The Web People Forgot
It's September 2000, and we've just flown in to NYC. We're meeting people from Issey Miyake for a web project (what will become Final Home), and our cabby's moving swiftly, crisscrossing through traffic, tags dangling from the rearview mirror. Every billboard we glimpse through the blur of steel and glass and concrete has a .com printed somewhere. This will soon be commonplace but for now—for us—it's a new world. It's the future.
Canada is in the midst of a serious power struggle with Google and Meta over Bill C-18, a new law that will force them to pay for content by local news organizations. We aren't alone here—Australia, Spain, even California in a surprising bi-partisan proposal, all are either exploring, or have already implemented measures to protect newsrooms and journalists. There are varying viewpoints about this bill, and it certainly raises questions about the free flow of information on the internet. But I think most would agree on two points:
Meta and Google became giants on everyone's shoulders. Everyone's. Every company, blogger, newspaper, tv station AND user. They gobble up and regurgitate.
They only wield power because we all stopped moving.
Somewhere along the way it seems we completely forgot what the Web was all about: a series of interconnected destinations, each one with its own address, its own personality, content, and design. Tim Berners-Lee didn't create a webpage, he created a framework TO LINK pages together. And when it exploded it did so like fireworks, bright and loud and plentiful, all of the colours and all of the sounds on the biggest tapestry humankind had ever created.
Of course, it was a mess. Millions of needles in just as many haystacks. So search engines were invented. Just jump-off points, at first. But eyeballs meant people, and people meant money and now search engines wanted to keep all those eyeballs glued to their pages: "Here's your local weather! And some news! And look: a cute little cat too!". These sort-of worked, as start-up pages mostly. But we were still moving around.
And then social media came along, and those companies figured out the equation. They implemented the mechanics and recipes so well that people stayed put. And all the other websites went along with it, sharing their content freely, some even moving in permanently, relinquishing control over their entire brand in the name of eyeballs and engagement.
They all got screwed.
...
I guess I'm an outlier, because I never stopped visiting websites. I never stopped going to the source—whatever it is—to get content. I use RSS readers to pick and choose a lot of the content I read, but that's an aggregator I control entirely. My reality isn't defined by Meta's or Google's algorithm. For news, I hop between several official websites, daily, sometimes hourly. For me the Internet, in 2023, is still a web of destinations. I know I’m not alone but we might be a minority.
There's clear mobilization in Canada against the bullying tactics being deployed by Meta (Google, at least, are still engaged in a conversation). Competing media organizations, even three of our four major federal political parties, are currently united in a serious pushback, going so far as to cutting off millions in ad spending. Because screw you Mark, we can all tango.
One of the calls to action is to go back to browsing genuine news websites.
My parents had subscriptions to La Presse and the Montreal Gazette. We'd also get news from the radio—CBC, SRC, CJAD and CKAC. In the evening it would be CTV, or SRC again. Multiple sources, daily and hourly. We can't turn back time, and I'm certainly not advocating for dismissing the past ten years. But this apathy, this eternal scroll that serves to feed a beast whose only goal is to devour us, has to stop.
We need to reward those who do the work.
We need a better future.
