Everything is different now, but I am still at my desk. Except with the websites. They separate themselves from the others, because I don’t feel much better at making them after 20 years. My knowledge and skills develop a bit, then things change, and half of what I know becomes dead weight. This hardly happens with any of the other work I do. ​ I don’t bring this up to imply that the young are dumb or that the inexperienced are inept—of course they’re not. But remember: if you stick around in the industry long enough, you’ll get to feel all three situations. ​ Experience, on the other hand, creates two distinct struggles: the first is to identify and unlearn what is no longer necessary (that’s work, too). The second is to remain open-minded, patient, and willing to engage with what’s new, even if it resembles a new take on something you decided against a long time ago. ​ This situation is annoying to me, because my thoughts turn to that young designer I mentioned at the start of my talk. How many opportunities did I have to reproduce what I saw by having legible examples in front of me? And how detrimental is it to have that kind of information obfuscated for her? Before, the websites could explain themselves; now, someone needs to walk you through it.

Even as we dream of abandoning social media, we search for ways to redeem it. ​ and it’s that quest for large-scale value extraction, they argue, that leads directly to the crises of compromised privacy and engineered addictiveness with which we’re currently grappling. ​ Jaron Lanier has called “multiple-choice identities.” According to this way of thinking, sites like Facebook and Instagram encourage conformism because it makes your data easier to process and monetize. This creates the exhausting sense that you’re a worker in a data factory rather than a three-dimensional individual trying to express yourself and connect with other real people in an organic way online. ​ free-form energy reminiscent of the Internet’s early days. ​ a human-scale environment ​ The Internet may work better when it’s spread out, as originally designed. ​ For the exhausted majority of social-media users, however, the appeal of the proverbial quiet bench might outweigh the lure of a better Facebook.