“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke

Try to imagine the you of twenty years ago holding a Rabbit R1, or using a cell phone or being able to listen to every song, ever recorded, for just a few dollars a month.

We don’t just take these once magic items for granted, now we express frustration that they’re not better or cheaper or faster. The fade is real and the half-life continues to get shorter.

It’s a sort of hedonic treadmill of tech, where we not only take a breakthrough for granted in just a short time, but we also raise the bar for what counts as magic next time.

If we depend on outside forces to find wonder and awe, we’re going to end up disappointed.

We don’t have to wait for a new technology to feel the magic. Instead, we have the chance to erase our expectations and simply notice it wherever we look.

Excerpted from a new monologue on Team Human. Here the whole thing here.

I can’t do this anymore. 

Oh, I’m happy to write and podcast and teach and talk. That’s me, and that’s all good. What I’m finding difficult, even counter-productive, is to try to keep doing this work at the pace of the Internet.

Podcasting is great fun, and if it were lucrative enough I could probably record and release one or two episodes a week without breaking too much of a sweat. That’s the pace encouraged by both the advertising algorithms and the patronage platforms. Advertisers can more easily bid for spots on a show with a predictable schedule on specified days. Likewise, paying subscribers have come to expect regular content from the podcasts they support. Or at least the platforms encourage a regular rhythm, and embed subtle cues for consistency. 

Substack, while great for a lot of things, is even worse as far as its implied demand for near-daily output. If I really wanted to live off a Substack writing career, I would have to ramp up to at least three posts a week. That might work if I were a beat reporter covering sports, but - really - how many cogent ideas about media, society, technology and change can one person develop over the course of a week? More important, how many ideas can one person come up with that are truly worth other people’s time? 

I don’t even read the semi-weekly output of Paul Krugman, Tom Friedman, or any of the NYTimes a-list commentators. I feel like I’m reading the same column, again and again, with slight variations. For that experience of variations on a theme I’d rather listen to the Grateful Dead channel, where each concert version of DarkStar is a unique instance of something fundamentally familiar. 

Making matters worse, the pace of the Internet actually increases with the growth of the platforms. Where print or television may have been a regular grind, the Internet is an accelerating grind. No sooner do you get used to one pace of production than the platforms seem to demand more. More posts, more microcontent to support those posts, and more networks on which to post and cross-post all of that content. A platform’s profits can’t grow exponentially without accelerating the hamster wheels on which its users run. 

I get it. It’s just the indsutrial age expressing the values of increased productivity to all of us through platforms that can substitute for the commands of the taskmaster with pacing and leading of the digital environment itself. Where freelancers like me used to internalize the mean boss, now our technologies do that for us. 

And while I love being able to engage with readers and listeners and Discord members through many modes, I am coming to realize my sense of guilty obligation to all the people on all these platforms is actually misplaced. The platforms themselves are configured to tug on those triggers of responsibility, the same way Snapchat uses the “streak” feature to keep tween girls messaging each other every day. They’re not messaging out of social obligation, but to keep the platform’s metric rising. It’s early training for the way their eventual economic precarity will keep them checking for how much money a Medium post earned, or how many new subscribers were generated by a Substack post. 

Most ironically, perhaps, the more content we churn out for all of these platforms, the less valuable all of our content becomes. There’s simply too much stuff. The problem isn’t information overload so much as “perspective abundance.” We may need to redefine “discipline” from the ability to write and publish something every day to the ability hold back. What if people started to produce content when they had actually something to say, rather than coming up with something to say in order to fill another slot? 

I’m going to try that. It’s how I always worked in the past. I remember when Blogger started, I would use the platform to write one thosuand-word piece every couple of weeks. People would comment that I was using it “wrong” - that it was supposed to be a daily web log, thus “blog.” But I ended up growing an audience anyway, and I think they appreciated that I’d only ask for their eyeballs if I thought what I had to share was worth their time. 

