# 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

 i. [Introduction](0%20Introduction.md)
 
I. The Web We Lost

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

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

II. The Web We Need

 1. [Moral Philosphy for Digital Humanity](5%20Moral%20Philosophy%20for%20Digital%20Humanity.md)

    * Why go so deep?  Why talk about philosophy??
      * Human communications have undergone a phase transition.
      * Peak words; semantic density of the human cognitive field is at breakdown voltage
      * Four-dimensionality: Digital Humans are all ships of Theseus
      * Sensemaking is not optional (draft)
    * Social Physics
        * Identity, Names, and the Social Field
        * Privacy and Trust
        * Self-hood and agency

 2. [The Humane Network](6%20The%20Humane%20Network.md)
    * The Fundamental Question - 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
    * The Internet Is Too Much
    * Anomie (in Clipped Articles Civ 2.0)

 3. What Could Come 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

 4. What Should Come Next: A Decentralized Information System
    * Motivating questions (a la Bitcoin's "money no one can stop me from spending")
    * Orthogonalizing transport from representation from identity
    * Computational Trust: bootstrapping from local trust to global reputation; web of trust; a global decentralized credit system

 5. Beaker and Dat

 6. Tech overview/survey, 2018: What About _____?
    * ZeroNet / Zero platform
    * SAFE network
    * Fermat
    * Urbit
    * Ethereum (and ether-related, e.g. https://www.uport.me/) and [Akasha](https://blog.akasha.world/2018/02/10/akasha-beta-emergence/)
    * Blockstack
    * DAOStack / Backfeed
    * Mastodon
    * Matrix
    * IPFS
    * I2P
    * Consensys
    * DFINITY
    * cjdns
    * Solid
    * Syncthing
    * WebTorrent
    * StrongLink
    * Twister
    * Indie
    * Cicada
    * RetroShare
    * Self-sovereign identity
      * Sovrin.org
    * Better hypertext/knowledge systems:
      * FutureOfText.org
      * Xanadu
    
III. Civilization 2.0

  * A Brief History of Modern Economics
     * Labor and resource scarcity
     * Fifty years of "As if" growth in a fiat currency bubble
     * The system of the world: Transactional money, Wealth, Risk, and Temporal Novation
     * Centralization of credit and "trust bondage"

  * Collective Intelligence


IV. Commentaries


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