To show how old I feel, my friends and I had a vision for where the web was going in the 90s. We wanted a shareware future where anyone and their grandma could save their MS Word file to a shared drive on their computer and point a domain name at it for a few dollars per year. Then use a real version of PayPal with no transaction fees to accept micropayments. To maybe write casual games priced at $10 and sell a few hundred copies per month to enter pretirement. Or make pottery and sell it themselves rather than on Etsy, and actually get found and paid.
Of course that future never materialized, or more accurately was quickly overshadowed by the attention economy which makes nothing and sells nothing.
Through that lens, it's easy to see where search engines went wrong. There should have been a public domain database of the web and its metadata like archive.org, but fully indexed and queryable through SQL. Search engines could be built above that with clever queries, but the database would always be available to all of us. Then we could have search that does the opposite of what corporations do, and actually make long tail results the most prominent. Instead we got the ensh*ttification of the very best stuff like Google, bringing the worst aspects of capitalism to what should have been a free human economy of ideas on its way to delivering a moneyless society.
I would very much like to work on all of this and help bring us back to the bright future of 1999. I'd also like to write declarative stateless programming languages and AI that actually does people's work for them to get them paid instead of robbing them of their creative opportunities. Basically put real effort and resources into undoing whatever all this is and get back to the real work of solving the prerequisites needed to roll out UBI. Instead like most of you, I'll likely spend the rest of my life throwing all of my energy at the hardest problems with the smallest rewards to make rent. A tragedy of the commons on such a vast scale that we can't even see it.
I still have faith that AI will deliver the semantic web and maybe this could all materialize, since human-curated metadata was always a pipe dream. But I worry that the trillion dollar tech status quo will stop this. Mainly because revisionist history has turned what were once deep insights and winning strategies into easily discreditable flights of fancy and idealism. That's why search engines were corrupted in the first place.
To show how old I feel, my friends and I had a vision for where the web was going in the 90s. We wanted a shareware future where anyone and their grandma could save their MS Word file to a shared drive on their computer and point a domain name at it for a few dollars per year. Then use a real version of PayPal with no transaction fees to accept micropayments. To maybe write casual games priced at $10 and sell a few hundred copies per month to enter pretirement. Or make pottery and sell it themselves rather than on Etsy, and actually get found and paid.
Of course that future never materialized, or more accurately was quickly overshadowed by the attention economy which makes nothing and sells nothing.
Through that lens, it's easy to see where search engines went wrong. There should have been a public domain database of the web and its metadata like archive.org, but fully indexed and queryable through SQL. Search engines could be built above that with clever queries, but the database would always be available to all of us. Then we could have search that does the opposite of what corporations do, and actually make long tail results the most prominent. Instead we got the ensh*ttification of the very best stuff like Google, bringing the worst aspects of capitalism to what should have been a free human economy of ideas on its way to delivering a moneyless society.
I would very much like to work on all of this and help bring us back to the bright future of 1999. I'd also like to write declarative stateless programming languages and AI that actually does people's work for them to get them paid instead of robbing them of their creative opportunities. Basically put real effort and resources into undoing whatever all this is and get back to the real work of solving the prerequisites needed to roll out UBI. Instead like most of you, I'll likely spend the rest of my life throwing all of my energy at the hardest problems with the smallest rewards to make rent. A tragedy of the commons on such a vast scale that we can't even see it.
I still have faith that AI will deliver the semantic web and maybe this could all materialize, since human-curated metadata was always a pipe dream. But I worry that the trillion dollar tech status quo will stop this. Mainly because revisionist history has turned what were once deep insights and winning strategies into easily discreditable flights of fancy and idealism. That's why search engines were corrupted in the first place.