When describing how gradual disempowerment could play out, I’d often give the example of AIs being used for lobbying as a prototypical example of a runaway effect where economic power begets political power. The truth is even more mundane though — the economic interest in AI is already getting traded into political interest. In general, even if hypothetical future AIs could do a particularly good job of causing disempowerment, we should generally expect it to start with humans doing it for their own local reasons.

I think the web is a beautiful idea. It links decentralized islands controlled by different people and companies into one interconnected surface that anyone can index and navigate. Links describe a relationship between logical documents rather than between physical servers. As a result, you’re not a hostage to your hosting.

There still exists a web-like logical model of our data—our profiles, our posts, our follows, our likes, all the things that we’ve created—but it lives within some social app’s database. What’s exposed to the web are only projections of that model—the Home screen, the Notifications screen, the HTML pages for individual posts. This architecture makes sense. It is the easiest way to evolve the “personal sites” paradigm to support aggregation so it’s not surprising today’s apps have largely converged on it. People create accounts on social apps, which lets those apps build aggregated features, which entices more people to sign up for those apps. However, something got lost in the process. The web we’re actually creating—our posts, our follows, our likes—is no longer meaningfully ours. Even though much of what we’re creating is public, it is not a part of the open web. We can’t change our “hosting provider” because we’re now one step removed from how the internet works. We, and the web we create, have become rows in somebody else’s database:

There is no API to hit, no integrations to build, nothing to get locked out of. All the data is in the user’s repository, so you can parse it (as typed JSON), and use it. The protocol is the API. This has deep implications for the lifecycle of products. If a product gets shut down, the data doesn’t disappear. It’s still in its users’ repos. Someone can build a replacement that makes this data comes back to life. Someone can build a new product that incorporates some of that data, or lets users choose what to import. Someone can build an alternative projection of existing data—a forked product.