I cut my teeth on the open web of the early 2000s. It was APIs, and mashups. Mac OS X turned my laptop into a web server and coding machine, just the same as where I hosted the toys and tools that I wrote. This is what the future was going to be like.

And then it didn’t happen. Code is fragile because APIs keep changing and nobody cares about scripting anymore. There are no text and image file formats anymore, practically speaking, because there’s no file interchange. Once photos are on Instagram, that’s it.

We’ve lost the ambition of the early web and early internet to create an inclusive, level playing field. It’s clear what the technical challenges are - HTTP needs micro-payments at the protocol level to support businesses outside advertising, we need portable high level standards for photos, streams and identity - but we’re kinda not thinking like that anymore.

So in reaction I stick with plain text as much as possible, and continue my computing life vaguely resenting the software world we’ve built.