Now I’m doing a podcast every week, which means finding guests to fill slots rather than finding slots to share friends and ideas with you. That’s not fair to anyone, particularly when there are so many podcasts and radio shows on which many of these same guests and friends are appearing. (That’s likely why my interview shows have significantly smaller audiences than the monologues.) Back when we started the Team Human podcast, I remember listeners emailing to say that our episodes were so rich that they wanted more time to digest them. They complained that our weekly output was just too much to process. They wanted to have time for a second listen. So we dropped to once every-other-week, which did feel more natural. But that was before Covid and the loss of speaking gigs, before Medium shut its magazines and stopped paying writers, before I had to start paying college tuition bills and before I found myself enmeshed in the value system of views, opens, and CPMs. 

It’s not worth it. What I value most and, hopefully, offer is an alternative to the pacing and values of digital industrialism. That’s what I’m here for: to express and even model a human approach to living in a digital media environment. So I’m getting off the treadmill, recognizing this assembly line for what it is, and trusting that you will stay with me on this journey in recognition of the fact that less is more. 

Listen to the whole monologue, including how AI fits into all this, on the new Team Human show right here.

How do you convince the world that your ideas and business might ultimately be worth $7 trillion dollars? Partly by getting some great results, partly by speculating about unlimited potential, and partly by downplaying and ignoring inconvenient truths.

Sam Altman is on a tour to raise money and raise valuations, and he’s plying these moves day after day, in a city after city, at some of top universities in the world. Aside from a minor upgrade to GPT-4, he doesn’t have a newly released product, so he is selling vision and promise.

Let’s start with the promises. A few days ago at Stanford, Sam promised that AGI will be worth it, no matter how much it costs:

At the same talk at Stanford, Altman grandoisely asserted, with no qualification, that “we’re making AGI”, without touching on the possibility that current approaches might not get us there — despite (a) the enormous known problems with reliability, reasoning, planning and hallucinations and (b) the fact that the entire field, despite being massively well-capitalized, has struggled for over year (and in fact for decades) to solve any of these problems.

Whether GenAI proves to be AGI is very much still up for grabs, and on any reasonable account we have a long way to go. But you would never know that, listening to claims like Sam’s. (He also of course didn’t get into whether it would be OpenAI that would get to AGI, or someone else, or in what decade.)

In another very recent interview, this one with MIT’s Technology Review, Altman claimed that AGI agents are on their way (again without presenting evidence that historically extremely difficult problems are close to being solved):

He also hinted at a kind of ultimate executive assistant (utterly ignoring huge questions about privacy, surveillance, and security):

Assumptions are never questioned, counterarguments never considered. (When someone asked if he would debate with me at Davos, he politely declined.)

§

Confidence is another big part of the show. At Stanford he said, “I think every year for the next many we have dramatically more capable systems every year”, as if that were a sure thing, when of course it isn’t. For the last fourteen months we have seen no such dramatic improvement in capabilities—already evidence against his optimistic projection--and there are increasing concerns about whether there is enough high-quality data to sustain prior improvements, as well as in-principle concerns re hallucinations, reasoning, planning, outliers and reliability. Sam never lets on.

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Undergirding all is this often a sense that without AI, we are screwed. As Geoffrey Miller put it on X, “[Altman’s] implicit message is usually 'We need AGI to solve aging & discover longevity treatments, so if you don't support us, you'll die.” Longevity is the carrot; death is the stick.

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In order to make it all plausible, Sam uses a unique combination of charm, soft-spoken personal humility and absolute confidence in outlandish claims.

He seems like such a nice guy, yet he implies, unrealistically, that the solution to AGI is within his grasp; he presents no evidence that is so, and rarely considers the many critiques of current approaches that have been raised. (Better to pretend they don’t exist.) Because he seems so nice, pushback somehow seems like bad form.

Absurd, hubristic claims, often verging on the messianic, presented kindly, gently, and quietly — but never considered skeptically. That’s his M.O.

Pay no attention to the assumptions behind the curtain.

§

Another rhetorical move, a form of inoculation, acknowledges vague worries in a cursory way but doesn’t go deeply into them.

Here, Altman acknowledges that intelligence isn’t everything, but doesn’t ackwowledge (at all) that there are risks associated with AI. (He knows darn well that such risks exist.) He has innoculated himself against the charge that the big problems (poverty, climate science) aren’t strictly technical, but done nothing to actually address them, and entirely ignored the potential costs of the technology (to the environment, to the species, etc)

Not one one scary capital letter in either post, either. So gentle. Just a regular guy sharing his thoughts.

