World Wide Web

In theory, the “free market” should reward publications that are doing important work. The more people care about a given issue the more they’ll read news stories about it, which should give publications covering it traffic and ad dollars. In reality, the advertising industry has singled out the issues the audience cares about most, like reproductive rights, as unsuitable to sell ads against, even though a ton of people want to read about them. This helps explain the precarity of publications like Jezebel, despite it being more vital to its audience than ever.

The death of Jezebel under this set of circumstances is particularly cruel considering that voters overwhelmingly voted to enshrine abortion protections and against politicians who made the dehumanization of trans people one of their key policies.

“The closure of Jezebel also underscores fundamental flaws in the ad-supported media model where concerns about ‘brand safety’ limit monetizing content about the biggest, most important stories of the day—stories that create huge traffic because people read and share them,” Jezebel staff said in a statement from its union, the Writers Guild of America. “A well-run company would have moved away from an advertising model, but instead they are shuttering the brand entirely because of their strategic and commercial ineptitude. Jezebel was a good website.”

This looks very good. (Of course it's very good; Jeremy Keith wrote it.) Just read the first part and I'm hooked. So little time…

The World Wide Web has been around for long enough now that we can begin to evaluate the twists and turns of its evolution. I wrote this book to highlight some of the approaches to web design that have proven to be resilient. I didn’t do this purely out of historical interest (although I am fascinated by the already rich history of our young industry). In learning from the past, I believe we can better prepare for the future.

You won’t find any code in here to help you build better websites. But you will find ideas and approaches. Ideas are more resilient than code. I’ve tried to combine the most resilient ideas from the history of web design into an approach for building the websites of the future.

Last month the government’s tender website, AusTender, published a contract between the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and ShadowDragon Holdings, LLC. The contract runs for two years and is valued at $563,040.

ShadowDragon Holdings is an American company that sells software collecting “open source intelligence software, unique datasets and training” to organisations, including the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency as well as state police forces in New York and Michigan.

ShadowDragon’s products pull data from a range of public online platforms — reportedly more than “200 unique sources and datasets” — to make them searchable for its users.

The full list of places isn’t published but its promotional material lists places including Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, YouTube, X, Google, Amazon, Tumblr, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Reddit, 4Chan, Skype, Spotify, Twitch, Xbox network, PornHub, SoundCloud, Gab, Foursquare, Tripadvisor, Tinder, Etsy, PayPal, Flickr, Imgur, Disqus, eBay, GitHub, DeviantArt, Blogger, FetLife, BitChute, parenting forum BabyCenter, social network for Black people BlackPlanet and more. 

The answer, I think, lies in a decade-old idea about how to organize the internet. It’s called POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. (Sometimes the P is also “Post,” and the E can be “Elsewhere.” The idea is the same either way.) The idea is that you, the poster, should post on a website that you own. Not an app that can go away and take all your posts with it, not a platform with ever-shifting rules and algorithms. Your website. But people who want to read or watch or listen to or look at your posts can do that almost anywhere because your content is syndicated to all those platforms.

Using a free browser is now more important than ever. We've written recently on this topic, but the issue we wrote about there was minor compared to the gross injustice Google is now attempting to force down the throats of web users around the world. The so-called "Web Environment Integrity" (WEI) is the worst stunt we've seen from them in some time. Beginning its life as an innocuous, if worrying, policy document posted to Microsoft GitHub, Google has now fast-tracked its development into their Chromium browser. At its current rate of progress, WEI will be upon us in no time.

By giving developers an API through which they can approve certain browser configurations while forbidding others, WEI is a tremendous step toward the "enshittification" of the web as a whole. Many of us have grown up with a specific idea of the Internet, the notion of it as a collection of hyperlinked pages that can be accessed by a wide variety of different machines, programs, and operating systems. WEI is this idea's antithesis.