
2001. I blogged, of course, and although I haven’t kept a consistent platform
or domain for all that time, I’ve been writing consistently on the web since
1998.

It was a platform I got to approach with a sense of play; a sense of
storytelling; a sense of magical discovery as I met new people and learned from
their creativity.

The web sits apart from the rest of technology; to me, it’s inherently more
interesting. [15]Silicon Valley’s origins (including the venture capital
ecosystem) lie in defense technology. In contrast, the web was created in
service of academic learning and mutual discovery, and both built and shared in
a spirit of free and open access. Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, and CERN
did a wonderful thing by building a prototype and setting it free. [16]As CERN
points out on its page about the history of the web:

    An essential point was that the web should remain an open standard for all
    to use and that no-one should lock it up into a proprietary system.

That ethos is how it succeeded; it’s why the web changed the world. And it’s
why someone like me — over in Scotland, with no networks, wealth, or privilege
to speak of — was able to break in and build something that got peoples’
attention. It’s also why I was interested to begin with. “The internet is
people,” I used to say; more than protocols and pipes, the web was a fabric of
interconnectedness that we were all building together. Even in the beginning,
some people saw the web and thought, “this is a way I can make a lot of money.”
For me, it was always a way to build community at scale.

And then Facebook — it always seems to be Facebook — became the first web
company to reach a billion dollar valuation, in a year that happened to also
see the launch of the iPhone. Building community at scale became finding
customers at scale. There was a brief reprieve while global financial markets
tumbled at the hands of terrible debt instruments that had been built on shaky
foundations, and then the tech industry started investing in new startups in
greater and greater numbers. Y Combinator, which had started a few years
earlier, started investing in more and more startups, with higher and higher
checks ([17]$6,000 per founder for the first cohort, compared to [18]half a
million dollars per startup today). The number of billion-dollar-plus web
startups grows by the hundreds every year.

The web I loved was swamped by a mindset that was closer to Wall Street. It’s
been about the money ever since.

It’s so rare these days to find people who want to build that
interconnectedness; who see it as a mission and a movement. People in tech talk
excitedly about their [19]total Compensation (which has earned its own
shorthand acronym, TC), and less so what exciting thing they got to build, and
what it allowed people to do. Maybe they’ll give you a line about what they
allow for the enterprise or increasing some company’s bottom line, but it’s
usually devoid of the humanist idealism that enchanted me about the early web.

I realized some time ago that the startups I personally founded in this era
couldn’t have succeeded, because my focus was all wrong. I wanted to be paid to
explore and build this wonderful platform, and was not laser focused on how to
build investor value. I still want to be paid to build and explore, try and
make new things happen, with a sense of play. That’s not, I’m afraid to say,
how you build a venture-scale business.

So, let’s return to the question. Given this disillusionment, and my lack of
alignment with what the modern tech industry expects of us, what am I excited
about?

My cynicism has been tempered by the discovery that there are still movements
out there that remind me of the web’s original promise — efforts that focus on
reclaiming independence and fostering real community. Despite the
commercialization of the web, these are still places where that original spirit
of openness and community-building thrives.

[20]The Indieweb is one. It’s an interdisciplinary group of people that
advocates for everyone owning their own websites and publishing from their own
domains. It’s happening! From the resurgence of personal blogs to new
independent publications like [21]Platformer and [22]User Mag, many people see
the value of owning their presence on the internet and their relationships with
their community. Independence from sites like Facebook and Google is surging.

The other is [23]the Fediverse: a way to have conversations on the web that
isn’t owned by any single company or entity. The people who are building the
Fediverse (through communities, platforms like [24]Mastodon, cultural
explorations) are expanding a patchwork of conversations through open protocols
and collaborative exploration, just like the web itself was grown decades ago.
It’s phenomenally exciting, with a rapidly-developing center of gravity that’s
even drawing in some of the companies who previously were committed to siloed,
walled-garden models. I haven’t been this enthused about momentum on the web
for twenty years.

I was afraid I had become too cynical to find excitement in technology again.
It wasn’t true.

While I’ve grown more cynical about much of tech, movements like the Indieweb
and the Fediverse remind me that the ideals I once loved, and that spirit of
the early web, aren’t lost. They’re evolving, just like everything else.

[25] October 10, 2024 · [26]Posts · [27][logo] Share this
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I’m writing about the intersection of the internet, media, and society. [28]
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References:

[1] https://werd.io/2024/it-turns-out-im-still-excited-about-the-web#maincontent
[3] https://werd.io/
[5] https://about.werd.io/
[6] https://werd.io/content/posts
[7] https://werd.io/content/bookmarkedpages
[8] https://werd.io/
[9] https://artisanal-artisan-3527.ck.page/56920a9da9
[10] https://werd.io/profile/benwerd
[11] https://werd.io/profile/benwerd
[12] https://werd.io/profile/benwerd
[13] https://werd.io/2024/it-turns-out-im-still-excited-about-the-web
[14] https://words.werd.io/we-are-the-monkeys-of-rum-70f81d4a02df
[15] https://words.werd.io/what-is-silicon-valley-87fcf49f30c8
[16] https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web
[17] https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/grow-the-puzzle-around-you
[18] https://www.ycombinator.com/deal
[19] https://compt.io/guide/total-compensation/
[20] https://indieweb.org/
[21] https://www.platformer.news/leaving-substack-platformer-year-four/
[22] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/taylor-lorenz-leaves-washington-post-launch-user-mag-substack-1236011888/
[23] https://socialwebfoundation.org/
[24] https://joinmastodon.org/
[25] https://werd.io/2024/it-turns-out-im-still-excited-about-the-web
[26] https://werd.io/content/posts
[27] https://shareopenly.org/share/?url=https://werd.io/2024/it-turns-out-im-still-excited-about-the-web&text=It+turns+out+I%27m+still+excited+about+the+web
[28] https://newsletter.werd.io/
[31] https://newsletter.werd.io/
[32] mailto:ben@werd.io
[33] https://signal.me/#eu/_ehMeopT5JeELrkt2lSk-R0V6d1AsGt_3Q98UOJhgBMTal5EGTdNIbZHB9H9CqBn
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