Remember when the web was open?
No?
Well, I’m not surprised.
It’s a long time since the web was the open medium we were promised.
Who closed the web?
You might be surprised at some of the culprits...
...and at how close we might be to breaking the web open again.
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You can’t do much on the web these days without giving your real name, your social security number, your driver’s licence and your fingerprints, without some shadowy mechanism dictating what you can and can’t say and see, without some nameless functionary nudging you away from what you want to do towards what they want you to do.
How did this happen?
When the web was invented, it promised open connection between every person on the planet.
Who broke this promise?
Here are the four forces that have worked to close the web...
...and how Open Web Mind will open it right back up again.
Force #1: Walled gardens
You may have noticed that these days, there are five companies that dominate our online experience: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta.
The one thing they have in common?
They don’t want you to leave.
Once you’re inside their enticing Edens, they offer you preternatural stimulation: a beautiful environment; a never-ending stream of messages, connection, information, images and videos; ever-so-useful products at ever-so-reasonable prices.
The one thing they don’t offer is a way out.
They’ll do anything to keep you inside their walled gardens.
Want to share the photos you took with your Apple iPhone? Good luck with that. Apple recently changed the format of their photos from JPEG, which everyone uses, to HEIC, so that they can’t be shared with anyone outside the Apple ecosystem.
Want to use Microsoft Outlook to receive email? Good luck with that. Microsoft has a habit of blocking emails from people who don’t have Microsoft email addresses, or at least email addresses of other oversized corporations, because, you know, you can’t trust those renegades. I get the feeling that Microsoft would prefer email not to exist as an open standard, that they’d prefer we all communicate through LinkedIn or Microsoft Teams instead.
Want to use Google search to explore the open web? Good luck with that. Google has done everything it can to move the real search results out of sight, focusing instead on giving you a potted answer to your query, so that you don’t click away, and prioritizing paid ads disguised as real search results.
Walled gardens aren’t new.
In the early days of the web, AOL and CompuServe each had its own walled garden, giving its subscribers access to carefully curated content.
What they didn’t seem to want to give their subscribers was a way out of the walled garden on to the open web.
Why would they, when companies like The New York Times, Barnes & Noble, eBay and Amazon, not to mention little known phone companies, health companies, travel companies and even florists, were willing to pay AOL and CompuServe hundreds of millions of dollars to bring their content inside the walls of those gardens?
The trouble was, people didn’t want those walls.
Why would you confine yourself to AOL’s or CompuServe’s exclusive newspaper or exclusive florist when there’s a world wide web of other newspapers and other florists out there?
What people wanted was the open web.
Today’s walled gardens are more compelling.
Apple’s experiences are truly beautiful. Google’s search is truly powerful. YouTube’s videos are truly engaging. Instagram’s images are truly alluring. Facebook’s communities are truly vibrant. Meta’s metaverse is truly immersive.
These more compelling walled gardens are still an effective barrier between us and the open web.
Force #2: Hackers, fraudsters and predators
One of the ways AOL, CompuServe and their successors have always tried to persuade people not to venture beyond the walls of their gardens is by convincing them that it’s scary out there.
And it’s true, it is scary out there.
Hackers are ceaselessly plotting to mine your private data.
Fraudsters are ceaselessly finagling to relieve you of your money.
There are things on the web that you definitely don’t want your children to see.
And there really are people out there who, if you – or your children – were to meet them in real life, would do you – or your children – real harm.
The perfidy of hackers, fraudsters and predators makes them very useful to those who would like the web to be less open.
How can Microsoft, Google and Apple justify blocking email from people who don’t have Microsoft, Google or Apple email addresses? By claiming that these people might be hackers, fraudsters or predators.
How can these companies get you to send messages through LinkedIn, YouTube, iMessage or WhatsApp instead? By persuading you that it’s so much safer.
How can governments pass regulations forcing big tech companies to verify the identity of everyone on the web... which means everyone in the world, more or less? By arguing that such measures are necessary to catch the hackers, fraudsters and predators.
There are times when you really should use closed, encrypted connections, and the organizations you’re communicating with really should verify your identity. When you’re sending money overseas, for example, the government has a legitimate interest in your bank’s verifying that you are who you say you are and that you’re not doing anything illegal, and you have a legitimate interest in your money’s not being intercepted along the way. Or when you’re doing something that has real consequences in the real world, such as using Airbnb to book a room in someone’s home, your host has a legitimate interest in Airbnb’s knowing who you really are, and you have a legitimate interest in Airbnb’s knowing who your host really is.
But now that we’re inured to such sensible precautions in the service of safety and security, it’s too easy for those who would like the web to be less open to expand them to cover interactions where there’s no risk of harm to any_one_ or any_thing_.
Hackers, fraudsters and predators didn’t close the web, but they’re close allies of those who did.
Force #3: Opaque algorithms
The most pernicious force working to close the web today is the one that’s not human.
Who decides what you can and can’t see on the web?
Who decides what you can and can’t say on the web?
These are the wrong questions.
It’s not who decides, it’s what decides.
Which tweets do you see on X? Which posts do you see on Facebook? Which images do you see on Instagram? Which videos do you see on YouTube? Which emails get blocked by Microsoft? Which search results do you get from Google?
It’s not a human who decides, it’s an algorithm.
I have a feeling that history will judge us harshly for how abruptly and how absolutely we ceded control of such crucial decisions to the machines.
Think about it.
For millennia, the worst of humanity, from petty princes to authoritarian regimes, sought to control what we can and can’t see and say.
Over the last few centuries, however, we’ve rebelled against such oppression, adopting the Enlightenment ideal that no one should control what we can and can’t see and say.
