Source: Aaron Ross Powell
by Aaron Ross Powell
“I want the internet to be better. There’s of course always the risk of nostalgia building an unearned sense that it in fact used to be, in every way. That the era before, say, Facebook was idyllic, or the time of Blogger and Movable Type a paradise of thoughtful and thought-elevating discourse. We tend not to remember the warts, and so think a return to the old ways is invariably a return to better ways. But I do think there are ways it has declined. The rise of platforms and the centralization that came with them has tipped the balance away from small and weird and obsessive and towards big and bland and optimized. … a lot of ‘making things better’ will entail making things smaller. Giving people communities they control the boundaries of, and letting them exist in multiple communities at once.” (10/26/26)