Share this postI’ve seen a lot of this sentiment lately, and can relate:
I miss being excited by technology. I wish I could see a way out of the endless hype cycles that continue to elicit little more than cynicism from me. The version of technology that we’re mostly being sold today has almost nothing to do with improving lives, but instead stuffing the pockets of those who already need for nothing. It’s not making us smarter. It’s not helping heal a damaged planet. It’s not making us happier or more generous towards each other. And it’s entrenched in everything — meaning a momentous challenge to re-wire or meticulously disconnect.
Many of us got excited about technology because of the web, and are discovering, latterly, that it was always the web itself — rather than technology as a whole — that we were excited about. The web is a movement: more than a set of protocols, languages, and software, it was always about bringing about a social and cultural shift that removed traditional gatekeepers to publishing and being heard.
It’s perhaps hard to remember now, but in the early nineties, finding an audience really meant being discovered and highlighted by a small number of very rich publishing companies (or record labels, etc) who were most often not representative of their audiences. The web was a revolution: anyone could publish their words, their music, or their art, without asking anyone for permission, and they could find their communities equally permissionlessly.
The web, of course, didn’t turn out to be quite as utopian as the promise. The truth is, the people who could afford to publish on the early web were also from a narrow, relatively wealthy demographic. To make publishing accessible to most people (who didn’t, quite reasonably, want to learn HTML or pay for or configure a domain name and hosting), we needed a set of easy-to-use publishing platforms, which in turn became centralized single points of failure and took the place of the old gatekeepers. Replacing publishers with Facebook wasn’t the original intention, but that’s what happened. And in the process, the power dynamics completely shifted.
The original web was inherently about redistribution of power from a small number of gatekeepers to a large number of individuals, even if it never quite lived up to that promise. But the next iteration of the web was about concentrating power in a small set of gatekeepers whose near-unlimited growth potential tended towards monopoly. There were always movements that bucked this trend — blogging and the indie web never really went away — but they were no longer the mainstream force on the internet. And over time, the centralized platforms disempowered their users by monopolizing more and more slices of everyday life that used to be free. The open, unlimited nature of the web that was originally used to distribute equity was now being used to suck it up and concentrate it in a handful of increasingly-wealthy people.
For the people who were attracted to the near-unlimited wealth hoarding and rent-seeking potential, this new web was incredibly exciting. Conversely, for those of us who were attracted by the power redistribution more than the technology itself, it was incredibly disheartening. The reason we got involved in the first place had all but evaporated.
For a while, decentralization did become a hot topic. Unfortunately, this was more about avoiding the trappings of traditional banking — crucially, including avoiding regulatory controls — than it was about distributing power. The actual equity redistribution was mostly an illusion; although there certainly were people with their hearts in the right place in the movement, the people who truly gained from blockchain and cryptocurrencies were libertarian grifters who saw potential in moving money away from the prying eyes of regulatory oversight and saw banking regulations designed to protect people as being unnecessarily restrictive. Blockchain wore the clothes of power redistribution, but rather than empowering a large number of people, it enriched very few, often at other people’s expense.
I do think the brief popularity of blockchain helped bring attention to decentralization, which was useful. I don’t know that as much attention would have been paid to the new crop of decentralized social networks like Mastodon and BlueSky, for example, had Web3 not previously seeded some of the core ideas in a more mainstream consciousness. The web3 community was also the most successful at, for example, embedding identity in the browser. It wasn’t valueless as a movement, but it fell far short of the hype.
Which brings us to AI, the current hotness. Like any software technology, it’s being sold to us as an empowering tool. But the broad perception is that it’s anything but: models are trained, unpaid, on the work of artists, writers, and researchers, who are already relatively low-paid, in order to build value for a small handful of vendors who are making deals worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. Or as one commenter put it:
The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from skill the ability to access wealth.
If you think this is hyperbole, consider Marc Benioff’s comments about not hiring any more software engineers in 2025:
“We’re not adding any more software engineers next year because we have increased the productivity this year with Agentforce and with other AI technology that we’re using for engineering teams by more than 30% – to the point where our engineering velocity is incredible. I can’t believe what we’re achieving in engineering.”
Whether you care about software engineering jobs or not, the same dynamics are underway for writers, artists, and any other creative job. Even the productivity gains that are being realized through use of AI tools are benefiting a small number of wealthy companies rather than individuals. This is the exact opposite of the power redistribution that led to so many people seeing such promise in the web.
It’s very hard to get excited about technology that redistributes wealth and power in favor of people who already have it.
The trajectory of the web — starting as a tool for redistributing power and becoming one that entrenches it — was not inevitable. It was the result of specific choices: business models that prioritized monopolization, technologies designed for centralization, and a relentless focus on extracting value rather than creating it. If we want a different future, we have to make different choices.
What does an alternative look like? It starts with software designed for people rather than for capital. The web once thrived on protocols instead of platforms — email, RSS, blogs, personal websites — before closed networks turned users into data sources. We are now seeing efforts to return to that ethos. The Fediverse, open-source publishing tools, community-run platforms, and decentralized identity projects all point to a path where individuals have more control over their online lives. They aren’t perfect, but they represent a fundamental shift in intention: building systems that work for people instead of on them.
The first wave of the web was decentralized by default but only accessible to a small number of people. The second wave was more accessible but centralized by profit motives. If there is to be a third wave, it will have to be intentional: built with equity and accessibility as core values, not an afterthought. That’s a hard road, because open and ethical technology doesn’t attract billion-dollar investments the way extractive models do. But if history has shown anything, it’s that the web’s greatest strength is in the people who believe it can be better. The real question is not whether more equitable software is possible: it’s whether enough of us are willing to build it.
For many of us, the social movement, rather than the underlying technology, was always the point. We need that movement more than ever before. Hopefully building it is something that more of us can get excited about.
Photo: Tim Berners-Lee's tweet "This is for everyone" at the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
