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. Social media encourages a kind of interaction that isn't at all what we'd choose in other contexts. Some of this is the incentives of an overwhelmingly commercial internet clustered on the servers of overwhelmingly commerical institutions. Some of it is just structural: Jam a bunch of diverse people together in the real world and you get a thriving city. Jam a bunch of diverse people together on a platform and you get reply guys.
A big part of why I'm so exceptionally excited about the Atmosphere—and why its underlying AT Protocol has me more optimistic about the future of the internet than I've been in fifteen or twenty years—is that it gives us the tools to claw back something much more in line with what I'm nostalgic for, but in ways that take advantage of all the cool technology developed since the pre-platform days. (I remarked to at a conference last week that AT Protocol feels like a ton of ridiculously smart people decided to rebuild the internet based entirely on somehow seeing all my dreams for it.)
I do think 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. Instead of putting everyone in the same community to misunderstand and yell at each other. And I think a lot of it is building conversations away from social media—with the rewards social media gives for a certain kind of conversing that none of us but a few strange outliers actually like—and clawing our way back to something like how blogging used to be. Or how discussion boards used to be.
("Used to be" not implying blogging is gone or message boards are gone, because both still exist, but rather how both used to be much more a default way of using the internet than they are today.)
I don't know what this looks like, and I'm not sure anyone else does, either. Not exactly. Not with perfect confidence. But I do think most of us have a sense of what direction "better" points and the awareness and discernment to know when a step in that direction is truly in that direction.
I've spent a good deal of the last few months at conferences, and have talked a lot with brilliant people who have this sense of direction and a drive to point us there and accelerate. Those conversations have me inspired and hopeful. Check out what AT Protocol is building. Check out what Imbue is building. Poke around the opportunities Common Fabric opens up. There are countless more.
It's easy to feel like we've lost something. That the internet went bad and can't be made good again. But the next year feels like a big one, with so much tech emerging and moving faster and finding its footing. We can just do things. And the things being done right now are pretty great.