The tag at the end doubles down by playing dumb; it acknowledges that criticism exists (a further attempt at inoculation) without ever enumerating any of those potential criticisms (why did some people not share his opinions?) – almost as if those criticisms were too silly to address, and of great surprise to him.

They are not. There are great many potential concerns he is fully aware that he chooses to ignore. Unequivocally great? Tell that to those that have been scammed, to victims of deepfake porn, perhaps to whole nations if deep fakes taint elections.

Why might people object the claim that using AI is an unequivocally great thing to do? They might worry that people will lose their jobs, and their sense of well-being; they might worry that the tools of AI might be misused for nefarious purposes, as OpenAI themselves detailed at great length in the 60 page GPT-4 System Card. Sam himself told the US Senate that AI might “cause significant harm to the world”. There also immense potential environmental costs.

Feigning surprise is pure stagecraft. It’s not that Altman doesn’t know there are potential downsides, maybe even massive ones; it’s that he often temporarily suppresses his own concerns in order to sell a story.

One might also wonder whether AI will genuinely create abundance, longevity, etc, and further whether Generative AI, the only form of AI that OpenAI happens to specialize in, will play a material role in such advances. As Jane Rosenzweig of said to me this morning: "Altman is a guy who has the potential to put whole industries out of work who is saying, with no capital letters, that what he's doing is what the world has always wanted and then acting surprised that anyone has questions. It's truly amazing in a sense."

§

It’s not the first time Rosenzweig has raised an eyebrow over Altman’s remarks. Here’s a classic that she likes to deconstruct in her writing classes, which again shows how Altman’s superficially compelling rhetoric tends to hide from counterarguments while ignoring alternative perspectives. Annotations are hers:

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And then of course there is the bait-and-switch. The company promises to serve all humanity…

... but in reality mostly just sells chatbots. Charitable work is at best a small part of the overall operation. Roughly half of its first couple hundred billion dollars in profits (if they materialize at all) will go to Microsoft, and artist, writers, publishers and so on are being screwed day after day, their work used without compensation or consent.

Creators are part of humanity. OpenAI has not thus far worked in their interest.

There is also a kind of bait-and-switch around Gen AI versus AGI. As Dave Troy put it on X, knowing how to build better (or at least bigger) GenAI doesn’t necessarily get us to AGI: “the assertion that “AGI” is not only achievable but simply a function of cash spend is a clear logical fallacy, and his use of repetition only reinforces that in the weak minded/true believers.”

§

Finally, there is Sam’s well-known personal support for UBI (Universal Basic Income). Clearly he is a man of the people. But wait, if he really believes in basic income for all, why is he fleecing artists, writers, and other creators, not paying a nickel (to most) for training materials? A lot of them are losing gigs. None of them are getting UBI checks, or anything at all.

§

Altman’s wildly speculative, assumptions unquestioned, we’re doing it for humanity moves are not entirely new.

Many (except perhaps the humility and soft-spoken tone) are familiar from Elon Musk’s regular overpromising; almost all the AI companies are basically following the same playbook, albeit with less panache.

As Sigal Samuel has noted, there’s an uncanny similarity between superlative claims about AI, and superlative claims about religion:

Center to Samuel’s analysis

Sam has of all late, been speaking straight from this playbook.

§

At other times, Altman retreats to the mystical and unfalsifiable:

A fundamental problem of matter? Rocks are intelligent, now? Like a lot of what Sam says, it sounds interesting, until you think it through.

As ever, inconvenient counterarguments are ignored. Reality distortion phasers are set to stun.

And speaking of science fiction, if all else fails, you can always lift a riff from Battlestar Galactica (which in turn lifted it from Peter Pan):

Profound.

§

Altman has been honing this formula literally for years, spinning a heady mixture of mysticism, apocalyptic warning, and speculative exaltation and humility, all the while innoculating himself against great fears while hinting at vast fortunes to be made:

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The cards Sam is holding are not as great as he lets on.

