· Author: Patrick Blick · Essays · 3 min read
Our Web
Every technology has a culture. Over 30 years, the Web has drifted from a shared productivity platform designed by Tim Berners-Lee, towards a machine of "social media", ad campaigns and global consumption. The cognitive offloading effect of AI is now 'critically endangering' it before it had a chance to evolve. We are here to preserve it.
Where does the Web begin? If you take a course in web development today, you still get some level of introduction to Git, HTML, CSS and JS, maybe even servers and databases, but only to then find their unrecognizable abstractions in JSX, MDX or .liquid files, dozens of unrelated configurations, and insurmountable limitations to navigate left and right in the industry. In practice, there is no beginning, only an end, and any means are justified to get there. Even offloading your agency to an AI.
This is the kind of ‘information asymmetry’ that awarded George Akerlof a Nobel prize in 1970 for showing how it leads to a dysfunction of free markets, substituting quality and competence with information (a “market of lemons”). Around the same time, Scandinavian countries were legislating for the participation of workers in the design of their tools, to prevent their ‘deskilling’. Ironically, these same market forces managed to bend these efforts by substituting the words “worker” and “skill” with “user” and “experience”, which is what we’ve come to recognize as “PD” today: workers were always too informed to be consulted. The consequences for the industry are well summarized by the famous meme:
Randall Munroe’s “Dependency” meme (xkcd) from 2020, and a latest iteration of it today.
Today AI seems to have given the sirens of incompetence a license for honesty: rather than so-called “skill”, you are asked to have a “refined taste”, and “pure knowledge”, both ideally acquired without the sweat and toil that would too inconvenience management and board rooms. As detached as this is from any respect for basic human experience, we are not interested in arguing with these voices. We are here to represent the alternative: a community of practice, competence and curiosity.
The ‘Regenerative’ paradigm helps to emphasize the natural evolution of every skill and technology, including software and programming languages. Any culture that can’t be reproduced and improved upon by subsequent generations loses its viability. As this second meme illustrates, the Web has already suffered from technical debt, and with the EU’s new Cyber-Resilience Act we are required to expose these closets from next month through software bills of material and vulnerability reporting. Are we ready for this level of transparency?
Mind over Machine is opening its WEB LAB to formalize the Open Source stewardship loosely defined by this regulation, exercising our proposed standards of quality, those of the Open Science Framework, the W3C’s foundational specifications, and actual implementations of open source web content and infrastructure in a Community of Practice - from servers through client-side applications to browsers. Working hands-on, but from first principles, beginners and experts alike are welcome. Soon enough we anticipate a ring of personal websites and/or open source projects to collaborate on. Come join if you would like to resume the original project of the open Web! Our first workshop will be a deep dive into Git, to establish a diverse, but well-understood foundation for our stewarded projects.
Upcoming workshops will be generally thematized for knowledge share, but with an open agenda to work on chosen projects: server operation, programming paradigms, web standards, frameworks and libraries, routing, rendering and more. Join our Slack channel for future announcements and continuous discussion.
