Have you ever noticed nearly all Web software is feudalistic?

There’s a single owner. Maybe a handful of admins. They assign special permissions to a class of high-level users (moderators, managers, or power users) and can revoke them at any time. And then there’s everyone else, the mere users, who inhabit the space. There’s no bottom-up control or mechanisms to request systemic change; no remedies or justice. Someone else who knows better built this system, and good luck contacting support if there’s a problem. Most folks self-blame when the system goes wrong.

I want to tell you about three things I read.

First — This week was the 35th anniversary of the Web. Its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, wrote a brief message which calls out that “There are two clear, connected issues to address [with the Web]. The first is the extent of power concentration, which contradicts the decentralised spirit I originally envisioned. […] Compounding this issue is the second, the personal data market that has exploited people’s time and data with the creation of deep profiles that allow for targeted advertising and ultimately control over the information people are fed.” I highly recommend spending the three minutes to read it in its entirety.

Second — Professor of Sociology Benjamin Shestakofsky was recently embedded with a venture capital-backed startup that became valued at more than $1B. In an article excerpted from his new book, he writes about how hundreds of Filipino contractors were used to create the illusion of a successful service-to-buyer matching algorithm, because the engineers that were supposed to be writing that automation instead spent all of their time interviewing new engineers. He concludes, “The interdependence between generously compensated software engineers in San Francisco and low-cost contractors in the Philippines suggests that advances in software automation still rely not only on human labor, but also on global inequalities.” The linked article is a concise read I similarly recommend.

Third — Professor of Media Studies Nathan Schneider recently published Governable Spaces, a book on the lack of democracy online and how it is effecting our society at large to be trained in “implicit feudalism”. From the Amazon book description, “The consequences of this arrangement matter far beyond online spaces themselves, as feudal defaults train us to give up on our communities’ democratic potential, inclining us to be more tolerant of autocratic tech CEOs and authoritarian tendencies among politicians.” I’ve just picked up a copy and look forward to reading it.

I believe there’s a common thread here beyond warnings about our uncritical acceptance of the Web as it is today. It’s that we’d all be wise to spend the next few years listening more closely to academics studying these issues, and a lot less time worrying about what venture capitalists and politicians think about it all.

My career started in academia, and I fondly remember the exchange of ideas and thoughtful discussions that seemed to happen every day. When I moved to private enterprise, I felt liberated by the focus on productivity, the ability to experiment & demonstrate ideas quickly, and “self-proof” of shipping a working a product. However, after a dozen years building successful products for profitable companies, I feel confident in saying our industry needs to do a great deal of remedial work to center academic conversations about what we’re building and why.

The economic engine of the Web sprang from academia and is imbued with it. Ignoring those roots and the folks still doing that important work today does far more damage than failing to ship a product a little faster.