In the last year, his company has released no major update to GPT-4, and many competitors have caught up or are close. Competitors are eroding the initial gap in quality and starting to offer similar products, sometimes at significantly lower prices. Meta will likely release a GPT-4 level model within months – for free. If OpenAI has a moat (beyond initial customers, which could potentially move), we haven’t seen it. There tons of copyright lawsuits, from multiple publishers, artists, writers, and so forth pending. If they lost one of those in court, and precedent against training on copyright materials was set, the entire enterprise could be in jeopardy. So far, there have been no net profits, and as noted above if there are any, for a long time roughly half must be shared with Microsoft, by contractual agreement. Training GPT-4 was expensive, training GPT-5 maybe an order of magnitude more expensive. GPT-6 yet another order more expensive. Usership for ChatGPT rose like a rocket until May 2023 but has more or less stabilized since then without significant further growth. Altman himself has recently acknowledged that GPT-4 “sucks”. The company has not demo’d a working, reliable agent, and does not seem to have GPT-5 level model thus far. GoogleDeepMind, Anthropic, Meta or someone else could conceivably beat them there. Altman isn’t out there selling a new product; he is selling hope.

§

Why care about any of this? Opportunity costs.

In seeking to grab vast resources for an approach that is deeply flawed, Altman is diverting resources from alternative approaches from AI that might be more trustworthy, reliable, and interpretable, potentially incurring considerable environment costs, and distracting from better ways of using capital to help humanity more generally.

People who buy Altman’s narrative will continue to invest. But in the end, Altman’s place in history will depend on whether he delivers what he has promised.

Gary Marcus is co-author of Rebooting AI, one of Forbes’ 7 must read books in AI, and author of the forthcoming Taming Silicon Valley.

The intentional, noticed choices are obvious. “Vanilla or chocolate?”

But most of the choices we live with are unseen. They’re expensive, challenging and invisible.

When we plan an event with an outdoor component, we’re choosing to be anxious about the weather in the week leading up to the big day.

When we buy something with a credit card, we’re choosing the long-term cost of paying the ongoing debt.

When we stick with a deadend job instead of quitting today, tomorrow’s angst was a choice.

These invisible choices are all around us, often hidden by forces that would rather we didn’t think about them. And it’s usually easier to simply look the other way.

But they’re still choices.

We can have a different web

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As a lifelong lover of the web, it's hard not to feel a little hopeless right now.

Search engines — the window into the web for many people — top their results with pages containing thousands of words of auto-generated nothingness, perfectly optimized for search engine prominence and to pull in money via ads and affiliate links while simultaneously devoid of any useful information.

Social networks have become “the web” for many people who rarely venture outside of their tall and increasingly reinforced walls. As Tom Eastman once put it, the web has rotted into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”.¹ Within those enclosures, the character limits, neutered subset of web functionality, and constant push to satisfy the enigmatic desires of an algorithm tuned to keeping eyeballs on the platform encourage sameness, vapid engagement farming, and rage bait while stifling creativity.

Newspapers, whose evolution towards online models once stoked optimism for more accessible and dynamic journalism that could lead to a more informed and democratically engaged citizenry, have become luxury goods as aggressive paywalls and expensive subscription models are increasingly deployed by the hedge funds and other profit-hungry entities that control these papers. Some use the excuse that they're trying to protect their journalism from the unsanctioned scraping by companies training ever-hungrier artificial intelligence models. Yet those same media outlets hasten their own demise with wave after wave of layoffs, or by chasing harebrained schemes like churning out tedious clickbait or their own AI-generated soup even as their executives continue to cash huge checks.

Many websites now require one to steel themselves for battle against the advertisements and trackers and GDPR cookie consent popups and AI-powered chatbot windows that interrupt you to offer to helpfully bungle whatever you ask of them. AdBlock is no longer optional, and even with it, trackers and advertisements slither through the cracks. Browsing the web brings with it the ever-present feeling that you're being watched — your activities and preferences and habits all being logged and funneled into a giant vat of horrifying data soup, all just to help more companies serve you more of these intrusive ads that you must endlessly swat away as you try to find whatever it was you were looking for.

It is tempting, amid all of this decay, to yearn for the good old days.

The emergence of online chat and instant messaging, where you used some acronym-named chat like ICQ or IRC or AOL messenger to talk to friends you knew in real life or anonymous strangers all over the globe. Those phpBB forums and message boards on sites like GameFAQs — or, for some, the BBSes and Usenet newsgroups that predated them. The flash games and the whimsical GeoCities sites full of dancing hamsters and the MySpace pages full of garish, hand-coded styles and glitter GIFs and auto-playing MIDI tracks.

