The Web established the rules for a game of inequality that platforms learned to master.

Browsing the Web, our journey looks more like a guided tour than a solo trip. The site we are visiting chooses and provides us with the opportunities for our next jump. Once on the new website, the same dynamic repeats again. Each webpage then, can be perceived as a filter of reality, as a unique and limited perspective about a specific topic. The act of deciding which links go in a page implies leaving other links out of it, and for those lucky links that passed the selection process, a different level of relevance is attributed to them, depending on their position in the page, their format and their behavior.

It is important to understand the implications of being a big player in the ecosystem of the Web, the responsibility this platforms have at managing the connections between pieces of information and the power that comes with them, but I don’t want to focus your attention and my energy on this now.

I want you to realize that we are building, regardless of the size or the intention, on top of a a system that treats us, by default, as tourists instead of travelers, a system that has been designed in a way that limits and conditions our online experience.

Particularly, a seemingly subtle design decision that created inequality of power under the idea of “linking”, misinterpreting or underestimating the original ideas from the hyperlink concept, moving us away from the opportunity to explore human connection in ways we can not fully understand yet.