The Extended Internet Universe

The web isn’t what it used to be. When the editors of Nature compared mycorrhizal fungi to a computer network, the web was still predominantly peer-to-peer, its users sharing their thoughts on personal home pages and homespun message-boards. Online advertising was in its infancy. But as the web has centralized, it has strayed further and further fr... See more

the ultimate problem of the Internet might stem not from the discrete technology but from the Frankensteinian way in which humanity’s invention has exceeded our own capacities.

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

If we take the metaphor of the wood wide web seriously, it’s hard not to see an analogy here to the context collapse endemic to social media. A few corporations control the lion’s share of public cloud infrastructure, and monopolistic ISPs exploit everyday users. Tech and social media giants have clear-cut the web, privileging high-value crops—vira... See more

Because they were living in the future, they were interacting on a daily basis with the new, enabling technologies of the internet and cultivating new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting through those interactions. The team realized that the winning metaphor wasn’t a digital superhighway, with traffic speeding along a well-defined path, and fixed... See more