Editing Philosophical Research:Apocalypse Manual (section)

== On "The Web" ==

Many people over the past decade have lamented the slow death of "The Web": a scattered and spontaneous collection of interesting small-scale "web pages" and niche "sites". This always seems to people like some kind of profound statement on the surface, in which everyone has clearly lost sight of what is important to them and misplaced the long-term forest for the short-term trees. However, this particular narrative about "The Web" fails to ask a lot of obvious questions. If any particular spontaneous "site" drops away, it is generally because the living individual behind it became materially unreliable at maintaining it. Some people do not have the time and energy to run servers. Some people do not have the money to pay for servers. Some people do not have the money for a host, and try to put up a server, and suddenly find that they can't maintain it and it has to go down. Some people have so little audience it turns out not to be worth the energy to put up a server. In any of these cases, who exactly would be expected to put back up and restore something that might only be important to and worth the energy of the person that originally put it up? At the end of the day every individualized "web site" is a person, and people are notoriously unreliable. People go away and do something else. People die. And other people have no real control over the time at which that happens.

The reason any particular scattered and spontaneous collection of "web sites" has dropped away is simply that such spontaneous constellations are not mathematically configured to survive. Large corporate entities have increasingly filled up the space because they have a more favorable configuration, given their ability to regulate the needs and expenses of great numbers of people at once. Even so, the ability of large corporate entities to successfully endure as specific entities is almost as fragile as the scattered tiny "web sites" that preceded them.