Konstantinos Komaitis has turned some musings which he chose to edit out of his upcoming book into an essay series, which is being serialised over on Techdirt:
The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around power, prediction, geopolitics, accountability and the future of digital life.
The series will be published in two parts each week over five weeks, with each installment building on the one before it. At the end of the series, the complete essay will be brought together in a single PDF edition, providing the full argument in one place.
It is really, really good, and you should take it in.
KK and I are both 1990s dialup telnet teenagers who remember the starting point of the open commercial internet from its first principles. I don’t say that to remind you how wheezingly old we are damn good we both look for our age; I say that because our shared origin point, as teenagers listening to the modem sing, is the bias we bring to our work in policy, for better or for worse.
I’ve written before about how disorienting it is to sometimes find myself in meetings with colleagues who are younger than some of my coats and jackets, whose origin points for their work in policy is the big tech-era Silicon Valley social media hellscape. What KK and I grew up with is incomprehensible to them, as are the first principles we advocate from.
It’s a small wonder any of us, fighting the same battles on the same side, find common ground at all. I think KK’s series might go some way into building that bridge.
KK gave me the first step up to where I am today, so imploring you, dear readers, to take in the full series is the least I can do in return.