What upsets me isn’t that we created this centralized version of the Internet based on permanent surveillance.
What upsets me, what really gets my goat, is that we did it because it was the easiest thing to do. There was no design, forethought, or analysis involved. No one said “hey, this sounds like a great world to live in, let’s make it”. It happened because we couldn’t be bothered.
Making things ephemeral is hard.
Making things distributed is hard.
Making things anonymous is hard.
Coming up with a sane business model is really hard—I get tired just thinking about it.
So let’s take people’s data, throw it on a server, link it to their Facebook profiles, keep it forever, and if we can’t raise another round of venture funding we’ll just slap Google ads on the thing.
“High five, Chad!”
“High five, bro!”
That is the design process that went into building the Internet of 2014.
An extract from Our Comrade The Electron, a talk from the Webstock Conference by Maciej Cegłowski. (via new-aesthetic)
An additional mentality that I think needs to be changed is, whatever work you’re contributing to the internet matters. “Fuck it, ship it.” shouldn’t be good enough for anyone. Lets build the internet we’d all like to see, regardless of how long it might take. It’s too important not to.
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