Thread · 7 tweets · 17 Oct 2022

This is a good point, and it's why you keep hearing me talk about governance (and that's only about to get worse). AMP & CWV may well have been honest attempts to improve the Web. Instead, they've convinced most publishers that apps are definitely the future. Why? 🧵

A recurring frustration with apps is that decisions made by some random Silicon Valley product person — crosswords MUST have a night mode! — matter more than your knowledge of what your users need. AMP & CWV bring the same meddling to the Web: now just a clunkier app platform.

Performance matters (a lot) but it might very well not be what matters *most* given your resources. It may be what matters most *across the whole Web* but that doesn't mean that it's better than the sum of the improvements made with the same resources and *local knowledge*.

Performance is to Web health what GDP is to development. It's easy (enough) to measure and it does matter. But AMP/CWV are like a bunch of IMF technocrats forcing you into fiscal austerity no matter how much you know that investing in health and education will work out better.

Good intentions coupled with legibility-fuelled hubris that lead to projects that make things worse rather than better will of course be a very familiar pattern to readers of "Seeing Like A State". Or of Jane Jacobs. Or of Susan George. It's hardly new.

Panoptic legibility has been making powerful entities self-assured and wrong for as long as it has existed. The only surprising part is that there are people who still don't know!

If we believe that the Internet makes things different, we may believe that we can do better than those massive corporations with their pre-Internet solutions. If we want this Internet thing to work out, the innovations of the next decade have to be governance-based.