"The exciting new thing, call it Internet.2, would be where links were updated and moved depending on where people click. That would give you the kind of content screening that you don't get at the moment"
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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.
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.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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