World Wide Web

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.