"The internet was once a highly decentralized system. In the earliest days, there were no large corporations or service providers like Ashley Madison or Facebook or Twitter, or behemoth databases to house your information. If you wanted to join up, you plugged in a computer and found a connection through a service provider, and that was basically it. You were online. Your computer was a “peer” of the other computers. It was a computocracy."

"When the web came along, it was the same. You wanted to say something, so you ran a web server on a computer. You put some web pages in a folder. Your web server waited, night and day, for other computers to ask it for pages and files, and then sent those files back over the network. The servers were still off on their own, but now they could talk to each other."

"Everyone is a publisher. Everyone is a peer. That’s why it’s called a web. Individuals knit themselves together by linking to one another. Everyone tends his or her own little epistemological garden, growing ideas from seed and sharing them with anyone who comes by."

"The search engine has power over other pages—you’re no longer a peer."

"At the same time, it became possible to rent access to a database on a server somewhere. To solve this too-many-pages problem, people began to put their “content” into databases, and then publish everything through consistent, replicable “templates.” As a result, every page on your web site—and everyone else’s—eventually came to look roughly the same. Data went into the database via forms and came out via templates. Content was thusly managed."

"Tools like Movable Type, Blogger, and Typepad emerged, which “hosted” your content in their databases. No longer did people tend their own digital gardens. The gardens were tended for them."

"Freed from the need to build and manage their own web sites, people could do more social things with their computers. They could talk to each other, start conversations, argue endlessly. They could leave private messages. Many found a community. And the companies that hosted the databases found a business model. Make the messages short, and adapt the database to manage millions of “friends” and “followers” (Friendster, then Twitter). Make a blogging engine that allows you to post short updates and keep track of your friends (MySpace, then Facebook). The computocracy was now something else—a Googlopoly."

"The technology that let people make web sites never went away. You can still set up a site as if it were 1995. But culture changes, as do expectations. It takes a certain set of skills to create your own web site, populate it with cool stuff, set up a web server, and publish your own cool-stuff web pages. I would argue that those skills should be a basic part of living in a transparent and open culture where individuals are able to communicate on an equal field of play. Some fellow nerds would argue the same. But most everyone else, statistically, just uses Facebook and plays along."

"We live in a world in which sensitive information of every conceivable sort—financial, sexual, medical, legal, familial, governmental—is now kept, and presumably guarded, online. It’s guarded in gigantic treasure chests labeled “important data here.” So many plums for hackers to pluck."

"If you don’t take care of yourself online, someone else will. "

"“When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation.” You should own your information and profit from it. You should have your own servers. Your destiny, which you signed over to Facebook in order to avoid learning a few lines of code, would once again be your own."

I can host it from my apartment, on a machine that costs $35. You can link to me from your site. Just the two of us. This is an age of great enterprise, no time to think small. Yet whatever enormous explosion tears through our digital world next will come from exactly that: an individual recognizing the potential of the small, where others see only scale.""