Then, suddenly, over the last few years, we’ve decided that we do want to be told what we can and can’t see and say after all, ceding our hard-won freedoms not to petty princes or authoritarian regimes, but to something more shadowy.
We’ve blithely handed control of what we can and can’t see and say to algorithms.
It’s a total capitulation to the machines.
Now, I’m no Luddite. I like algorithms. I’ve created many algorithms in my time.
But unlike the algorithms I create, the algorithms used by X, Meta, Microsoft and Google are black boxes. Not only are these companies unable to control precisely how their algorithms work, they can’t even see precisely how their algorithms work. They’re completely opaque.
I can’t help but think that the tech companies like it this way.
It has the benefit of deniability.
Meta can train the Facebook algorithm to maximize the time people spend on the platform, and so maximize ad revenue. If the algorithm does this by spreading disinformation, sowing discord and fostering outrage, Meta can claim: we didn’t know, we can’t know, the algorithm is a black box to us.
Using opaque algorithms also has the benefit of cloaking interventions the tech companies do know about, but don’t want anyone else to see.
The FBI can direct Twitter to censor certain ideas, certain stories and certain people, and when Twitter does so, none of us can tell whether it’s a foible of the algorithm, or whether it’s the tech companies colluding with the government to do what petty princes and authoritarian regimes have always done.
Communication of ideas between people is the lifeblood of our civilization.
History will judge us harshly for ceding control over such communication to the machines.
Force #4: Pompous politicians
The efforts of legislators to close the web have been so scattershot that it’s sometimes difficult to take them seriously.
I mean, every functional web site uses cookies, as everyone must know by now. Since politicians passed legislation requiring web sites that use cookies to pop up cookie disclosures, that means that every functional web site must now pop up a cookie disclosure.
Why?
Who does that serve, other than the politicians who get to pump themselves up on their own power?
What does it achieve, other than to force billions of us to waste trillions of moments of our lives furiously clicking to get the cookie disclosures to go away?
I’ll say it again, every functional web site uses cookies, so why do we need to be reminded of it a dozen times a day?
It’s easy to laugh at the fathomless ineptitude of the politicians, but too often, the ludicrous laws they pass pose a serious threat to the openness of our society.
I can’t help but feel that sometimes, far from being technologically clueless, the politicians know exactly what they’re doing.
They claim that their laws will protect our privacy, promote local content and keep the big, bad tech companies at bay. But somehow those laws always seem to consolidate government power over the media, and censor ideas that challenge the establishment narrative.
Politicians know that many of us are so fed up with hearing propaganda from government-funded institutions like the BBC, the CBC and NPR that we’ve simply stopped listening, switching to independent media. So, in some countries, they fund that, too, paying journalists a substantial portion of their salaries. Who pays the piper, the saying goes, calls the tune.
Politicians know that many of us are so fed up with all legacy media that we’ve taken to getting our information from tweets on X, from newsletters on Substack, from podcasts on Spotify and from videos on YouTube instead, where we find freer ideas from freer minds in freer countries. So, in some countries, they pass clumsy legislation dictating what these platforms can and can’t show us in our feeds. These laws are explicitly designed to reduce our exposure to those foreign ideas.
To be clear, I’m not talking about obviously authoritarian countries, like China and Iran. I’m talking about nominally liberal countries, like Australia and Canada.
What makes this all the more insidious is that, regardless of their rhetoric, the politicians have a curiously cosy relationship with those big, bad tech companies.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta know that governments can, at a whim, hit them with massive fines for arcane transgressions, force them to fund local media, and strangle them with antitrust lawsuits.
So when the government comes calling, asking, say, for a certain idea, a certain story or a certain person to be censored, there’s an unspoken threat: nice tech company you have here, it’d be a shame if anything happened to it.
It’s easy to mock the pompous politicians and their posturing, but they have real power, and they’re wielding it in a way that’s making the web less open.
How to be open
How do we resist these forces working to close the web?
How do we make the web open again?
Here’s how I’m doing it with Open Web Mind.
I’m so committed to an open web that I put those words right there in the name, Open Web Mind.
Open Web Mind is my reinvention of the way we explore ideas on the web.
It’s not a walled garden. Indeed, it’s the antithesis of a walled garden. It has its own minds, for sure, and I have my own mind, but there are no barriers between its minds, my mind and your mind. You can flow freely from ideas in one mind to ideas in another, without so much as seeing the seams.
Open Web Mind doesn’t use opaque algorithms to feed you ideas it wants you to see. Instead, it follows the same principles as the neurons in the human brain – simple, transparent principles that I try to explain as clearly as I can in my videos, podcasts and articles – to show you the ideas that are foremost in your own mind and in the minds of others.
Nor does it use opaque algorithms to block hackers, fraudsters and predators. Instead of using artificial intelligence to block bad actors, it uses human intelligence to surface good actors. You choose which minds to meld with. So sure, you can choose to meld with the minds of bad actors, but I’m guessing you’ll choose instead to meld with the minds of the people you know, the people you admire, the people you trust.
Finally, Open Web Mind is engineered to resist the meddling of politicians. Minds aren’t hosted on a single server that could be shut down by the government. Instead, they can be hosted anywhere. My mind might be hosted on my server; your mind might be hosted on your server. Even if we both choose to host our minds on Open Web Mind servers, we can move them elsewhere at a moment’s notice.
By replacing search and social media as our way into web, Open Web Mind breaks the web open again.
If we’ve learnt anything over the first few decades of the web – or, indeed, over the first few centuries of the Enlightenment – it’s that we need to be eternally vigilant if we’re to keep the web – and our civilization – open.
It’s time to push back against those who would close the web.
