Time & Perspective Quote by Dave Rowntree

Rowntree is pitching a future that feels less like a library and more like a nightclub: the DJ watches the dance floor and keeps swapping tracks until the room moves as one. “Internet.2” isn’t just a technical upgrade; it’s an admission that the web he’s describing would be steered by attention, not authorship. Links “updated and moved” according to clicks turns browsing into feedback-controlled choreography, where popularity literally rearranges the map.

The key phrase is “content screening.” Rowntree frames it as something missing, a helpful filter against the web’s sprawl. Coming from a musician, that makes cultural sense: playlists, charts, radio rotation, and recommendation engines already mediate what we hear. He’s imagining the internet adopting the logic of hit-making, where the crowd’s response becomes a sorting mechanism. The subtext is faith in the audience as editor and in motion as improvement: if people click, it must be good; if it’s good, it deserves to rise.

But there’s a darker undertow. Clicks don’t measure quality so much as impulse, outrage, habit, and manipulation. A link that moves to where attention goes doesn’t merely “screen” content; it pressures content to become clickable, rewarding the loud, the simple, the polarizing. Rowntree’s “exciting new thing” accidentally sketches the architecture of today’s algorithmic feeds: dynamic, personalized, and relentlessly optimized. What’s being sold as discovery is also discipline - a web trained to anticipate you, and in doing so, to narrow you.