Any Technology Indistinguishable from Magic Is Hiding Something (opens in new tab)

For those lamenting the writing style: I agree that this article could use some editing, but in the same way the author laments the passing of the Unique Web, I too am saddened that an off-beat tech rant like this is hard to find these days in a sea of SEO-optimized or AI-generated content.

I don't necessarily agree with the author's conclusions, but I absolutely loved the writing style here:

Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta (GAMM) now own most of the steel and glass that makes the internet go vroom. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft control seventy-five percent of the cloud computing market. Meta and Google own half of the fiber optic cables supplying internet services across continents. Most of our favorite productivity apps, retail websites, and social media platforms are beholden to proprietary infrastructure controlled by these four corporations. They own the most heavily trafficked server networks, all the GPUs, and gigawatts, and whatever.

They call it the cloud, but really, that’s just the internet.

So, what we know as the cloud doesn’t actually exist. It’s a euphemism that obfuscates the consolidation of critical infrastructure. The cloud is metaphysical porn for wild-eyed technocrats in Allbirds who say things like “I’m making a dent in the universe” without a whisper of irony. It’s bullshit. It’s fugazi. There is no spoon, Neo. The cloud is a lie.

I hate to keep repeating this but if I can run local LLMs or AI models in Linux why do I need Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta products?

Google search, social, even shopping become obsolete. If there's an AGI equivalent model that can help me get through my day, maybe even build, cook and everything else DIY humans need.

Sorry but this idea that the old internet is dead is just people hand wringing that nobody will read their boring blog. It's the mistake that people make about democracy. Most assume that democracy is about the right to be heard. Wrong. It's the right to be peacefully ignored. Nobody, not even GAMM ( did he make that up ) is stopping me spinning up a web server on my cheap 50MBit up/down connection, writing a blog and doing whatever. If nobody comes to read it and nobody is kicking down my door to punish me for writing it then the system is working about as best it can. That others choose to consume their content elsewhere is just a sign that I am not as interesting as I think I am. But that is most of us.

> The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate.

Hard to take this article seriously.

>if we want a true indie web, we must be prepared to fight for it. Hope is not enough.

This argument would be far more convincing if I saw some gifs of dancing bananas, rainbow colored text, a main text column that spanned the entire screen width, a repeated background image right under the text, a music playing widget that autoplayed music, and it changed my cursor to a pencil or something.

Right now, I'm looking at a medium post that's not on medium. This is what I see.

Is it really your personal website if it doesn't contain your mixtape?

Finally a good rant with lots of swear words, sarcasm and telling things as the author sees them, without thinking if any of that may hurt some companies feelings. There should be more articles like that.

The is dead in much the same the Aztecs were dead immediately prior to the arrival of the Spanish. Consolidation into proprietary closed gardens corrupted it like a cancer and mass content population via AI will kill it. It’s time for a competing format. Any will do, but we could do something superior.

A superior format would look like:

* Full duplex binary sockets for transmission versus HTTP or WebSockets. It shouldn’t require proprietary software to perform a video call in a browser when modern browsers fully support that capability. The web could be fast and simple but it certainly isn’t.

* Markdown instead of HTML. Accessible semantic HTML is just too challenging for most people.

* Most developers are too stupid and fearful to make direct use of the DOM. Embracing the DOM must be mandatory with 100% dedication without alternatives or abstractions in future software or it must be abandoned in the entirety. Provided the opportunity to get this wrong most developers will find a self-serving way to fuck this up nine times out of ten, so don’t cave to weakness on this.

* No matter what the solution is it should enshrine a forced dichotomy of anonymity or privacy. It must be a choice and that choice must be clear and mandatory. If you try for both you will have neither and developers will cry about how hard life is, like with the DOM. Don’t give the whiners an excuse to whine.

Isn't that the beauty of magic, and of much technology...that to the end viewer it just works? How does a magician get the oohs and ahhs by revealing their secrets? Much of the world spending time on the web actually doesn't care that things aren't open, or that the magic show is just an act of misdirection...the consumer is happy to scroll, get a dopamine hit, and repeat 1000 times a night.

I think this article is entertaining and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The key takeaway for me was that some companies who's business models revolved around infrastructure and scale (web search, social media,...) went vertical and acquired most of the world's web infra and core services. This provides them with scale advantage and they try to push products that rely on that advantage, while making cost of entry prohibitive to any potential competitors. Chasing the dream of selling "50-dollar solutions to 50-cent questions". No conspiracy in sight. Just capitalism :)

Like all conspiracy theory articles, this one has a kernel of truth, but does some massaging of the facts to get everything to line up.

And for some reason in the latter part it turns into a who's-who of people the author dislikes (internet billionaires who are fashionable to scorn)