## Metadata - Author: [[David Weinberger]] - Full Title: Small Pieces Loosely Joined - Category: #books ## Highlights - The Web, on the other hand, has no geography, no landscape. It has no distance. It has nothing natural in it. It has few rules of behavior and fewer lines of authority. Common sense doesn’t hold there, and uncommon sense hasn’t yet emerged. ([Location 228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=228)) - how we live in our world is the same thing as who we are. Are we charitable? Self-centered? Cheerful? Ambitious? Pessimistic? Gregarious? Stoic? Forgiving? Each of these describes how we are engaged with our world but each can also be expressed as the way our world appears to us. If we’re egotistical, the world appears to revolve around us. If we’re gregarious, the world appears to be an invitation to be with others. If we’re ambitious, the world appears to await our conquest. ([Location 232](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=232)) - We have a hundred ways of considering the Web, from bytes in flight to technological infrastructure to economic playing field to entertainment medium to global conversation to a wanker’s paradise. But none seems adequate to the task. Our ways of thinking about the Web, even ones as evocative as Mike’s bytes in flight, have tended to make the Web too small to account for the effect it’s having. ([Location 394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=394)) - Consider the Web as a construction project. It’s the most complex network ever created. It is by many orders of magnitude the largest collection of human writings and works in history. It is far more robust than networks far smaller, yet it was created without managers. In fact, it succeeded only because its designers made the conscious decision to build a network that would require no central control. You don’t need anyone’s permission to join in, to post whatever you want, to read whatever others have posted. The Web is profoundly unmanaged, and that is crucial to its success. It takes traditional command and control structures and busts them up into many small pieces that then loosely join themselves—and that, too, is crucial to its success. As a result, the Web is a mess, as organized as an orgy. It consists of voices proclaiming whatever they think is worth saying, trying on stances, experimenting with extremes, being wrong in public, making fun of what they hold sacred in their day jobs, linking themselves into permanent coalitions and drive-by arguments, savoring the rush you feel when you realize you don’t have to be the way you’ve been. ([Location 431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=431)) - But we pay a price psychologically and sociologically for repressing our differences and it goes beyond psychology. It has to do with the fundamentals of our world. Our real-world view of space says that it consists of homogenous measurable distances laid across an arbitrary geography indifferent to human needs; the Web’s geography, on the other hand, consists of links among pages each representing a spring of human interest. Real-world time consists of ticking clocks and the relentless schedules they enable; on the Web, time runs as intertwining threads and stories. In the real world, perfection is held as an ideal we humans always disappoint; on the Web,… ([Location 446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=446)) - of the group—even in the “faceless mass” of the public. In the real world, we have thinned our knowledge down to a flavorless stream of verifiable facts; on the Web, knowledge is fat with stories and voice. Our “realistic” view of matter says that it’s the stuff that exists independent of us, and as such it is essentially apart from whatever meanings we cast over it like shadows; the matter of the Web, on the other hand, consists of pages that we’ve built, full of intention and meaning. In the real world, to be moral means we follow a set of… ([Location 451](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=451)) - We carry with us two distinct conceptions of space. On the one hand, there’s the space we walk around in; this is filled with tangible things such as houses, trees, and bicycles. On the other hand, there’s the space we measure with odometers, yardsticks, and surveying-equipment rulers. These two spaces, lived space and measured space, are quite distinct. ([Location 538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=538)) - In the 1970s, the makers of word processing systems were looking for a word that would distinguish their files from those of other applications. They needed a term of sufficient generality to include everything one could write with their software, and, surprisingly, there was no such term in our language; the closest is perhaps “writings,” and that doesn’t work very well in the singular. So the word processors took over the term document, and if you are old enough to have been in on the first round of personal computers, you may remember being struck by how out of place the term seemed. ([Location 612](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=612)) - As a result, the word document has opposite meanings inside and outside the computing world. Outside, documents are unique originals; inside the world of computers, they are perfectly copy-able. Outside, documents are high-value; inside, everything from a will to a grocery list is a document. Outside, documents are unchanging; inside, documents are there to be changed. Outside, documents are an unusual class of writings; inside, there’s nothing more common than a document. ([Location 622](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=622)) - the Web has created a weird amalgam of documents and buildings. With normal paper documents, we read them, file them, throw them out, or send them to someone else. We do not go to them. We don’t visit them. Web