Those incredibly specific websites created by one guy with an encyclopedic knowledge of something really niche, or the labors of love that were fansites dedicated to The X Files or the Backstreet Boys.

Some of this is nostalgia for our younger years, I think. According to my very scientific Twitter and Mastodon polls, around 60% and 42% (respectively) of people happened to be under 20 years old during the period they identified as the "good old days".

It may be that we are, at least in part, yearning for the days when logging on to the internet was less likely to mean going to work or paying a bill and more likely to mean playing Runescape or hoping that the green circle on AIM would light up next to the name of our crush after school.

But some of this is certainly based in the feeling that the web was just better back then. Fewer trolls, and a lot fewer bots. Google search results that actually returned what you were looking for, not just the sites that paid the most. Cobbled-together blogs and LiveJournal pages written by people who felt authentic, who maybe wanted to attract more visitors to tick up their pageview counters or add entries to their guestbook pages, but who weren't trying to cultivate a persona as an influencer or a thought leader, "build a brand", or monetize their audience. More of a neighborhood feeling where everyone was a possible friend, and less fear that people might interpret your social media post as uncharitably as possible. The worry that the girl you were talking to might be a man pretending to be a girl, but probably not the fear that she's a crypto romance scammer or part of a state-sponsored disinformation network. Fewer and less intrusive ads, less engagement farming, less surveillance. Fewer paywalls, more "information wants to be free".

The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it's become a lot easier. We can return. Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.

When I envision the web, I picture an infinite expanse of empty space that stretches as far as the eye can see. It's full of fertile soil, but no seeds have taken root. That is, except for about an acre of it.

Years ago, in the web's early days, people entered this infinite expanse and began to cultivate it. First it was the scientists at CERN, who poked a hole through into this uncultivated world and began to experiment within that acre. Eventually, they widened the entry point to enable others — mostly from universities — to join. They set up their own tiny plots within this acre, sowing seeds that they personally loved.

With time, the entrance widened even further, and geeks outside of universities found their way in. Then, home computing really began to take off, and the number of visitors expanded far beyond just the geeky hobbyists. Some people continued to cultivate their own little patches in the acre, but others opened community gardens: forum sites and shared blogs and chat rooms and webhosting services where people could develop their own projects. People brought in little gnome sculptures and garish lawn flamingos. Some people erected fencing to control who wandered in — or even who could see in — to their plots. But people had also begun to build pathways in the spaces among the patches: webrings and hand-curated blogrolls, vigorous hyperlinking, and early versions of search engines.

There were weeds, too. Invasive plants that threatened to crowd out what some people had lovingly built. Trolls that poisoned the forums and chat rooms, or the threat of viruses that made people more cautious. All too many people who shunned or harassed those who didn't fit the mold of the (white, male, straight) prototypical internet user.

And some from the outside world began to worry. What do you mean there are no police there? And you're letting kids in? Hey, those are my seeds you're using, and now you're just giving them away for free to other people!

But eventually, businesses set up shop, selling everything from seeds to tractors to garden gnomes to landscaping services to all the kinds of things people were used to using back outside of this digital expanse. And at first, they fit in among the hobbyist plots and community gardens.

But with time, businesses learned there were other ways to extract money from the community that had grown within this acre in the digital world. They set up tolls on the pathways. They planted invasive species that encroached on what other people had built, shading them out — or they spread pesticides that poisoned what others had cultivated. Some acquired plot after plot after plot, building their own empires through which others needed to pass to get where they were trying to go. Many businesses initially invited people in with open arms, promising that if they moved within their boundaries, the business would take care of all the hard stuff — the digging, the weeding, the sowing — and let you just do the parts you wanted to do. After a time, many people opted to do so, drawn in by these easy and free services that let them spend more time admiring the flowers or visiting neighbors and less time doing the dirty work. But then, the walls went up.

Towering over the rest of the acre, massive walls shaded out much of what was happening outside of these businesses' enclosures. People couldn't see over to know what was happening beyond, so was it even worth the effort to make a visit? After all, there's so much to see inside. These businesses set up right at the gate too, so some new entrants thought the space within the walls was all there was. They never saw the infinite expanse beyond, nor the creativity that was still flourishing out there.

