One day not that long ago, on a tram, my boiling frustrations with what the Web is becoming were particularly unbearable. Little rights, many wrongs. Is this what we’ll let it be?
It’s idealistic and very millennial of me to reminiscence the early days of Web innocence, unbound creativity it hosted and wonderful lack of monetisation of virtually every aspect of being online. We can’t turn back time. But, individually and collectively, we can strive for better as the Web evolves as a home for work, knowledge, community, and love. We can resist the ongoing enshittification and corporate capitalism.
So I jotted down an non-exhaustive list of what I’d love the future Web to be.
- Be accessible affordably or free of charge, no matter where you are.
- Operate on the principle of informed consent.
- Be as usable and delightful with the help of assistive technology as it is without.
- Be grift-free.
- Not track you.
- Collect the minimal amount of information necessary to do its core job.
- Carefully protect the private information it holds.
- Not be monopolised by mega corporations.
- Be optimised for near-instant browsing.
- Make it easy to be forgotten.
- Minimalise the amount of energy needed to run it.
- Not rely on JavaScript.
- Protect vulnerable people from harassment.
- Be safe to authentically show up.
- Have no ads.
- Value human curation over algorithmic feeds.
- Not be a copying machine of someone else’s work.
- Take responsibility for the harm it inflicts.
- Focus on sustainability instead of hyper-growth.
- Actively combat mis- and disinformation.
- Be transparently open.
- Protect human rights over capitalist wants.
- Banish “it works on my machine” whataboutism.
- Steward over its foundations over inventing ways to circumvent them.
- Be unionised.