I had a chance to give "Small Pieces Loosely Joined - A Unified Theory of the Web" by @dweinberger a read this morning, a mere 22 years after it was first published.
It holds up very well, in my opinion, despite the myriad ways in which the web has changed in the interim. Throughout the day I'll be calling out ideas and themes David presents in the book in a thread below this toot, tagged #SPLJ2024 in case you'd prefer to mute my ramblings on the topic.
The first thing I want to bring the the fediverse is a quote from the book, from the end of the chapter titled "Togetherness":
The Web is a new social, public space. But because the Web has no geography, no surface, no container of space that pre-exists its habitation, we can't make the old mistake about what constitutes our sociality. The Web is a shared place that we choose to build, extend and inhabit. We form groups there because our interests aren't unique. How could they be if we're truly social? But the ground rules are different from the real world precisely because there's no ground to the Web. In the real world, masses get more faceless the further away they are. On the Web, each person is present only insofar as she has presented herself in a unique expression of her interests: many small faces, each distinct in their multitude. And since being on the Web is a voluntary activity, we are forced to face the excruciating fact that we seem to spend so much real world energy denying: Not only do we live in a shared world, but we like it that way.
You could build a new destiny for your species on an idea as radical as that.
I'll let you sit with that for a moment before I ramble on.
Now, as I began, the web has changed a lot since this was put on paper in 2002. The world has changed. Each of us has as well.
But the above still rings (mostly) true. Sure, we can argue about how voluntary of an activity using the web (which has lost its capital these days) is here in 2024, when governments and corporations have all but mandated its use in order to transact the business of being alive in physical space. Yes, how we present ourselves on the web has also shifted dramatically away from the web presences discussed in the book.
And yet the power in this paragraph, the power that was there in 2002 and still shines through today, is how well it focuses on the core of the web, and indeed the book is fabulous about staying on this note throughout its examination of the big-w Web from the start of the century: we are the web.
And frankly, nothing is a better indication of the truth of this than this - the fediverse. Our favorite voidspace, constantly changing and nebulous yet solid as real life because it is, in fact, real life. It's real life because we bring ourselves here and declare it to be a place.
David does a wonderful job in another part of the book talking about our relationship with space, and the inherent nature of a place having space in the physical world, and how the Web brought us to a new conceptual realm, that of a place without space, where space can be created wholesale out of a smidge of desire and a dab of action.
We inhabit a place like that here. We've been building (and destroying) places without spaces for a couple of decades now. It is as real as anything else.
It's realness - the fact that it definitely exists, in no small part because enough of us say it does to make it so - is part of what makes us passionate about this place. We want it to be better than it is at any given time because it's made of us.
That's part of why the fediverse feels like the "old Web" to a lot of folk. It hearkens back to a time on the Web before single-page apps and infinite scroll, and focuses on our ability to connect and share with each other regardless of anything else we use to define this place. It allows for us to show each other who we are and who we want to be and what we care about and how we express that care. It's a connecting place, one of a long line of places we as a species have collected and considered sacred and worthy of respect and care due to the importance it holds in our shared experience of life.
That's a weighty set of concepts to attribute to a place where people regularly get into spectacular arguments and/or long threads about the glories of piss. Yet it's true. If none of us cared, this place would just not be.
It can be easy to ignore how dramatically different this part of the web is from anything that's come before it, because we're pretty good at pattern matching even if there's no pattern around and we love to liken what is unfamiliar with what is familiar.
Some of us olds remember bits and pieces of a pre-Web world. Some of y'all younger folk were born into a Webbed world, a world where of course you could end up being close friends - lovers! family! - with pseudo-anonymous others in unknown physicalities anywhere on the planet. We can share any bit of information with anyone else in the world almost instantaneously. We can do so not only with the written word but with real-time bi-directional audio and video, without even being tethered to a computer with a fixed location in physical space. We roam physical space and move completely independently in our voidplaces.
But this is a very new state of affairs in human history, and it drastically changes everything about how we interact with each other, as individuals, as groups, and en masse.
Add comment