Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web - Neustadt.fr

I quit Facebook seven months ago.

Despite its undeniable value, I think Facebook is at odds with the open web that I love and defend. This essay is my attempt to explain not only why I quit Facebook but why I believe we're slowly replacing a web that empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. And why we should, at the very least, stop and think about the consequences of that shift.

The Web: Backstory

(If you want, you can skip the backstory and jump directly to the table of contents).

I love the web.

I don't mean that in the way that someone might say that they love pizza. For many of us in the early 2000s, the web was magical. You connected a phone line to your computer, let it make a funny noise and suddenly you had access to a seemingly-unending repository of thoughts and ideas from people around the world.

It might not seem like much now, but what that noise represented was the stuff of science fiction at the time: near-instantaneous communication at a planetary scale. It was a big deal.

I was an average student at school. Despite well-meaning and often wonderful teachers, I didn't thrive much in a school system that valued test performance and fact-retention over genuine curiosity. Had it not been for the web, I might have convinced myself that I was a poor learner; instead, I realized that learning is one of my great passions in life.

What remains of my fan site for German powermetal band Gamma Ray from 2001, archived thanks to the wonderful folks over at Archive.org

I was 11 when I set up my first website. Growing up in Nepal, this was magical. Almost everything I love today—design, aviation, cosmology, metal music, computation, foreign languages, philosophy—I discovered through the many pages that found their way to my web browser. All I needed were curiosity, a phone line and that strange little electrical song. And good old Netscape Navigator.

Netscape Navigator 4.04, source: A Visual Browser History, from Netscape 4 to Mozilla Firefox

The web enabled that. It's one of humanity's greatest inventions. And now, we the architects of the modern web—web designers, UX designers, developers, creative directors, social media managers, data scientists, product managers, start-up people, strategists—are destroying it.

We're very good at talking about immersive experiences, personalized content, growth hacking, responsive strategy, user centered design, social media activation, retargeting, CMS and user experience. But behind all this jargon lurks the uncomfortable idea that we might be accomplices in the destruction of a platform that was meant to empower and bring people together; the possibility that we are instead building a machine that surveils, subverts, manipulates, overwhelms and exploits people.

It all comes down a simple but very dangerous shift: the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her. Our visitor has become a data point, a customer profile, a potential lead -- a proverbial fly in the spider's web. In the guise of user-centered design, we're building an increasingly user-hostile web.

If you work in the design/communication industry, consider this essay introspective soul-searching by one of your own. If you're a regular web user, consider this an appeal to demand a better web, one that respects you instead of abusing and exploiting you.

Note : The entire essay is rather long so feel free to skip to individual parts:

The Web was Born Open: a very brief history of the web

The Modern Web (of Deception): the disturbing state of the web today

Track the Trackers, an Experiment: with whom websites are sharing your information

Gated Communities: recentralization and closed platforms

The Way Forward: open tools, technologies and services for a better web

The Web was Born Open

It all began in the early 90s.

The Internet—the physical network that allowed computers around the world to communicate—was already in place but it remained inaccessible to most people. You had to know how to use a local client to connect to a remote FTP, Usenet, Gopher or an email server. This was before the days of ubiquitous graphical user interfaces so you had to type funny commands into a terminal, one of those black screens with green text that that hackers supposedly use to do Bad Things.

Usenet Archives from 1981 on gopher server Quux.org, accessed 31 October 2017 via lynx

Meanwhile, Tim Berners-Lee was working as an independent contractor at CERN in Geneva. Frustrated with how difficult it was to find, organize and update technical documentation, he proposed a solution that involved "global computer networked information system" that "presented users with a web of interlinked documents", called Mesh. Pretty soon it became apparent that WWW—World Wide Web, as it came to be known—could do more than just link technical documents.

The world's first website, accessed 31 October 2017...