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Another day, another eulogy for the Internet:
It's an internet driven not by human beings, but by content, at all costs. And none of us — neither media professionals, nor readers — can stop it. Every single one of us is building it every single day.
Over the last decade, the Internet has been growing at a frenetic pace. Since Facebook launched, over two billion people have joined, tripling the number of people who are connected online.
When I joined the Internet for the first time, I was one of only 25 million users. Now, there are a little over 3 billion. Most of them never knew the Internet many of us remember fondly; for them, phones and Facebook are what it has always looked like. There is certainly no going back, because there isn't anything to return to. The Internet we have today is the most accessible it's ever been; more people are connected than ever before. To yearn for the old Internet is to yearn for an elitist network that only a few people could be part of.
This is also the fastest the Internet will ever grow, unless there's some unprecedented population explosion. And it's a problem for the content-driven Facebook Internet. These sites and services need to show growth, which is why Google is sending balloons into the upper atmosphere to get more people online, and why Facebook is creating specially-built planes. They need more people online and using their services; their models start to break if growth is static.
Eventually, Internet growth has to be static. We can pour more things onto the Internet - hey, let's all connect our smoke alarms and our doorknobs - but ultimately, Internet growth has to be tethered to global population.
It's impressive that Facebook and Google have both managed to reach this sort of scale. But what happens once we hit the population limit and connectivity is ubiquitous?
In particular, it requires the idea that making money on this new internet requires scale, and if you need to always keep scaling up, you can't alienate readers, particularly those who arrive from social channels. The Gawker of 2015 can't afford to be mean, for this reason. But the Gawker of 2005 couldn't afford not to be mean. What happens when these changes scrub away something seen as central to a site's voice?
In saying that content needs to be as broadly accessible as possible, you're saying that the potential audience for any piece must be 3.17 billion people and counting. It's also a serious problem for journalism or any kind of factual content: if you're creating something that needs to be as broadly accessible as possible, you can't be nuanced, quiet, or considered.
The central thesis that you need to have a potential audience of the entire Internet to make money on it is flat-out wrong. On a much larger Internet, it should theoretically be easier to find the 1,000 true fans you need to be profitable than ever before. And then ten thousand, and a million, and so on. There are a lot of people out there.
In a growth bubble (yes, let's call it that), everyone's out to grab turf. On an Internet where there's no-one left to join and everyone is connected, the only way you can compete is the old-fashioned way: with quality. Having necessarily jettisoned the old-media model, where content is licensed to geographic regions and monopoly broadcasters, content will have to fight on its own terms.
And here's where it gets interesting. It's absolutely true that websites as destinations are dead. You're not reading this piece because you follow my blog; you're either picking it up via social media or, if you're part of the indie web community and practically no-one else, because it's in your feed reader.
That's not a bad thing at all. It means we're no longer loyal readers: the theory is that if content is good, we'll read and share it, no matter where it's from. That's egalitarian and awesome. Anyone can create great content and have it be discovered, whether they're working for News International or an individual blogger in Iran.
The challenge is this: in practice, that's not how it works at all. The challenge on the Internet is not to give everyone a place to publish: thanks to WordPress, Known, the indie web community and hundreds of other projects, they have that. The challenge is letting people be heard.
It's not about owning content. On an Internet where everyone is connected, the prize is to own discovery. In the 21st century more than ever before, information is power. If you're the way everyone learns about the world, you hold all the cards.
Information is vital for democracy, but it's not just socially bad for one or two large players to own how we discover content on the Internet. It's also bad for business. A highly-controlled discovery layer on the Internet means that what was an open market is now effectively run by one or two companies' proprietary business rules. A more open Internet doesn't just lead to freedom: it leads to free trade. Whether you're an activist or a startup founder, a liberal or a libertarian, that should be an idea you can get behind.
The Internet is not dead: it's more alive than it's ever been. The challenge is to secure its future.
