A Website To End All Websites

Instead of designing and using tools to build a society, our society changes to adapt to the demands of our tools.

A really great essay about how to build a better web. There's some good references I haven't heard before. The idea Henry establishes connecting the problems of technology we've seen before, like with cars, to the ones that we see in the modern web. Technologies that becomes so prevalent that they dominate our environment.

"Instead of designing and using tools to build a society, our society changes to adapt to the demands of our tools."

The idea of "convivial tools", "designed primarily to enhance the autonomy and creativity of their users" is such a useful one for thinking about how and why to build on the web. We aim to not just escape the traps of the owned and corporate colonized web, but to build something new.

Illich’s thesis is that technology and its derived tools should serve people in a way that enhances their freedom, creativity, independence, and will.