documents are different. They’re places on the Web. We go to them as we might go to the Washington Monument or the old Endicott Building. They’re there, we’re here, and if we want to see them, we’ve got to travel. They’re there. With this phrase, space—or something like it—has entered the picture. ([Location 640](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=640)) - In the final analysis, we seem to have a choice of metaphors that are equally suited to the task. We could think of the Web as a giant photocopier that delivers copies of sites. We could think of it as a medium through which we see sites. We could think of it as a library from which we request copies. But we don’t. We experience the Web as a web: a set of nodes that are linked one to another, creating a space through which we travel. ([Location 654](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=654)) - Supposedly, the item in a real-world grocery found in the most shopping carts is, surprisingly, bananas. So, many real-world groceries put the bananas at the back of the store to force you to traverse the aisles in hopes that you’ll be tempted into doing some impulse shopping on the way to the bananas. But this would be precisely the wrong strategy for a Web store. If you force users to click many times to get to what they’re looking for, they will remember that they’re only one click away from your competition. We don’t mind walking down the real-world aisle to get the bananas because real-world space requires some things to be further away than others. But because the Web’s peculiar type of space can put everything we need within equally distanceless reach, if we think a site is making itself inconvenient on purpose, we don’t get the bananas . . . we get annoyed. ([Location 705](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=705)) - Real-world space is a preexisting container in which the things of the world exist. Web space is created by the things in it. ([Location 712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=712)) - In Web space, no expanse of empty space gets diminished every time someone stakes a new plot on which to build a house, as it would in the real world. Web space is infinite in that it can’t be used up, but it’s not infinitely big. It’s not a container waiting to be filled; it is more like a book that’s being written. ([Location 715](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=715)) - Note: like burning man is a blank canvas - in this Web city there is no outside, no empty space that contains the whole and arranges the parts. The Web is a public place completely devoid of space. ([Location 794](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=794)) - in literature, the author can arrange events according to her interests, can build scenes and juxtapose them as she likes, all without having to worry about how they’ll physically fit together or how long it will take the reader to travel from here to there. The author, and the reader, enjoy the freedom that comes from the liberation of place from space. The Web is in this sense, like a collective, global work of literature. Or a dream. ([Location 806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=806)) - In the real world, I can’t just put in a door from my apartment to my neighbor’s so that anyone can go through. But that’s exactly how the Web was built. Tim Berners-Lee originally created the Web so that scientists could link to the work of other scientists without having to ask their permission. If I put a page into the public Web, you can link to it without having to ask me to do anything special, without asking me if it’s all right with me, and without even letting me know that you’ve done it. ([Location 826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=826)) - Note: Similar to the way in which camps at Burning Man are quite open to each other - The Web couldn’t have been built if everyone had to ask permission first. In the real world, we assume privacy and need permission to enter. On the Web, that flips. The politics of the Web, by its very nature, is that of public rights and public ownership. ([Location 839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=839)) - It turns out that because realworld space is so hard to move around in, it provides continuity to our stories of ourselves: our story tells of our day’s journey. Hyperlinks, on the other hand, enable our attention to fly off and provide no unifying theme beyond what seemed interesting for some reason, any reason. ([Location 987](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=987)) - We generally don’t choose what we’re interested in. The Web throws that fact in our faces by presenting an immense world of things that range from brightly colored gewgaws designed to snag our peripheral vision to venal ads that appeal to our lizard brain to profound expressions of faith. These are given to us in an environment without restraint and with no urgency beyond our own curiosity. No permission is required or asked. No polite excuses are needed to abandon a page in mid-sentence. Our interests on the Web are unencumbered and uninhibited. ([Location 1019](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1019)) - Web conversations can be hyperthreaded because the Web, free of the drag of space and free of a permission-based social structure, unsticks our interests. ([Location 1041](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1041)) - Since every service company claims to have “highly trained professionals”—even the Ku Klux Klan boasts on its home page that it’s “America’s Oldest, Largest Most Professional White Rights Organization”4—having a methodology provides some further value and differentiation; it implies that the company has done this type of thing over and over and has it down to a science. ([Location 1122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1122)) - Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s inventor, is reported to have said, the “Web will always be a little bit broken.” ([Location 1143](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1143)) - The imperfection of the Web isn’t a temporary lapse; it’s a design decision. It flows directly from the fact that the Web is unmanaged and uncontrolled so that it can grow rapidly and host innovations of every sort. The designers weighed perfection against growth and creativity, and perfection lost. ([Location 1179](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1179)) - In an imperfect world, software can be an island of perfection. Software does exactly what the programmer tells it to do; ([Location 1183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1183)) - But the design assumption of the Internet was that it’s an imperfect world. The Internet isn’t just a program. It’s a physical system that uses hardware and wires. For the Internet to be robust, its designers had to keep in mind that hardware sometimes fails ([Location 1188](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1188)) - The Internet routes around disruption. ([Location 1194](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1194)) - When you look at the systems and institutions that have advanced our culture—education, government, business, religion—the same basic picture emerges: the bigger a system is, the more control it requires. ([Location 1204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1204)) - Management is, in short, about power as much as about efficiency. As Edward Tufte has said, “Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.” ([Location 1212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1212)) - Now consider how we would have gone about building the Web had we deliberately set out to do so. Generating the billions of pages on the Web, all interlinked, would have required a mobilization on the order of a world war. Because complexity requires management, we would have planned it, budgeted it, managed it, . . . and we would have failed miserably. If everything had to be coordinated and controlled, we’d still be processing Requests to Join and Requests to Post. We’d have editors poring through those pages, authenticating them, vetting them for scandalous and pornographic material, classifying them, and obtaining sign-offs and permissions to avoid the inevitable law suits. Yet we—all of us—have built the global Web without a single person with a business card that says “Manager, WWW.” Our biggest joint undertaking as a species is working out splendidly, but only because we forgot to apply the theory that has guided us ever since the pyramids were built. Whether we’ve thought about it explicitly or not, we all tacitly recognize —it’s part of the Web’s common sense—that what’s on the Web was put there without permission. We know that we can go wherever we want on the Web without permission. We know that we can say what we want in an email or on a discussion board without permission. The sense of freedom on the Web is palpable. The Web is profoundly permission-free and management-free, and we all know it. ([Location 1213](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1213)) - The Web isn’t just informal. Its informality is in-your-face. In it we hear ourselves being released from impossible ideals of behavior. We get to kick in the teeth the idealized and constricted set of behaviors known as professionalism. And we get to shed the limits imposed by whatever level of “political correctness” we think has gone too far. Professionalism and kneejerk political correctness both try to make human existence perfectible by limiting its possibilities: we can be perfect businesspeople by restricting our behaviors to those of professionals and we can be perfect citizens by restricting our utterances to those that are safe. This is a predictable tactic for imperfect creatures who find their imperfection embarrassing: redefine downward what it means to be perfect. We perhaps first resorted to this technique with sexuality when we defined as pornographic the possibilities that we didn’t want to consider, masking the fact that at one level we’re rutting animals happier wet than dry. ([Location 1362](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1362)) - On the one hand, the Web is a tool of automation from which we expect perfect and immediate obedience. On the other, it is a connection that relishes our breaking free of the computer world of perfected calculations and the business world of perfectly mannered professionalism. ([Location 1399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1399)) - Imperfection is our shibboleth on the Web, the sign by which we know we’re talking with another human being. Crudeness testifies to our escape from the world of permission, so on the Web we jump around like monkeys without diapers. ([Location 1401](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1401)) - The Web celebrates our imperfection, ludicrous creatures that we are. Its juice comes from there being as many points of view as people and as many ways of talking as there are Web pages. The Web is where we can air our viewpoints, experiment, play, and fail, and then get right back on our feet and try again. It is not headed towards agreement. Ever. There isn’t one way of thinking or talking or behaving on the Web, and if there were, who’d want to go? ([Location 1403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1403)) - Both the positive and negative side of the paradox of the public are based on the simple formula that says there’s an inverse relationship between the size of the group and our individuality as participants in it. Rewrite that formula and the rules of groups come unstuck: do we behave at the book club the way we behave at the mass rally or vice versa? How much individuality are we allowed to bring to the party? What would it mean for us to be a member of a group, even a mass group like the public, without giving up our individuality? What would it mean if we could replace the faceless masses with face-ful masses? Thanks to the Web, we’re in the process of finding out. ([Location 1481](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1481)) - groups are one of the major attractions of the Net. People don’t join just to send an email to this or that person; they join to participate in the hundreds of ways people associate. Reed, being a true geek, immediately thought about the mathematics of this concept and realized that the number of potential groups scales even faster than the number of potential connections: the number of connections is the square of the number of users, but the number of groups is 2 to the power of the number of users. For example, if 15 people are connected, there are 210 possible connections and 32,768 possible groups. ([Location 1586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1586)) - While Metcalfe’s Law thinks only about individuals and how they can connect in undifferentiated ways, Reed’s Law locates the value of the Internet squarely in the presence of groups. ([Location 1593](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1593)) - the Web is a hotbed of experimental couplings. In fact, the Web sometimes seems to consist of 300 million monkeys chained to Web software development tools and randomly creating new ways for us to be together. The results are, at best, uneven. But we benefit from the Web’s ability to evolve new forms so rapidly that if real-world evolution worked as fast, we could move from grapefruit to squid in a couple of months. ([Location 1663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1663)) - This progression has an almost Hegelian logic to it, each step following from the other, each propelled by an internal contradiction: the Web consists of hundreds of millions of individuals. They are a mass, but each member is unique. Individuals write reviews. The massness of the individuals makes the aggregate of reviews useless. So Amazon captures summary information, 1–5 stars, from the mass of individual reviews. But because those numeric rankings slight the individual side of the Web, the site begins to star the individual reviewers—but by using the masses’ review of the reviewers as its criterion. And so on. One can almost feel the breeze from the pendulum as it swings this way or that: massness, individuality, massness, individuality. And, most important, a new relationship between them: the Web consists of a mass that refuses to lose its individual faces. ([Location 1687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1687)) - mailing lists might someday evolve a “Right on!” button that makes it easy for people to nod visibly without choking the mailboxes of those on the list, a function the “Did you find this review helpful?” button serves at Amazon.com. One way or another, through advanced intelligence or trial and error, the system will evolve to meet the seesawing needs of individuality and mass-ness. ([Location 1712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1712)) - Note: like the snapping of fingers at a burning man meeting - the paradox of the public. It is ultimately a reflection of one of the two abiding human mysteries: there are other people and I am going to die. ([Location 1729](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1729)) - if I say that humans are social, I don’t mean that we tend to like one another or even that it takes a village to raise a child. I mean simply that we live in a shared world. We are here with others. And that is the condition for there being a public. ([Location 1738](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1738)) - Our shared world isn’t the surface of the earth. What makes us social isn’t shared space, for we share geography with nematodes and macaroons, but we are not social with them. What makes us social are shared interests. We care about one another and we care together about the world we’ve built out of the world we were born into. There should be no need to state such obvious truths. But our history has also brought us to an odd individualism—part of our default philosophy—that says that only individuals are real. Groups, according to this philosophy, are immaterial and thus unreal; a group is really nothing but a collection of individuals. ([Location 1740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1740)) - Without groups, there would be no individual humans, only howling monkeys in human form. In fact, that’s unfair to the monkeys. A human being raised in isolation would not be identifiably human in anything except DNA. Sociality grants a mute herd of brutes their souls and selves. The Web is a new social, public space. But because the Web has no geography, no surface, no container of space that preexists its habitation, we can’t make the old mistake about what constitutes our sociality. The Web is a shared place that we choose to build, extend, and inhabit. We form groups there because our interests aren’t unique. ([Location 1746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1746)) - In the real world, masses become more faceless the farther away they are. On the Web, each person is present only insofar as she has presented herself in an individual expression of her interests: many small faces, each distinct within the multitude. And since being on the Web is a voluntary activity, we are forced to face the excruciating fact that we spend so much real-world energy denying: not only do we live in a shared world, but we like it that way. You could build a new destiny for your species on an idea as radical as that. ([Location 1751](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1751)) - When we make a tough decision, often it’s tough because