The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet

Throughout the 2000s media was still in some significant sense balkanized. People did not just consume stories, they visited story sources, and the sources were numerous. Everything from trusted websites associated with legacy media institutions like the New York Times to popular aggregators like Drudge and blogs like the Huffington Post thrived, a... See more

Really, the changes AI is currently causing are just the latest in a long struggle in the web’s history. Essentially, this is a battle over information — over who makes it, how you access it, and who gets paid. But just because the fight is familiar doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, nor does it guarantee the system that follows will be better than wh... See more

The second issue is that sites now understand that they’re competing with this Upside Down Internet. It’s up there on their list of worries, along with a shrinking public attention span, shrinking ad revenues, an uncertain market, and everything that makes the internet the beautiful, broken thing it is today.

To the extent that the web has been difficult to kill, it is because it is evolvable. The web started as a way for scientists to share papers, and then evolved into new niches, including e-commerce, wikis, flash games, blogs, web apps, streaming video, social media, office suites, chat apps, design tools... It keeps finding new fits, and changing i... See more