The Human Story of the Open Web

STOP ME if you’ve heard this one: The members of an extended family spend years curating a shared online photo album. Then the website they posted on vanishes, flushing their collective memories away forever. Or this: A Queer kid growing up isolated in Nebraska discovers a welcoming community on MySpace; then, one day, MySpace is no more, obliterating that carefully built community—with no chance of recovery. Or an author who’s spent years building a following on Twitter finds their posts there suddenly going unseen after a new owner with a radical political agenda biases the algorithm against their type of content (or even just against them personally, if that new owner is feeling particularly petty and peevish). If you’ve used the internet for more than a few days, you’ve experienced losses like these, along with the frustration and disillusionment that come when our favorite digital walled gardens become more and more about extracting financial value from us while providing less…