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The decay of the open Web
Hossein Derakhshan — @h0d3r –has just published an essay that is very specific about the nature of activism, free speech, hyperlinks, and blogging, and also about the stakes for all of us in the way the Web has evolved away from the openness we knew about a decade ago. Like other important pieces of writing, his essay implies a theory of healthy and unhealthy society. A healthy society is a Web-like we
b of voices and institutions and texts with hyperlink-like connections that thinking, feeling people make and remake together. The tools in our possession make this easier or harder or impossible to do. A former political prisoner recently released, the writer has stepped out of a time machine, in effect, to discover that the necessary tools have eroded while he was away. Please consider “The Web We Have to Save” and write about it. He considers the responses and his follow-up thinking on his website, too.
PS. A few days later, for the 25th anniversary of the first web page, I added this on Facebook: The ability to publish without a printing press, to link to the words of others, to collaborate with readers and writers around the world, to respond on your own terms and in your own time to important events that you have witnessed, to affiliate yourself with kindred spirits you have never met, to innovate with technology so that other forms of creativity have new ways to grow, to reach for a more meaningful democracy…all owe a debt on this anniversary. And all at risk of being taken back to one degree or another.
PPS. And early in the new year Dave Winer continued this discussion with “It’s time to care about the open web.”