Enshittification, or, Why Does The Web Suck Right Now?
This module will look at the web as it is in September 2025. The web is not a synonym for the internet! But it’s the layer that you encounter most often, and it’s changing rapidly. We’ll work backwards from this current moment of change and destruction (the deployment of AI into search and writing), back to the era of user generated ‘content’ and why ‘content’ is a rhetorical move that diminishes human creativity, past the dot-com boom to the first bloom of the web in the 1990s.
Things to Read and Annotate and By When
- For Sept 8: Page through Tim Berners-Lee’s own account of the start of the web and think about the contrast with Bory’s The Myth of the World Wide Web.
- For Sept 15: Doctorow on Enshittification. (There’s also a four-episode podcast on the CBC by Doctorow on this topic you are welcome to listen to, but are not obliged). Alternatively, you could read Ted Chiang’s ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web (if that link doesn’t work for you, try this one).
- For Oct 1: Frana, Philip, “Before the web there was Gopher” (2004). Selected Works. 197. https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/selectedworks/197
Use Zotero to record the metadata for both articles (use Zotero to always record the metadata of what you read!)
Key Dates & Topics
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September 3: Introduction, course overview, why this isn’t a conventional overview of the history of the internet
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Sept 8: What even is the web, today?
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Sept 10: How does enshittification work? Research note/précis dry-run
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Sept 15: Web 2.0: The Golden Age of the Web?
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Sept 17: Your first research note/précis You will write your precis in-class today.
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Sept 22: Dot Com Goes Boom.
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Sept 24: Web 1.0, GeoCities, and Browser Wars
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Sept 29: Feedback on your first research note
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Oct 1: The Deeper History of Hypertext