The web is in rough shape and tech companies can smell its blood. Their territorial efforts to recentralize the online experience on private platforms may well fail, but watching them try is the foreseeable future.
“The melding experiences of living and working on a queasily centralizing internet will be defined by these relationships. Platform conflict, private or public, sensible or capricious, explicit or implied, will determine the manners in which we read and watch and communicate and produce online. A type of co-dependency that would be familiar in any advanced industry becomes incomprehensible at such scale and seemingly boundless acceleration—a billion users as unsure about what they’re seeing as where they’re seeing it from.”