Anil Dash
Technologist and writer, a blogger since 1999, formerly chief executive of Glitch and a board member of the Data & Society Research Institute. His 2012 essay "The Web We Lost" is one of the founding texts of the argument that the open web has been enclosed.
Anil Dash did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsPeople being embarrassed or ashamed while still using the technology does not bother the authoritarian owners of those platforms in the least, as long as they’re profiting off of those ashamed users.
↗Why shaming people about AI slop isn’t enough to stop Big AIanildash.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsIn short, the venture capitalists and CEOs of Silicon Valley have priced the costs of shame into their business plans.
↗Why shaming people about AI slop isn’t enough to stop Big AIanildash.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsHe gave them an affirmative alternative to move toward, and in doing so, empowered both those people and himself to do something better.
↗Why shaming people about AI slop isn’t enough to stop Big AIanildash.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 2 months earlier
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Their wordsThere are millions of people who don't like that they're using LLMs provided by the Big AI companies, but end up using them anyway.
↗Maybe it's time for lots of little indie AIs to take overanildash.com
- 7 weeks earlier
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Their wordsthe incredibly positive and generous intent of these open licenses has since been exploited by extractive Big AI companies, who ransacked all of the images on Flickr that had permissive licenses without any consent from, or compensation to, the creators.
↗Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr?anildash.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsIn contrast, platforms that are run by technically fluent, well-intentioned and thoughtful technologists can be very effective in maintaining content over a timescale of decades.
↗Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr?anildash.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
Authoritarian governments seek to destroy or falsify public records, including digital ones.
documentationgovernmentcensorship
Their wordsThe traditional authoritarian impulse to destroy or falsify the public record has not spared the digital realm under the current administration.
↗Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr?anildash.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 2 days earlier
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Their wordsThe Big AI companies that take content without consent, or who refuse to let people see their code, or who insist they can't give people control over how their models run and whether they are responsible about their environmental impact can now be definitively refuted.
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Their wordsAnd that's the way AI should work - solving a specific problem for a particular community, instead of trying to be all things to all people, which is when these platforms start becoming unaccountable and start harming massive numbers of people.
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Our reading
Public sentiment is turning against tech companies that force unwanted features on their users.
behavioural scienceattitude change
Their wordsI think the tide is turning, and people are so fed up with the software-brained CEOs forcing things on them that they don't want.
- 5 weeks earlier
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Their wordsWhether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months.
↗Endgame for the Open Webanildash.com 1st of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsThe deal was always simple: search engines had permission to crawl sites because they were going to be sending users to those sites. If they're hitting your site half a million times for every one user they send to your site, all they're giving you is higher costs.
↗Endgame for the Open Webanildash.com 2nd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsAs publishers see the danger from AI bots expand, they retreat to putting more and more content behind either password protection or payment walls or both, leaving the only publicly-accessible content to be AI-generated slop; open resources like research work, scientific analysis, and fair use of content all suffer as a result of people responding to the bad actors, since legitimate uses of open content are no longer possible.
↗Endgame for the Open Webanildash.com 3rd of 4 in this piece
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Their wordsMeanwhile, others like Spotify and Netflix leverage their dominant positions in the market to coerce creators to abandon open podcasts entirely, in favor of proprietary formats that require listeners to be on those platforms — locking in both creators and their audiences so they are stuck as they begin the enshittification process.
↗Endgame for the Open Webanildash.com 4th of 4 in this piece
- 5 months earlier
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Their wordsI had typed "Taylor Swift" in a browser, and the response had literally zero links to Taylor Swift's actual website. If you stayed within what Atlas generated, you would have no way of knowing that Taylor Swift has a website at all.
↗ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Webanildash.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsAtlas is a browser, but it is not a web browser. It is an anti-web browser.
↗ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Webanildash.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 13 years earlier
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Their wordsThe web was an interesting and different place before links got monetized, but by 2007 it was clear that Google had changed the web forever, and for the worse, by corrupting links.
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Their wordsThis was a sensible reaction to the realization that big sites rise and fall in popularity, but that regular people need an identity that persists longer than those sites do.
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Their wordsThe primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth.