# 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 3, "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 Introduction.md)
 1. [The Web In 2017 - Structural Failure At Every Level](1 Web 2017.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 The Web We Lost.md)
 3. The Root Problems

 4. 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)

 5. 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

 6. Beaker and Dat

 7. Appendix A. What About _____?
    * ZeroNet
    * Matrix
    * IPFS
    * Fermat
    * Urbit
    * Ethereum (and ether-related, e.g. https://www.uport.me/)
    * (Hardware stacks)


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