The Lurker

On the grim future of the web

Benjamin Mako Hill writes about staying at a hotel that provides free wireless with a very restrictive whitelist:

You can use Google search (but not click on the links), use GMail, Google Talk, Google Reader (but not see any images on the blogs you are reading), Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Checkout, Google Docs, and so on.

A few people at the conference seem only barely inconvenienced by the arrangement and most seem to be able to get work done! I can't help feel like I'm experiencing some dystopian version of the Internet from 10 years in the future.

I'm not sure I've got much hope that we can avoid a future Internet that looks a lot like the television industry does today. Danny O'Brien argues we find ourselves where Richard Stallman was a couple of decades ago:

If we want people to have the same degree of user autonomy as we've come to expect from the world, we may have to sit down and code alternatives to Google Docs, Twitter, and EC2 that can live with us on the edge, not be run by third parties.

Related topics: Quote of the day Web Mindless Link Propagation