Jim Stogdill's piece Welcome back, Weblandians is wonderful:

In the late 1960s, Vint Cerf and his colleagues thought they were building a packet-switched network. With (I’m sure) more meta-awareness than Watt, they brought the ethos of the counter culture to their work. They were suspicious of the top-down technocracy of the Vietnam War era, and they imbued their protocols with the principles of emergence in the hope that the network they built would maintain a bias toward decentralization and a force for democratization.

Yet, here we are. Instead of that smooth decentralized landscape, the web has concentrated and congealed into exabyte lumps of Google, Facebook, Amazon — and now we know, the NSA. Utah is set to become the gravity well of the web.

I love how ethics and values shaped the Internet as we know it today. Despite being made of packets, switches, servers and protocols, it's a predominantly human technology.

The piece is an edited version of his Solid conference keynote from last week: