The Extended Internet Universe

“The internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the ‘90s web is gone... The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our identities, cultivate communities, and gain in knowledge were overtaken by forces using them to gain power of various kinds (market, political, social, and so on). This is the atmosphere of the mainstream web... See more

The internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the ’90s web is gone. The web 2.0 utopia — where we all lived in rounded filter bubbles of happiness — ended with the 2016 Presidential election when we learned that the tools we thought were only life-giving could be weaponized too. The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our... See more

The digital dominance of the 21st Century has sorted us into our own tailored versions of online reality, where we drown in ads and information. It's overwhelming, noisy, and ephemeral. It's hard to have a simple conversation, let alone align the globe on a future worth building.

To accomplish this goal, the “proud extroversion” of the early Web soon gave way to a much more homogenized experience: hundred-and-forty-character text boxes, uniformly sized photos accompanied by short captions, Like buttons, retweet counts, and, ultimately, a shift away from chronological time lines and profile pages and toward statistically opt... See more