You Can't Start the Revolution from the Web Country Club

The current fashion amongst alpha geeks is to reinvent many of the building blocks of the social web. Given that I’ve been obsessed with that particular intersection of technology and culture for a dozen years, I should be unequivocal in my excitement. But this time it’s complicated. Because we’re shutting some people out.
There are a few philosophical underpinnings that have informed the development of blogging and social media since their inception. These core values of the social web can be summed up as three simple goals. It’s important to understand them because they are what’s enabled the social web to be so radically transformative of society and culture.

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But I’ve been through this phase in the web’s evolution before, alongside some of the same folks who are building these tools today. The last time, the simple tools we all built exceeded our most outlandish predictions of their social impact in every regard. What matters this time is that we learn from what we got wrong before. And we won’t kick ourselves for having bugs in the software, or for not being compliant enough with the technical preferences of a small, geeky crowd. We will regret if we just give power to ourselves and to the existing institutions again.