I haven't watched the entire talk, but here are some excerpts from the transcript that resonated with me.

For a lot of people, the web feels worse than it used to. Much of our time is spent on a handful of giant social networks that do everything they can to keep people in their apps for as long as possible, even if it has detrimental effects on the people who are using them, or on the social networks themselves.

Websites outside of these handful of social networks are harder and harder to even find, and partially because of that, they have a harder and harder time sustaining themselves.

What is left for those of us who saw the web as an infinite canvas, a tool to reach those who we never could have dreamed of reaching before, a medium that could stretch the limits of what was even possible in an analog world?

...having said all this, would it surprise you to hear that now more than ever, I feel that same burning feeling of excitement around what’s possible?

That’s because what really sucks about the web these days, what has us feeling despair and anger, has everything to do with the industry that has formed around the web, but not the web itself. The web is still just a substrate on which anything can be built. Most importantly, the web is the people who use it, not the companies that have established themselves around it.

And the widespread disillusionment that we’re seeing may actually be a good thing. More people than ever have realized that the utopian dreams of a web that could only bring about positive and wonderful things might have been misguided.

With this knowledge comes power. The power to shape the web that we want to see, while fighting against the one that we don’t.

My experience in fighting this fight has helped to convince me of just how much power we, everyday normal people, have—even when we’re staring down massive platforms and billion-dollar companies.

I ended up doing what I enjoy doing—building something cool, mostly for the sake of building it, and writing down what I saw.

...this simple act of building something interesting and somewhat different had an impact that I could not have anticipated. It turned out that people were starving for it.

And even though I was a nobody, it had a major impact.

The lesson was clear. The tech industry, even with its billions of dollars, is not an indomitable force. Though they can and will ignore what people want from them, they cannot control what those people think. And the tide can turn against them. And it doesn’t always take a job at The New York Times or a huge pre-established platform to become one of the voices speaking up, helping to turn that tide. Sometimes you just have to make something cool. And using the very same technology that enabled crypto guys to sell their scam tokens, or the boosterist journalists to publish obsequious descriptions of companies that were really selling vaporware, or the crypto community to spam social media with promotions for their NFTs, I was able to do something a little different to push back against that very same phenomenon.

What they don’t seem to realize is that in doing so, by reducing the web only to the types of expression that can happen within their cramped boxes—where you can’t write more than 280 characters, or you can’t publish your cool JavaScript-based art project, or you can’t say the things that you want to say without getting de-boosted by the engagement maximization machine, or you can’t read what your friends are posting without the platform interjecting offensive troll posts or soulless AI-generated meme images—they’re creating a thirst for everything outside of those boxes.

A thirst for what the web really is—a medium, a conduit, a tool that is used by readers and artists and creators and explorers, not a gatekeeper that seems to be in an ever more adversarial relationship with everyone who uses it.

The platforms I talk about are deeply entrenched to the point where many people barely use the web outside of them.

But the platforms do not exist without the people, and there are a lot more of us than there are of them.

...it has never been easier to do cool things on the web. What used to be expensive and require a great deal of technical expertise is now becoming more and more accessible, both financially and technologically, by the day. More people than ever have access to the web, both in terms of access to devices, but also in terms of access to internet connectivity and software. What used to be the realm of the nerds and those with the financial wherewithal to purchase expensive home computers, connectivity, and software packages, is now home to people from all walks of life, who bring new ideas, perspectives, and experiences that we often forget were in short supply during what some of us think of as the “good old days” of the internet.

And so, we—all of us—can build the projects we want to see, write the software that the big platforms won’t, and create the services that people need. We can wire everything together, whether the platforms like it or not, to tear down the walls that they put up. We can modify the software, reverse engineer their systems, and wrestle back control of how we experience the web, even through these very platforms. We can share information and help people understand what is happening around them. We can teach others to build the things they want to build, and share with one another the important and meaningful work that is being done.

We can build the web that we want to see, and we can return to that place where the web is a place of wonder, where all of us feel that same burning feeling of excitement as we push the web back towards the wonderful, beautiful, joyful place it ought to be.