XOXO: Molly White
Molly White, Citation Needed / Web3 Is Going Just Great
I was familiar with Molly White's "Web3 Is Going Just Great" Twitter account, before I peaced out of there, and ended up following her on Mastodon, then Bluesky. Her talk at XOXO got boosted into my feed at the latter, and while it's maybe nothing new to me (the constrictive approach of the tech industry, the modern web as a handful of platforms, that we can make the web that we want to see), it's wonderful to hear it spoken out loud better than I ever could. Better than the big names, too. Earlier in the year, I went to a Cory Doctorow lecture on the enshittification of the modern internet, and while it wasn't particularly bad, it seemed to hover around a set of ideas which allowed him to repeat the word: enshittification, enshittification, enshittification.
(I don't like the term - not because it's rude, because who cares, but because it's simplistic and reductive, seeing so much badness as having the same root cause.)
But White's talk, while having a bit of a slower pace, is still good. It casts its gaze beyond just what's going wrong, and how we might fix it. One of the first things she talks about is why it's worth it - why so many of us are finding something missing in our online lives, why everything feels emptier despite more people being online than at any point in history; why the magic's gone. Because the web did feel magical, once. And yeah, I'm older, and I've been using it for three decades, but that's not it, not really. For a decade and a half, I became a consumer of the web, not a creator on it. I used to make things, then I didn't. It's clear that she experienced something similar, too. That many of us did.
She illustrates her point with Neopets, and the customizability (via HTML and CSS) of the user lookups. I'm older, but I take her point - for me, it was making my first website, and realizing, _holy shit, I can put anything here, and make it look however I want_. I made pages. She made pages. Where they actually were varied, but the space to create and explore was the same for both of us.
Different circumstances; the same basic idea. The web of creation, of creativity. Offered person to person: stumbling across someone else's personal space and being fascinated by the interests and life of a name you'll never meet.
Check out the video - it's not that long, just over twenty minutes. And it made me smile: in her screenshot collage of "what's possible", it includes, at the bottom right, a screenshot of tilde.club.
But, a sad note - the front page of XOXOfest.com notes, "XOXO was an experimental festival for independent artists who live and work online". That past tense - Wikipedia notes that due to "decreased sponsor budgets, independent artists' financial struggles, as well as the dangers of COVID-19", the August 2024 festival would be the last.
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