The hypertext Web is the real Metaverse
NOTES
“Online” is a state of being, not a place to be.
two trends worth paying attention to:
- the Web has lost a sense of place that it used to have. A sense of place is what allows humans to gather and meet and have conversations, and with fewer places on the Web feeling like real spaces we can enjoy, I think we find our conversations pushed out into the few places that retain that metaphor of place.
- the Web is globbing together into a single entity. When we go on the Web, we no longer hop from website to website. Instead, we mark out a trail of history moving rapidly between search, social, and media, which all blur together into a single experience.
What might it look like to architect a Web experience with a sense of place?
The idea that excites me the most is the potential for an annotation and highlighting layer on top of the Web.
Digital places, by contrast, are designed never to be worn down or written on. They are pristine, and we want software never to age. Many of the services on which we try to build online communities — Slack, Discord, Twitter —they work against the way humans build culture because they are impervious to cultural graffiti.