Anil Dash’s post “Endgame for the Open Web,” has me a bit worried. Dash understands these things better than most, he had a major hand in building and maintaining the web’s openness. Besides, he’s never been much of an alarmist. So when he sounds the alarm, we should all pay attention.

I think he lays out the existential threats pretty clearly, and I’d suggest you read through it if you’re interested in what all the fronts of this war are going to look like. I can’t add much there. What I can add is a bit of supporting evidence for where Dash ends up, in a call for us all to dig out our trenches and get ready for a fight. Dash is certain that the attack on the open web can be beat back, despite the sheer scale of what we’re up against. I agree, for two reasons.

First of all the people doing this to us are, at best, self-serving and reckless and, at worst, narrow minded and simple. And this is far from the first time a group of reckless and narrow-minded people has attacked the open web. And second, the web is extraordinarily resilient against attacks on its openness thanks to its design and community.

Understanding the distorted vision

Every ten years or so, but really kind of perpetually, a group of so-called visionaries attempt to capture and commoditize the open web. They come with big promises for societal transformation. Backed by vast supplies of capital and media attention, they promise a solution that can ease us into some inevitable transformation.

The pattern is always the same. They take good ideas formed organically on the open web and repackage them as bad ideas that can be more easily controlled.

In the mid to late 1990’s, a group of browser makers and software engineers figured out how to bring secure commerce to the web, dreaming of a day when shop owners around the world could open their own virtual storefronts. Not long after, that idea morphed into large, centralized e-stores meant to crowd out the competition and rush to an IPO. The dot-com boom and bust cycle followed. In the mid-2000’s, another group of web pioneers began thinking through a more interconnected web via APIs and communities in what would eventually be called Web 2.0. But after a few years, the APIs closed and the communities turned into walled gardens.

The playbook never changes all that much either. It is for our own safety, they will say. The world is dangerous, after all, and we can’t have our technologies be too open. Or they will promise to save independent media or small businesses because of more widespread distribution, or larger audiences. When the time comes, however, they will forget about safety and ditch their partners. The same excuses and the same goals, sometimes even by the same people, in a loop.

If you learn to recognize the signs and the patterns that history teaches us, you begin to see how predictable they are, and it makes it much easier to see past them. This time is a little different because, as Dash mentions, many of the visionaries of today have actually been involved in the web for a while. They are more savvy. And the regulatory and cultural environment we live in is more cynical than it ever has been. Many of the tools that have been used before to fight back aren’t available right now. We should, however, remember that the same kind of people have been doing this to web almost as long as it’s been around

The resilience of the web

This is how Dash opens his post:

You must imagine Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee’s throat

It’s jarring, and true. The open web is nothing more than a threat to a lot of the largest tech CEOs. But as Dash also points out, Berners-Lee kind of expected that. That’s why he pushed to the release the web into the public domain. That’s why he made the web open in its design and recruited like-minded people to help build the open web’s foundation.

The open web has proved remarkably resilient in the face of its frequently foretold death. Wikipedia was started at a time when Wall Street was ripped up into a frenzy by the rise of dot-coms, and companies rushed to add .com to their name to cash in on the trend. When the dot-com wave came crashing down, Wikipedia still stood. We lost a lot of great communities in the fallout of Web 2.0’s collapse and social media centralization, communities like Flickr and Delicious and Gowalla. Yet a lot of sites that took hold in that time — Metafilter, Ravelry, CaringBridge and so many others — never went anywhere and are still large communities today.

And the tools like WordPress and Movable Type (which Dash was involved in creating) that were built during that time to help everyone publish to the web continue to go strong or have evolved into an even greater set of tools.

My point is, each time the open web is attacked, fragments of it survive and persist. Berners-Lee designed the web with a lot of hope and optimism, but he wasn’t blind to the cynics. That’s why web technologies are simple and globally accessible. It’s why it’s not possible to control who links to what.

The people that build on the open web have always understood how to keep it going. Not without patience and practice of course. Not without massive amounts of coordinated effort. But the technology of the web is resilient enough to keep itself alive and the people of the web have, to this point, proved resilient enough to keep building on top of it.

With such a reckless assault, we may need to change the tactics somewhat these days. But the strategy is the same as it’s always been. Keep building on the open web, and resist the technologies that aim to do it harm.

Fighting for the open web

Dash points out that that we can sometimes duck and weave in the very technologies that seek to destroy us, citing, for instance, Mike Masnick’s reframing of AI as the open web’s possible savior. This has also been done before. Blogs rode a wave of media centralization and web commodification in the wake of the dot-coms. They used the same technology as their mainstream competitors, but changed it into something open and communal. The APIs that powered Web 2.0 may have eventually been shut down, but the open source frameworks and systems that made those sites possible still power much of the open web today, and are still worked on by the community.

There have been times when web builders have found refuge in the technologies that were being used to destroy them.

We should also find solace in the smaller technologies that have always slipped the chains of a closed and walled in web. RSS, for instance, still works. The reducers takes the best ideas about decentralization and puts it to work. The small web was given a name in the last few years, but it’s always been around. We shouldn’t ignore the fact that there are the roots of resistance all around us, communities and technologies that have always been there and have no plans on going anywhere.

This isn’t a technology problem and it can’t be solved by better tech. It’s a people problem that can be solved by better citizens of the web. As Julien pointed out recently, we have a word for that. We should all be better netizens.

I don’t always get personal on here, I prefer the long view of history. A recent conversation with a friend got me thinking about how bleak it all looks. But frankly, I don’t give a shit. The open web gave me a community, and friends, and a career, and a purpose. It’s the foundation I built my life on. It means everything to me, it has always felt like this incredible gift. If we’re going out, I’m going to do my part to make sure we go out swinging. I hope you all will join me.