# The Web We Lost, and The Web We Must Rebuild

by [Peter Wang](https://twitter.com/pwang)

This site is a reflection on how the web (and really, how the internet as a whole) has failed.  This serves as background reading and context for my interest in the emerging initiatives around "decentralizing the Internet", or the "peer-to-peer web".

I'm writing this for a technically sophisticated reader.  I'm also writing this for myself, to help organize my thoughts on this topic, and to provide an intellectual breadcrumb trail; that's why I provide a "Further Reading & Sources" at the end of each section.  I don't expect anyone to read every link, every piece of background material, but I have tried my best to cull & curate so as to present only the best of what I've read so far.

If you are already convinced that the current Internet/web is broken, you can skip ahead to section 4, "The Root Problems", to see if my formulation of what's broken and what's at stake aligns with your thinking.

## Contents

 0. [Introduction](0%20Introduction.md)
 
 1. [The Web In 2017 - Structural Failure At Every Level](1%20Web%202017.md)
     * A Beastiary of Obvious Failures
     * The Attention Economy, Servant of Growth Capitalism
     * From Connection to Consumption
     * The Chinese Model
     * An American Model

 2. [The Web We Lost](2%20The%20Web%20We%20Lost.md)

 3. [Centralized Social Media Is Broken By Design](3%20Centralized%20Social%20Media%20Is%20Broken%20By%20Design.md)

 4. [The Root Problems](4%20The%20Root%20Problems.md)

 5. A Humane Network
    * The Core Challenge - What is the right technological infrastructure that supplements, extends, and scales human networks, to achieve greater engagement, deeper trust, and emerges collective intelligence?
    * Computer Networks vs. Social Networks
    * The role of decentralized communication technology in bringing about a new, sustainable human ecology
    * Sensemaking is not optional (draft)
    * The Internet Is Too Much
    * Anomie (in Clipped Articles Civ 2.0)

 6. What Comes Next
    * What are current stop-gap tech approaches, and why are they not enough?
    * 4 Layers of Fail
    * Challenges for any distributed data application system

 7. Beaker and Dat

 8. Appendix A. What About _____?
    * ZeroNet / Zero platform
    * Matrix
    * IPFS
    * Fermat
    * Urbit
    * Ethereum (and ether-related, e.g. https://www.uport.me/)
    * SAFE network
    * Blockstack
    * Mastodon
    * I2P
    * DAOStack / Backfeed
    * Consensys
    * DFINITY
    * cjdns
    * Solid
    * Syncthing
    * WebTorrent
    * StrongLink
    * Twister
    * Indie
    * Cicada
    * RetroShare
    * Sovrin.org
    * Xanadu
    * FutureOfText.org
    * [Akasha](https://blog.akasha.world/2018/02/10/akasha-beta-emergence/) (on Ethereum): 
    * (Hardware stacks)


----

All contents within this site are copyright 2017 by Peter Wang, and licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA.