https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/25/ai-might-be-our-best-shot-at-taking-back-the-open-web/
it’s interesting reading this guy, who appears to specialize in Dershowitz-style hey-i-know-it’s-bad-but-hear-this-side-out screeds, write about using a chatbot using the word “superpower” both because that’s the American pathology of how Americans understand the world, but also because it’s the conditional, paid-for kind of superpower. I saw this in cartoons as a child; guy desperately wants revenge on, or to emulate batman, so he drinks the chemical X sludge and inadvertently becomes a monster, often only until the series’ hero (fewer crossovers back then) takes the supply of special sludge away from him. After that he’s back to being a regular schlub, albeit with a particularly expensive drug addiction, housed in Gotham’s penitentiary for the especially evil and dangerous.
The other analogy one could draw on would continue to place the power outside the man; he’s not gaining a skill or ability, he’s signing a contract and letting a different agent (a word in danger of gaining an ugly connotation) do it for him. That’s demon summoning. This will be the leitmotif of the whole text in my heart, because I no longer assume infantilism where evil will suffice.
He starts off (and ends) trying to worm his way into the reader’s sympathy by “hello fellow kids”-ing about the 1990s internet and copying html source code. For the record I’m relearning html and css and it’s not requiring a single drop of blood on any sigils to work. I’m actively declining to use wordpress or any other content management or any java derivative until I figure out how I could make those work, if I even fee lthe aesthetic need for them at such point. What exactly does this guy think I’m missing out on?
The gap between “basic functional website” and “actually looks good” widened into a chasm that required real expertise to cross.
That’s Not True. A computer enjoyer would be looking at this like a puzzle, one about imposed restrictions. Enough is being written about Clausewitz’ concept of Friction as it pertains to art and creation; the gap between idea and result contains fertile soil. The things he describes as awing him in his early years are those quirky little sliding features websites sometimes still have on extremely long investigative journalist pieces. They’re nice to look at on occasion but let’s be clear; this type of technology is used in a majority of cases for stupid crap, marquees that cover 3 lines of text if you dare scroll up one, things that I remove from websites manually with adblockers because they’re annoying. This is not a hurdle you have to jump over to succeed; you can walk around!
When the guy talks about letting a chatbot make him a “video conferencing software” by explaining clearly what he wants, he neglects to clearly explain what his motivation was; if it was security, he failed, seeing as how the black box is unable to guarantee that, barring inspection by someone who may as well be coding it themselves. If it’s the thrill of discovery and creation, he’s the Pharaoh who created the pyramids. Brecht asks; all by himself?
He also asserts without basis that this makes it his own thing, instead of some platform. I submit he’s clearly confused about what the word means; he is certainly in possession of it, but he doesn’t know what it is and how it works, what its backend bugs and security flaws are. It’s a thing taken out of a magic black box, which he doesn’t own, merely rents (or if the service is free, You’re what’s being sold). The alleged video conferencing platform is his own in the same sense as a street cat feeding at an outdoor bowl he filled, or a bic lighter that’s currently in his pocket. They’re not his, nor does he understand how they work. The defining feature of roman law is the right to destroy what is one’s legal possession; I notice a trend where people think of this as the only right that matters. A better, future society will consider this lack of empathy a first symptom of antisocial sociopathy.
The writer links back to an article about learned helplessness that does some strange consumer-choice-activism about how using one megacorp’s tools against another megacorp’s tools over begging a billionaire to do it for them constitutes the opposite of… something, but certainly not simple collaborationism with one ruling class party against another. He seems to suggest a sort of cyberpunk dystopia where genuine action against the corporations is impossible, and the best one can do is sign up to be a footslogger in the kindest lord’s levy. I humbly submit to the court that the very existence of simple html websites is both material proof to the contrary, and simultaneously clear evidence you don’t need the javascript sliding bullshit this guy claims is the hurdle that can only be beat using a slopzone subscription.
