A Secret Web

The web is mind-bogglingly massive. So massive, in fact, that it’s nearly impossibly to visualize its true scale. Even if your entire lifetime was spent perusing the web and searching every nook and cranny, you would never reach more than a miniscule fraction of the vast ocean of information available to you. There is so much information in the world that “post-scarcity” is a severe understatement of the scale of our information age. To have any hope of meaningfully browsing the web, we need systems in place that artificially limit that scope—curation technologies. Today, the web curation process is almost entirely through search engines and social media algorithms, commercial automated systems to narrow our focus on the web to the specific things we know we want. Before search engines, though, existed older, more powerful discovery methods, curated by humans for our benefit; these systems and networks still exist, but they seem hidden from the view of the mainstream web. Let’s take a…