you might expect someone to recognize him. But as he gets on a downtown train, no one turns a head.
Despite serving as a board member at one of the five largest social networks, and a mainstay of the Bay Area tech industry for almost two decades, the kind of fame attached to the names of Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, or the “Google guys” has eluded Williams.
.. His startups have nearly all specialized in the same abstract medium: text boxes.
.. In fact, you are reading this very story on the open web—unless you found it on the Facebook app on your phone, in which case you are reading a copy nearly identical to the open-web version of the story, except that yours loaded much faster and lives on Facebook’s servers.)
.. “I think the distribution points are going to consolidate.”
The distribution points are the search engines and the social networks: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snapchat, and the messaging apps. Also on that list are YouTube (owned by Google), Instagram (owned by Facebook), Whatsapp (also owned by Facebook), and Facebook Messenger (ditto). By linking the web together, or hosting normally data-heavy content for free, these distribution nodes seize more and more users. And because each of the nodes is more interesting than any one individual’s personal site, people who used to go to personal sites wind up at the nodes instead.
.. The developers who wrote Drupal and WordPress, two important pieces of blogging software, both recently expressed anxiety over the open web’s future.
.. Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University, argues in his book The Master Switch that every major telecommunications technology has followed the same pattern: a brief, thrilling period of openness, followed by a monopolistic and increasingly atrophied closedness
.. “Railroad, electricity, cable, telephone—all followed this similar pattern toward closedness and monopoly, and government regulated or not, it tends to happen because of the power of network effects and the economies of scale,” he told me.
.. Josh Benton, a media critic at Harvard, once described Medium as “YouTube for prose,”
.. “I realized there are dot-com people and there are web people,”
.. They don’t have personal sites. … They don’t get personal.”
.. For all the talk of their radical openness, blogs had mostly been the domain of those with hosting space, programming experience, and the time to write them.
.. Odeo wanted to be to podcasts what Blogger was to blogs, but internet audio was still too disorganized for a business to succeed.
.. the fall of 2006 to the spring of 2007—was the most heated the aughts ever got in Silicon Valley. In this period, Google acquired YouTube, an 18-month-old company, for $1.6 billion. Facebook opened to all users, not just college students. TIME declared “You” the Person of the Year, a silly gimmick that nonetheless initiated the era of social-media hype. And Apple debuted the first iPhone.
.. the internet of 2008 can seem distant. That year’s presidential election was famously waged via web blogs. By 2012, much of the conversation had moved to Twitter.
.. “If your job was to feed people, but you were only measured by the efficiency of calories delivered, you may learn over time that high-calorie, high-processed foods were the most efficient ways to deliver calories,” he says
.. Medium’s marketing position isn’t far from Whole Foods either—it wants to be the big corporation that upscale customers trust.
.. Each of these sites still lives on its own domain name, but in terms of design and function, each is essentially a Medium page. Their stories also live on Medium’s servers.
.. Two years later, he founded Medium, describing it as a place for content that was too short for Blogger and too long for Twitter.
.. This is Medium’s reason for existing: to protect individual writers in the fierce and nasty content jungles.
.. It wants to do so by adopting many of the tics and habits of the original blogosphere—the intertextuality, the back-and-forth, the sense of amateurism
.. Medium, yes, will just be another platform, but it will run the open web in an emulator.
.. Google and Facebook, just two companies, send more than 80 percent of all traffic to news sites.
.. The web of 2008—the web that helped elect President Obama—has already withered.
.. but ours had more creativity, ours weren’t just for the money.
Another Age of Discovery
Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance” — about lessons we can draw from the period 1450 to 1550, known as the Age of Discovery. It was when the world made a series of great leaps forward, propelled by da Vinci, Michelangelo, Copernicus and Columbus, that produced the Renaissance and reshaped science, education, manufacturing, communications, politics and geopolitics.
.. “Gutenberg’s printing press provided the trigger,” Goldin told me by email, “by flipping knowledge production and exchange from tight scarcity to radical abundance. Before that, the Catholic Churches monopolized knowledge, with their handwritten Latin manuscripts locked up in monasteries. The Gutenberg press democratized information, and provided the incentive to be literate.
.. Savonarola was amongst the first to tap into the information revolution of the time, and while others produced long sermons and treatises, Savonarola disseminated short pamphlets, in what may be thought of as the equivalent of political tweets.”
Ulysses and the Lie of Technological Progress
Joyce picked June 16 as the time of the novel partly to commemorate his first date with his future wife
.. it’s easy to render James Joyce a staid and honorable figure of cultural uprightness. But nothing could be less the case. Ulysses bathes in low-culture vulgarity
.. We chose Twitter, still a relatively esoteric “microblogging” platform in 2007, because it offered a perfect format for our interpretation. For one part, the invitation to post messages, in public, unfiltered, whatever thought or idea came out of one’s head perfectly paralleled Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness writing.
.. We registered 54 Twitter accounts in the names of Ulysses characters—from@BuckMulligan to @WifeOfSheehyMP, and converted the passages we’d selected and time-coded into 140-character tweets, adding @-mention cross-references where appropriate.
.. Twitter had published an application programming interface (API) for its service. Using the API, I wrote some software to automate the posting, such that everything would be timed correctly.
.. Adrienne LaFrance explained how a Pulitzer-nominated, 34-part investigative journalism series vanished entirely from the web. One reason: it was built on a technology platform, Flash
.. Works produced for HyperCard, Apple’s once-popular programming tool, have long since ceased to be viewable on modern computers.
.. One of the features that allowed Ulysses to become canon—hardly the only one, but one nevertheless—was its ability to be read by human eyeballs in 2016 as much as in 1986, 1956, or 1926.
.. The Twitter public timeline had been retired
.. The ultimate lesson of Ulyssesis that everything that seems permanent decays and returns to earth. But in so doing, it doesn’t vanish. It facilitates new growth, both native and invasive.
.. Bloomsday is the most contemporary of holidays, because it puts the lie to the conceit of contemporary life: that we move ever-forward through progress, amassing knowledge and innovation and adeptness. How quickly forgotten is the fundamental lesson of modernism—that entropy rules
.. It celebrates the ultimate technological advancement no matter the period: not discovery or innovation, but the warm, drunk rumble of the conversation between progress and decay.
The ‘Trump Effect’ on Cable News
Donald Trump is destroying the GOP, pluralism, and all adult standards of common decency. And cable’s profits are soaring.
.. In short, cable news is a gerontocratic kingdom where Fox News serves as king, with more than twice the audience of CNN and triple that of MSNBC
.. There is another interesting wrinkle to the Trump Effect: The viewership growth wasn’t evenly spread across networks. One network, CNN, gobbled up the majority of new viewers.
.. in the first quarter of 2016, CNN’s primetime ratings grew 159 percent annually... CNN has been a major driver of Trump’s news presence, an amount of time one analysis valued at equivalent to $3 billion of advertising. But his ubiquity on CNN has been a mutually profitable arrangement.