“We don’t need a new web browser,” Miller said. “We need a new successor to the web browser.” “You can’t just think really hard and design the best web browser,” Parrott said. “You have to feel it and put it in front of people and get them to react to it.” The risk of this approach is that The Browser Company could become an R & D shop, full of interesting ideas but unable to build a browser that anyone actually uses.

Examining the question: "Do we really need a new browser?"

There's not going to be a “Facebook killer.” But there could simply be lots of other sites, that focus on a different, more constructive and generative, set of goals.

If the ‘90s internet was a weird, largely unproductive place where you escaped from reality, today’s internet is where much of reality happens, and meatspace is where you escape from it. It barely even makes sense anymore to refer to “the internet” as an alternate domain. We’re all basically online all the time, passively if not actively.

The way we regulated social media platforms didn’t end harassment, extremism or disinformation. It only gave them more power and made the problem worse.

Others’ trails could be applied to materials you already have, so you could see a colleague’s associative structures alongside your own, on the same files. Yes, on a wiki, you can add a link to the text yourself…but that link would appear for _everyone._ There’s no notion of _personal_ associative markup.

“Yancey Strickler, a co-founder of Kickstarter, on the internet retreating to safe spaces – well, safer spaces: Podcasts are another example. There, meaning isn’t just expressed through language, but also through intonation and interaction. Podcasts are where a bad joke can still be followed by a self-aware and self-deprecating save. It’s a more forgiving space for communication than the internet at large. Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on. This is where Facebook is pivoting with Groups (and trying to redefine what the word “privacy” means in the process). Obviously, the various spaces mentioned above are wildly different, but it is interesting to try to bucket them all together into this trend. And it is something that resonates with me about newsletters…”

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.

A+ thread IMO private spaces feel more conducive to conversations that get closer to the truth, allowing for misunderstandings & developing ideas. No matter how real you think you are or you try to be, we are all engaging in some kind of performance for a larger crowd on here. The internet is less fun when people move from public to private thinking. Whether due to change of job, status, or competitive landscape, it's noticeable. Have had to do this for certain areas & it feels limiting at times, & mostly leads to less discourse/diversity of thought. The counterpoint is that when you find your braintrust, you can let things fly at a faster pace and with higher variance on quality and reasoned judgment. This leads to *different* discourse but in reality, personally building a diverse braintrust is harder than we like to admit Not to go on an "intellectual dark web"-toned tangent but final point: I sometimes worry that the attractiveness of public thinking that seemed to dominate for past 7-10 years has eroded recently because of 2 core forces that create a cycle of withdrawal or dilution of thought. 1) Widespread hate on social media today across all groups and how it's nearly impossible to make a fringe point without it being hated on. And related, our industry deals with confrontation *horribly*, specifically in the co-opetition world of VC. 2a) A widespread exhaustion & recognition of what is the over-intellectualization of thought & simple content. This leads to a ton of dilution in our feeds filled with abstract tweets, 9 min reads that should be 2, historical allegories for things happening in 2019, & book thread 2 b) Further explained: Many now take simple concepts, abstract them away to much more complex language/narrative as they recognize the arbitrage in doing so due to the value it brings to personal brand (IMO this is 90% of people) 2 c) OR they are so wrapped up in their own rhetoric they think communicating this way is dominant. In this case, I think we can cycle back to the difficulty of building a personal braintrust that is diverse and truly challenging.

The long-term effects of GDPR is yet to be seen, but it also did have a slight Balkanizing effect where some US firms like LATimes and Instapaper simply stopping to operate in Europe.

Internet debate is very effective at changing minds— Joe Groff (@jckarter) May 1, 2019

In 2006, Senator Ted Stevens infamously described the internet as a “series of tubes,” for which he was ridiculed, but his statement has aged well as a metaphor if not a literal description: a visual reminder of the wormholes we’re teleporting through to reach one another, the digital bridges and tunnels — the infrastructure we arrived by.

Thanks for reading! Hopefully with your help we'll be wishing the Web a happy 60th birthday in another thirty years. 😍🌐— John F🎃minella 🌠 (@jxxf) March 12, 2019

Rasowa, zaprojektowana, by cieszyć. Młoda i piękna brunetka z dużymi cyckami.

excited to say i wrote a book about photography and social media! it's out with @VersoBooks in April and you can pre-order it now if you'd like: https://t.co/lD43PwRjJa pic.twitter.com/bmOt0U7R5W— nathanjurgenson (@nathanjurgenson) February 4, 2019

The fact that I have allowed the illusion of the internet’s regard for me to seep so deeply into my unconscious mind makes me nervous. Like any belief system, it only becomes visible when it breaks down.

A talk at the Difficult to Name reading series about the disappearing web and what we can do to stop it.

“This obsession with technical innovation and growth at all costs caused the tech industry to turn a blind eye to the social impacts of its creations.”