There’s one platform for which none of this is true, and that’s the web platform, because it offers the grain of a medium—book, movie, album—rather than the seduction of a casino.

I’ve been working in tech more or less non-stop for more than 25 years, and in that time my feeling about the industry has changed dramatically. When I began, I held straightforwardly techno-utopian ideas: I believed that technology was an unalloyed force for Good, that the computer revolution would bring about a more just and equitable society. I thought the industry was going to create a Star Trek-esque post-scarcity society.

I cringe at past-Jacob’s naiveté. It’s been incredibly demoralizing to discover what the tech industry actually did was to invent surveillance capitalism, create exploitative “gig economy” business models, create a new generation of robber barons, enable the rise of global fascism, facilitate genocide, and I could go on but Christ I’m exhausted.