Some pathways remained, mostly linking together these giant fortresses, but with time even those were made harder to pass. Rules were imposed to limit what plants you could grow and how you could grow them and who might ever be able to see them. Some maintained plots within multiple of these businesses' walled areas, but found themselves having to devote more and more of their time to maintaining all of their disparate gardens, or let some of them lie fallow.

The businesses developed systems to quickly usher people along from undesirable tenants, drawing their attention to the carefully manicured plots where nary a blade of grass was out of place. And they started checking IDs at the door, making sure you were known both to the business owners and the policemen who had set up watchtowers and CCTV networks. Increasingly, drones passed overhead, operated by businesses who peered in to see what kinds of plants you were growing and what kinds of decorations you were putting up in hopes of selling you something similar later on.

If a tenant decided they were sick of their spot within a walled garden, well, they could leave — but it meant they abandoned what they had built, and the path for friends or admirers of their work to come visit them became a lot more arduous to traverse.

This is the world of today's web. Most of us spend our days within the confines of a handful of platforms, wandering around to admire what people have done with the seeds they are allowed in the space they are allotted, with platform owners directing us to the gardens they think we might like — or, more often, the ones they think will keep us within their walls for longer. Occasionally we venture outside to another plot, but sometimes we're given dire warnings before we go. After all, there could be weeds out there!

And those who cultivate those plots outside of these walls face pressures to conform to the whims of the businesses in hopes that the pathways remain open. Otherwise, they might toil away in silence, rarely seeing visitors like they one day used to.

It feels grim, and especially so for those of us who remember the days before the walls. We miss the messy but innovative landscaping, the use of space beyond the tiny squares our landlords provide us, the mostly polite strangers who wandered through and remarked on our work or shared their knowledge with us.

But we often forget: that world is still out there.

The walled enclosures that crowded out much of that acre of developed land still reside within an infinite expanse of possibility. There are no limits to the web — if it has borders, they are ever expanding. We may feel as though we are trapped in a tiny, crowded, noisy space, but it is only because we don't see over the walls.

If we wanted, each of us could escape those walls and set up our own spaces within the limitless, fertile soil beyond. Some of us might opt to leave those walls permanently, while others might choose to split our time between our beautiful, messy, free world outside to maintain smaller, meticulously-groomed simulacrums within the enclosures that hint — without angering our landlords — at the creations beyond. We can periodically smuggle seeds and plant cuttings beyond the walls, ensuring that if the proprietors decide to evict us, our gardens will live on.

We can develop protocols — more resilient versions of those early footpaths — that inherently resist the tollbooths and border crossing gates established by the businesses with the walls. We can even develop our own community gardens with spaces for tenants that have their own models of governance far beyond the single benevolent platform dictatorship model — that inevitably grows less benevolent as money changes hands.

While some of the early gardens that we reminisce about didn't survive the shade of the large platforms or the dwindling flow of visitors that were rerouted within those walls, new gardens can be cultivated to their specifications. People can experiment with combining the things they loved about the old gardens with the tools and models of the ones that have grown since then, or return to the spirit of experimentation and try new things altogether. They can draw on the population explosion within the digital expanse to bring in new people with new ideas and new energy to revitalize what once was, and make it better than before.

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. In the early days, people had to fight to enter the expanse at all, and those who did were starting with little. Now, the expanse feels ubiquitous in some countries, and is becoming ever more accessible in the others. Sophisticated tools and techniques are available even to novices. Where once the walled gardens were the only viable option for novice gardeners or those without many resources, that is no longer so much the case — and the skills and resources required to establish one's own sovereign plot become more accessible by the day.

We can have a different web, if we want it.

Further reading

• “The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again” by Anil Dash in Rolling Stone.
• “A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden” by Maggie Appleton. Her beautiful illustrations are what I think of when I picture the digital expanse, and the feature image is inspired by her “avoid walled gardens” illustration in this post.
• “We Need To Rewild The Internet” by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon in Noema.
• The indie web, the cozy web, the small web
• The incredible variety of responses by people on Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky when I asked them what they miss about the “good old days” of the web