He walks this back in a later part of the article, where he argues that locally hosted llms are meaningfully different by bypassing corporations. This is true in the sense that it doesn’t send money directly to the worst people on earth, but setting aside that coding tasks still rely on scouring and slurping up training data off the internet, localizing a fraction of the cost of the datacenter hole to individual homes requires the purchase of that hardware, continuing to keep it out of the hands of what he describes as the mom-and-pop computer user. How does this democratize anything?
The guy talks about using an “editor” to do something to his articles? Comments under the original TD article suggest he had a typo in the subtitle, which can be chalked up to a simple mistake but one cannot help but feel how painfully in line this is with people talking about how chatbot use causes cognitive decline. He talks about a “task management tool” which seems to be a virtual corkboard with one half of the Eisenhower matrix + some statistics at the end. The first half I have made myself a few months ago, entirely without slop, with the powerful tools of “pen and paper”. I have one to my left right now, oh look at that, fix doorhandle hex 3mm, I can mark that off now, I did that over the weekend. Can you do that in your slop-based smartphone bullshit? Oh you’re tapping a screen? You’re tapping a screen instead of unscrewing a pleasant, cheap, M-nib-width pen’s cap and subsequently drawing two lines of standard koh-i-noor ink through the note? Does baby need a bottle? Baby need jangling keys? Baby need bluesky integration? You child? Oh your thing now checks off one project when you check off the other project? People are being told to dig ditches so you can do this shit?
Corporate copyright is nonsense, and for real persons, I strongly believe it’s tactically desirable to not enforce copyright violations. Copying stuff on the computer is a normal part of learning about the computer, but the truly critical component of computer-touching isn’t what this guy describes as copying another man’s template, but the subsequent processing-it-in-your-mind, learning how it works, and making it do something different that you want it to do exactly, not what the original idea wanted. If you’re running other people’s work, that’s tool use, that’s society. It’s fine. If you’re pretending that copying another man’s javascript is you being “creative” you’re a cuckold. If you’re using a chatbot to “punch up” that work for you and claiming it as your own, you’ve lost touch with reality.
It really does give me that same underlying feeling that I felt when I was first playing around with HTML and being able to “just make things.” Except, now, it’s way more powerful. Rather than copying Derek’s use of HTML frames to create “sliding doors” on a webpage, I can create basically anything I dream up.
And what pray tell is it that you are capable of dreaming up? An (alleged) video conference software, something that exists, a website that’s quirky and useless? A fucking list app? Is your definition of “power” telling something to copy what already exists, except with a different font? Is your "power" of imagination so stunted that this is the limit?
There’s also a more subtle concern worth addressing: is this actually democratizing, or does it just shift which skills you need? After all, you still need to accurately describe what you want, debug when things go wrong, and understand what’s even possible. That’s different from learning HTML, but it’s still a skill. I think the honest answer is that the kind of skill needed has shifted. “Learn to code” becomes “learn to think clearly and describe things precisely” — which happens to be a superpower that writers, editors, and domain experts already have. The barrier has moved to territory that many more people already inhabit.
Again with the superpower shit. By this point he’s elevating “expressing oneself clearly” to a superpower. This is dementia! It definitely is a skill, different from HTML, one that small children learn it before puberty, not grown adults praying to a flatscreen altar. This is the kind of notion one might have at the onset of dementia.
“Learn to code” has always been the media-approved way of saying “I’m eliminating your job to make line go up, (and consequently my bonus)”. “Use a slopbot” is the 2026 edition of the exact same declaration. Having recognized this connection, I cannot help but feel anger at anyone propagating it.
What gets missed in most conversations about AI and the open web: these two pieces need each other.
This is a lie. The web as a whole, is nothing except threatened by slop inundation. LLMs feed on organic creation and, in return flood the environment with caustic trash, damaging the ecosystem for future humans and LLMs alike. A parasite becomes a cancer. Untreated, it will kill its host. Wikipedia is banning slop. Nobody wants this shit.
