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Ethan Zuckerman helped to invent the pop-up ad. But if you can forgive him that, his interview by Noah Kulwin for New York magazine is well worth a read:
Like a lot of Silicon Valley alumni, Zuckerman (now a professor at MIT) views today’s internet with a degree of horror. An old enemy – the push to create a proprietary internet walled-off from outside information sources – has come back from the dead and is more powerful than ever:
“…imagine that you had a web browser that could only look at Facebook. It couldn’t look at any other website. Well, that’s what we had more or less in the days of AOL and CompuServe. They finally had to open up, otherwise they would die. But that was that walled-garden model.
“In many ways, that’s now what we’re all dealing with on our phones, you know? My Facebook app won’t let me look at Twitter, and it won’t let me look at Mastodon, and it won’t let me look at anything else.”
The new tech lords have yet to capture the web in its entirety, but Zuckerman believes that their dominance comes at a terrible cost:
“I really feel like we’ve lost about ten years of innovation. I feel like this last decade has been pretty boring for the web.”
He’s right. Think about the development of internet in decade-long chunks. In 1988, most of us hadn’t even heard of the internet, but by 1998, email was widespread and websites commonplace (even if we were still using dial-up modems to access them). Fast forward another ten years to 2008 and broadband had become the norm. Google and Facebook were also achieving default status – indeed the internet as we know it today was pretty much all there already.
But that’s the problem: the internet in 2018 is really not that different from the internet in 2008. Compared with the enormous leaps of the previous two decades, the most recent decade has been one of consolidation – and, some might say, stagnation.
Of course, thanks to the smartphone (and the spread of halfway decent wi-fi) the internet has gone fully mobile over the last decade – but it’s still basically the same internet, only on a smaller screen. Any upgrades on ‘web 2.0’ are after, not before, the decimal point.
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