Strange New World: Web 2.0 Atrophy

Strange New World

Let's talk about something that isn't readily mentioned on here. Something that forces you to re-evaluate where society actually is with tech. Let's look at the side that is being left behind by tech.

In the world today we have a very large push toward a technology that feels like magic. We all know what it is, most have tried it or seen it, but they don't ACTUALLY understand what it's doing.

Yes, I'm referring to the catch phrase "AI".

But believe it or not, tech still has other areas of interest, other veins of growth to be explored. The AI crowd has been so loud, the sound is deafening to any other startup that exists.

While the scope of this topic is quite vast, I am choosing to limit the conversation to the portions of computers and IT that are not being discussed because AI has stolen the spotlight.

Web 2.0 Atrophy

Maybe it's not because you've been living under a rock. Maybe it's because AI simply isn't talking about it as much.

If you use the internet these days you can probably name on one hand the number of websites you actually use. This isn't a coincidence. Ever since the late 90's, the world has had its sights set on internet monopolization.

Cloud compute, while convenient, has always truly been about limiting how much of a product you actually own. The convenience factor is designed to make the consumer feel like the trade-offs are worth the loss.

Just like early entrepreneurship, where it was common to have "Mom and Pop" shops on every street in your own local community, the early internet felt like this. Every small business had a website. They weren't these massive, fancy portals like Amazon /

Chess.com

/ Walmart / Facebook that we see today. They were small, no-name companies that were simply trying to stay relevant and modern. Those companies still exist today, but the availability and relevance of their corner of the internet is waning.

From Ownership to Access

In the 2000's when you wanted a piece of software you paid for it and it was yours to use. Licensing was designed for you to take it home, or download it, and install it. It lived on your computer. You used it to run or build your business. Your website was hosted on your own machine.

You could see and touch these things. You had the disks, you had the hardware for your server in your own home or business.

This was a better, healthier ecosystem for business and competition. The reason it's dying off today isn't because it doesn't work, it's because it takes a little more effort to set up yourself.

Most people don't want to take the time to run a social site, even though it would be better to have it for their own brand. In many cases, business owners are so busy and overworked they just want to make a quick post, like an email, and be done. Never realizing that with today's tooling they can have just that.

The Five Website Internet

The world today is convinced that it is much better off outsourcing its work. That magic word sounds so convenient - 'outsourcing'. It just rolls off the tongue. Like it's free money. "Any work I can't do I just outsource it to someone who can and charge a little extra." This is how they got us to do it.

When you get to the bottom of it, this is WHY we have only a handful of sites on the internet and in the real world only big box stores exist. These companies at the end of the day are the ones we are outsourcing everything to.

Think about it... Even they technically outsource to other places that offer cheaper labor. Are we REALLY making money like this? Or did we just give them business that should have been ours?

The AI Accelerant

I don't mean to say that AI is all bad. I'm saying we have been duped into seeing AI as this oracle. The ULTIMATE cloud tool that we pay and subscribe to. When in fact it's the exact opposite. AI, local OPEN WEIGHT, is the EXACT tooling we need to solve the blockade of cloud compute forever.

With even a moderate 7B or 9B model you could set up and host your own web server and blog site. You can have it write the HTML, manage the database, handle the security updates, write your product descriptions. The assistant that everyone is renting for $20/month from OpenAI or Anthropic can actually be the thing that lets you stop renting. I'm not saying to never use the cloud AI models, but I am saying that we shouldn't rely on them.

Local models are the key. You CAN own and host these models on low to moderate hardware and run a business with it.

That is the strange new world we are in. We have the tool to rebuild the Mom and Pop internet, but we are using it to make the five-website internet even smaller. We are choosing to "One-Shot" code instead of solve a real problem which is code monopolization.

You now have the ability to CUSTOM build a word processing application for yourself with zero coding knowledge... Think about that for a minute. 20 years ago, hell 5 years ago that would have been impossible.

Not a bloated, subscription-based suite with 1,000 features you never use and telemetry you never agreed to. I mean a word processor that does exactly what you need.

If you write invoices, it writes invoices. If you write letters to clients, it does that. If you need it to pull names from your own local database and format your own letterhead - it does that. No cloud account. No "your files are stored on our servers." No update that moves the button or removes the feature you relied on.

20 years ago that would have taken a dev team and six months. 5 years ago it would have taken a full-stack developer and a GitHub repo full of dependencies you didn't understand.

Now you can sit down at a $600 mini-PC in your shop, with an open 7B model running locally, and say "build me a word processor that only does these 5 things, and save everything to this folder on my computer." And it will.

That's not "one-shot" code. That's not a party trick for X. That's ownership. That's what we lost when we moved everything to the cloud.

We spent 15 years learning how to rent software. We forgot how to own it. And right now, for the first time since Web 2.0 started eating itself, we have the exact tool we need to remember.

And that brings us right back to where this started.

This article was never supposed to be about AI. I said that at the beginning - that there are other veins of growth, other projects being left behind because the AI conversation is so loud.

But here's why I had to talk about it: local, open-weight AI is the first tool in 15 years that actually makes those other projects viable again.

I'm not talking about building the next ChatGPT wrapper. I'm talking about the projects that don't get press anymore:

• A self-hosted forum for your town where the posts don't disappear into an algorithm.

• A real website for your business that you own, not a Facebook Page you rent.

• A file server in your shop that holds your own customer data, not someone else's cloud dashboard.

A custom inventory tool, a custom invoicing tool, a custom anything that fits your work instead of you fitting your work into Shopify or Quickbooks.

That was the early internet. A million small, weird, useful things built by normal people for their own communities. That ecosystem didn't die because it was bad. It died because it got hard to maintain and easy to outsource.

We have spent the last decade outsourcing the entire internet to five websites. News/Media is Ours

The secret of AI is actually this. You now have the ability to push quality editorial pieces. Summarize content from stories you want to know about by reading more than just the headlines. Build a repository of the news you and your friends actually care about.

AI has killed the "Spin" of lobbyists disguised as journalists, by flooding the market with a tool that allows ANYONE to publish. You now have your choice of what you want to believe. It isn't simply left or right leaning stories anymore. It's whatever you want to write about.

The news carousel doesn't want you to know this. And it's why X is being downplayed so hard right now. The bots are flooding your feed because they know their time is up.

The day will come when every ACTUAL person with an opinion can now write a nearly perfect piece in their own words, or in words they agree with, and publish it to a place where anyone can read it. The only way they get you now is by convincing you their following is bigger than yours.

The strange new world isn't a world where everything is AI. It's a world where, for the first time in a long time, you don't need those five websites to participate. You can own the whole stack again - from the model to the word processor to the website - on hardware sitting in your own house.

So no, this isn't an AI article. AI just happens to be the tool that finally lets us stop talking about AI, and get back to building everything else we abandoned.