The Web We Have to Save

This is a wonderful celebration of the hyperlink and the beauty of the decentralized web in a world of social media sites vying to keep us in their walled gardens. Hossein Derakhshan’s perspective is an interesting one as he’d been in prison (for blogging) since 2008.

Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object — the same as a photo, or a piece of text — instead of seeing it as a way to make that text richer. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting: Adding several links to a piece of text is usually not allowed. Hyperlinks are objectivized, isolated, stripped of their powers.