we have too much information and it isn’t all consistent. For example, one report says that the market isn’t ready for our new product, but another has the market panting for it. One study predicts that the competitive landscape is about to change, but another says it’s going to stay pretty much the same. One set of financial projections says costs are going to be outrageous, but another says that they’ll be offset by decreases in delivery costs. Making a decision means deciding which of these “inputs” to value and how to fit them together to make a coherent story. In fact, the story helps determine which of the inputs to trust by providing a context in which the inputs make sense. That means the causality runs backwards: the inputs don’t determine the decision; the decision determines which of the inputs will count as influences. ([Location 1859](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1859)) - Knowing means more than being right. Plato nailed it when he defined knowledge as “justified true belief.” ([Location 1882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=1882)) - Knowing, we’ve come to believe, is the type of thing that a machine—a computer, or a robot—might do. And it is no accident that the voices of authority that try to shut us up—whether a bad government, a bad teacher, or a bad boss—do so by implicitly claiming to be “realistic,” a code word for the claim that the authority sees the world more “objectively” and without the “distortions” of perspective and interest. It would be ironic, then, if the Web, a world our bodies cannot enter, were to return knowledge to the truths of the body: tied to an individual, oriented by a particular viewpoint, rooted in passion. But, then, irony is the Web’s middle name. ([Location 2015](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2015)) - The Internet is designed to move bits and not to decide which bits to move, which bits to block, what is done with the bits, and whether anyone should have to pay for receiving particular bits. ([Location 2119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2119)) - The realist often takes tough-mindedness as a virtue. Those he silences are made to feel that they lack the moral fiber to look reality squarely in the eye. Thus, the realist lords it over others not just because of his firmer grasp of the facts but also because of his moral superiority. But although there are certainly times when hardheaded realism is called for, it limits focus to achieve a pragmatic goal. And that’s no way to lead your life. Realism is strong medicine that must be used cautiously because it suspends ways of thinking that are essential components of human existence such as dreaming, imagining, supposing, wishing, and hoping. ([Location 2411](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2411)) - Traditionally, a document is a container. That’s why we refer to what a document says as its “contents.” Yet this is as unlikely a metaphor as the Web’s idea that a document can be a “site.” A document, after all, isn’t a jar or a pot that has stuff inside; it’s primarily a two-dimensional rectangle with scribbles on its surface. So why do we think a document has contents? Possibly because we think of ourselves as containers of knowledge and therefore we see documents as things into which we “pour” our knowledge so that others can “drink” of it, internalizing it. An expert is someone who can pour out his or her knowledge, and a person becomes an expert by taking in the expertise others have poured out. In fact, our educational system to a large degree is based on this idea of “transferring knowledge,” moving content from the teacher to the student. But put a document on the Web and it explodes. Rather than being self-contained, it becomes hyperlinked. A page without hyperlinks is literally a dead-end on the Web. But this is most remarkable, for it means that now documents get at least some of their value not from what they contain but from what they point to. ([Location 2429](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2429)) - The Web will have its deepest effect as an idea. Ideas don’t explode; they subvert. They take their time. And because they change the way we think, they are less visible than a newly paved national highway or the advent of wall-sized television screens. After a while, someone notices that we’re not thinking about things the way our parents did. The Web isn’t entering the realm of our thoughts directly as an idea; it’s getting there as a technology. ([Location 2458](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2458)) - if we want to see the influence of the ideas changed by the Web, we should look at changes in behavior. ([Location 2499](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2499)) - the kids who are posting reviews at Amazon aren’t thinking about their relationship to the world. But they are implicitly seeing the world as a collection of people grouped by what they like to read. This is the opposite of thinking about the world as land masses that group people through the tyranny of distance. Does this mean that there will be no more wars? Of course not. But it would be just as foolish to think that our children’s view of the world as one big book club won’t affect how they engage with the world when their time comes. ([Location 2501](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2501)) - The Web is different enough from the real world that the mistakes we’ve made about the real world don’t distract us there. Thus, our experience of the Web is closer to the truth of our lived experience than are our ideas about our lived experience. ([Location 2541](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2541)) - because there’s no abstract space on the Web, we can’t misconstrue the Web’s spatiality the same way we’ve misconstrued real-world space. Web time explicitly threads our