While everyone is focused on minting NFTs and declaring the end of the centralized power structures of platform capitalism (or fleeing into an updated version of SecondLife that has only one enthusiastic inhabitant, Mark Z, who is also the owner, landlord, designer, and makes the weather) I find myself weirdly excited about the good old Web 1.0.
Maybe this is the moment to go back to the earlier days of the web and make some adjustments (aka try again) rather than keep storming forward into a future information ecosystem that is likely to be more centralized than less.
There certainly seems to be an increasing interest in public infrastructure for information, e.g. open-source based services that are supported by a mix of government, non-profit, and commercial users. I see people dusting off their RSS readers (please hold the comments about vinyl!) and some of the voices from the past are starting to pop up on my radar again. Or maybe I’m just looking again in places I haven’t looked in for a while.
Anyway, it feels like something is in the air and I’m excited to see if we can’t make it grow into a real alternative to the monolithic platforms and a new way of thinking about sustainable technology infrastructure.