Once upon a time, the world wide web was just that: a curated web of hand-built peer-to-peer connections. I used to love traversing the web: arriving at a site, absorbing what was there, seeking out the bookmarks page, finding it, and going down the list following every link to another world of knowledge, insights, and ideas.
Starting in the aughts, giant corporate entities began to overlay and overpower our web with their own competitive and hegemonic one-to-many connections. Then, for their next trick, they created social media: walled cities in which we could only build connections in ways those entities could control and monetize. Today our connections belong to those giant corporate entities, and they sell them back to us. We are expected to pay up and line up at troughs to be fed whatever slop their algorithms throw at us next.
Essentially, they forked our collaborative project. (In open-source software development, a fork is a bifurcation in a source code repository that separates one development focus, or “fork,” from another.) They had more resources and coordination than we did, so their fork became the main fork, and we went from being the architects of the web to its captive audiences and products. Today our hand-built web, what’s left of it, is in tatters. Many people and groups still have web sites, but the practice of building and using curated connections has been nearly lost.
So let’s unfork the web. Let’s take back our capabilities and responsibilities as architects of the internet. Let’s build a new web of curated connections – not Web 3.0 or Web 4.0, but something of our own design that we can control and use. Call it Web Plan B. Or the hand-built web. We could build a new arts-and-crafts movement, but for the web.
How can we do this? By putting in the time to rebuild our curated connections. If you have a web site or blog or podcast or video channel or any other kind of “place” on the internet, you can start building and maintaining a curated list of connections to other places.
To do my part, I have created, and will continue to improve and maintain, a new bookmarks page, here on this blog. You can read it and use it to find other people and groups whose work I respect and recommend.
If you create (or already have) a bookmarks page, tell me about it (in email) and I’ll add your bookmarks page to my bookmarks page. (Unless for some reason I don’t like what you are doing or saying; I reserve that right, of course. Everyone has that right. That’s what “curated” means.) If I have already linked to you, by all means give me a link to your bookmarks page, and I’ll add it to my mention of you.
I don’t want to sound all high-and-mighty about what I am doing here. After all, I am as much at fault for what has happened as anybody else. All of my web sites used to have long and annotated (and witty) bookmark pages. It was fun to play a part in the connection game. But I stopped doing it when everybody else stopped, gradually, starting roughly in the teens. The best I’ve done in recent years was to have an “other blogs” list on my blog. I recently took that list off the new blog design (as a de-cluttering thing), but I have put some of those links back into my curated bookmarks list.
Even as I created my new bookmarks page, I felt conflicted and uncertain. What should I say about these people? How should I group them together? My social skills felt a little rusty in this forgotten context. But I wrote the list of links anyway. Rough as it is, it will have to stay the way it is until I can improve it.
Every journey begins with a single step, and even if it’s a stumble, it’s a start.