discontinuous involvement with it, so we can’t misconstrue Web time as consisting of a continuous string of particularized moments. Web knowledge comes in the form of people speaking in their own voices, so we’re not as tempted to seek voiceless, passionless authorities. ([Location 2544](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2544)) - A culture’s excitement about the Web is directly proportional to that culture’s alienation from its everyday experience. That’s why the Web, for all its technological newness and oddness, feels so familiar to us. And that’s why it feels like a return even though it is the newest of the new. The Web is a return to the values that have been with us from the beginning. It is even a return to our basic self-understanding—a return from the distraction of… ([Location 2550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2550)) - That backpack contains ideas that seem so true yet are utterly nondescriptive not only of our daily lives but of what matters to us: In the backpack is individualism, the idea that we are first and foremost isolated human beings. Groups are secondary to individuals, our default philosophy says, because groups can’t exist without individuals but individuals can exist without groups. But with this individualism comes a lonely selfishness that does a true disservice to the concern for others that guides our every waking moment. The Web, on the other hand, exists only because its 300 million denizens are reaching out to others. The Web is possible only as a group activity. In the backpack is realism (or what some would call “materialism”), the idea that the real world is fully independent of our awareness of it. That’s undeniably true: we live in a world not of our own making. But our default realism goes further than this and gives things independent of us extraordinary and unwarranted clout in all human activities: Facts trump desires, and feelings are for sissies. The Web, on the other hand, is thoroughly a creation of subjective human beings and is built not of atoms or matter or facts but of human interests. In the backpack is relativism, the idea that all concepts and values depend on accidents of history and culture. This is true, but we’ve taken it to mean that concepts and values have no “real” value because “real” means “independent of humans”: We’ve set the hurdle impossibly high. Therefore, with relativism comes alienation from one’s own values. But the Web is a revel of values and viewpoints. The differences that supposedly disprove the worth of all values turn out on the Web to be a source of joy. When you have finished unpacking the backpack, you may notice a lingering whiff of… ([Location 2556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2556)) - there is no single “Web morality.” Although the geek ethos gave the Internet a certain set of starting values—it favored openness of information and selfreliance, for example, without which the Web could not have been built—the moral sway of the geeks waned precisely when having an email address that ended in “aol.com” lost its stigma. ([Location 2586](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2586)) - The Web helps us to embrace without embarrassment who we really are. It returns us to ourselves. It arches over the alienation we’ve been taught to take as a sign of tough-mindedness. The Web’s movement is towards human authenticity. ([Location 2707](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2707)) - As countless poems, songs, novels, and works of philosophy have told us, we live in an age of alienation. Our default philosophy’s beliefs about the nature of the real world and our relationship to that world don’t adequately describe their subject. They paint a picture of us primarily as individuals, yet we are possible only when we are embedded in a community and a shared history. They paint the real as that which exists independent of us when what counts most to us is the world in its involvement with us. They paint consciousness as a type of bodiless knowing when we can think and feel only because we are our bodies. They paint time and space as measurable, abstract quantities when we experience them as our life spent in places with significance to us. ([Location 2716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2716)) - At the heart of our default philosophy’s overly emphatic realism is a truth so deep that it’s completely obvious: The world doesn’t care about us. The ocean that drowns us doesn’t care if we sink or swim, the ground that buries us can’t tell the difference between a sinner and a saint. Even the atoms that make us up will go on their way unchastened once our bodies dissolve. ([Location 2727](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2727)) - Being on the Web doesn’t make an individual more authentic. We know that people use the Web to fool themselves and others. Any page or chat room persona may be as dishonest as a senior manager’s expense report. If the Web is bringing us closer to human authenticity, it is doing so at the level of our species, not individuals. ([Location 2738](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2738)) - the Web is a more honest— because unguarded—reflection of what we are like when we seek one another out without the limitations the real world imposes on us. ([Location 2744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2744)) - We’ve never before had a second world, much less one so widely accessible and so logarithmically valuable. ([Location 2753](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2753)) - Our most important constructions are not the pages we put up or the stories we tell or the poems we record or the videos we post. Far more important is the way we reinvent what it means to be together as human beings. ([Location 2756](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B009G1T1OK&location=2756))