The guy’s obsession with social media and dreams of “open protocols” or whatever belies a more foundational issue: that social media is shit. It hurts people's brains, it makes them feel like a community exists where one doesn’t, it makes them chase retweet numbers as if it were a thing that matters. E-mail and IRC do not have favs and animated reactions, because they aren’t desirable. Discord has them to give people a dragon to chase. For all its faults, Wikipedia’s consensus decision-making process takes into account voting, but critically, demands every vote come with text arguing the case why such a vote ought to be given weight in the first place. In my dreams, the revolution succeeded, and there’s a video hosting website built on the ruins of youtube, and there’s no thumbs up or thumbs down button: if you want to tell the English gentleman that you’re impressed with what he’s done to that derelict Honda Goldwing you just write that in a little note that he can read if he wishes to.
The web does not need a Cambrian explosion of new ways to interact online. During capitalism, it needs fewer ways. Every time a megacorp has gotten its grubby little fingers into this pie, it created new ways to foster addiction. Communication is a commons; ownership of the air through which words move would be impractical to enforce, but the internet is a series of tubes, cables on ocean floors, centralized enough that it is violated by those powerful enough to do so. The world doesn’t need a new, faster way for Jeffrey Epstein to attach a fresh take on slot machines to children’s instant messaging; if anything the planet would benefit from an alternative to the internet, an explicitly anticapitalistic mesh network, opinionated architecture design built from the ground up to prevent this kind of shit from happening just so the entire hardware industry can get put to work in a market manipulation bubble.
N.B. You’re insane if you think you paying a subscription to an LLM company means they aren’t taking your data too.
Thirty years ago, I right-clicked on Derek Powazek’s beautiful website, viewed the source, copied it, messed around with it, and built something new. I didn’t ask anyone’s permission. I didn’t agree to terms of service. I didn’t fit my ideas into someone else’s template. I just built the thing I wanted to build.
Then we gave that away. We traded it for convenience, for reach, for the path of least resistance — and we got walled gardens, manipulated feeds, and the quiet understanding that our tools would never quite work the way we wanted them to, because they weren’t really ours.
Today’s equivalent of right-clicking on Derek’s site is describing what you want to a coding agent, watching it build, telling it what’s wrong, and iterating until it works for you. Different mechanics, same magic. And this time, with open protocols and increasingly open models, we have a shot at keeping it.
Let’s not give it away again.
You never had it. You’re a middle manager talking to a chatbot that regurgitates cargo code into your mouth, and you're clapping in delight. Then you write a blog post about it.
Closing argument: May it please the court, every single one of the assertions about “good enough for me!” is us taking the defendant by his word. He’s welcome to his private estimate, but it’s inapplicable for an argument aimed at a broad audience, not without critical review. Computer touchers are notoriously bad at self-estimating both efficiency and effectiveness. He talks about the magic black box (hosted at his home? Or on the server farms of the worst people on earth?) creating for him apps that already exist, but with minor tweaks, all for the modest price of the world being on fire, half of young people worrying about the jobs they wish to perform in the future becoming economically untenable, and me being unable to upgrade my decade old computer. The defense seems to assert that "Some of you may die, but this is a sacrifice I am willing to make".
Even if his assertions about effectiveness were to be proven true, they come at a cost unbearable to anyone with a human soul.
What the confused writer is proposing is that “taking back the web” means “paying the companies that own and destroy it to 'create websites'? via processes opaque enough to be equivalent to the current ones, without learning a single thing in the process”. I submit to the court he deserves the same punishment as all other boosters.
PS While processing this horrible, awful screed, I talked to internet luminary Psych about how dismayed he was at how people making art are building humble, clean web 1.0 websites to get away from corpo content aggregators, but not using RSS. So he wrote a screed about how they should do so, and they read it, and now they all have RSS feeds. You want an Open Social Protocol? Tell people about a thing and watch them behave like humans, learn and create you fucking creep