Humanity first, Tech second
The Slow Web Initiative was a think tank founded by Tariq Krim to promote an ethical renaissance of the Internet.
We live in a world where a handful of companies control everything we do, own, and share online. It's the golden age of computational intimacy: a data-hungry and surveillance by design environment that pretends to be our friend.
To save the Internet we love, we must take another direction. It is time to rearchitect the Internet so that we own and control our digital belongings, our data, our feeds, and our identities.
We had control, and we lost it.
Most platforms put their needs over their user's best interests. By making monetization, data harvesting, and the constant capture of our attention their only priorities, they made technology indigestible and insufferable.
The Slow Web embodies the idea that we can use technology again for our benefit, to develop healthy habits. An equivalent of "Organic Food" for Technology.
We believe Slow Web will play an important part in the healing process of the Internet.
In a post laying out my vision for Jolicloud in 2011, I coined the term Slow Web to describe what experience should exist for products that deal with user intimate space and data.
3 years ago I started Jolicloud to reinvent our computing experience and make the cloud a better place. I discovered a world that is miles away from the social media industry.
I've observed myself following less Twitter and Facebook, spending less time trying the new new thing, getting away slowly from the fear of missing out in the social world.
I think we define the world we want to live in and I believe the current pace of the social Internet is not sustainable in the long term for the human brain. Too much stimulation, too much noise, too much stress.
The ability to understand and live in a high density information world is what divides the world today. For us, the world is about data, for the majority of the planet it's something they no longer understand.
But even for the small elite that we are, there's a form of resilience to the obligations of the socially connected world: We can't be at our best all the time and our life is not just the story telling we curate to our followers and friends.
For most of us, this social life is not fulfilling. I see some people leaving Facebook, people leaving even all form of Internet connection, but in fact what we need is a new set of services that helps us slow down. I have been advocating for such services for the last years, hoping that more people would join the Slow Internet Movement and start synchronizing their digital life with their inner pace.
We are definitely entering a post social, post app, post hyper consuming era: the age of emotion.
The age of emotion is the third age of the Internet and marks a certain maturity in how we as application developers should serve the user and respect its inner emotional balance.
Dominated by Google and Apple. It was about simplifying the actions that we did in the real life. Commoditizing search, access to software, commerce, payment. A lots of companies have made their way into success by making all aspects of our lives more convenient. But convenience has a low perceived value: I can search for something that it's perfectly OK to forget 5 minutes later.
Ruled by Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and whoever facilitate the creation of new relations between people. The result is a dramatic increase of our social environment and the emergence of a social pressure: not only the number of "friends" increased but all our interactions with them are memorized. Because the business model of social is to understand and monetize our intimacy, it's in the interest of theses services to keep the conversations open. It has an impact on the depth of what we communicate and if we don't restrain ourselves, we can spend hours watching others private moments instead of living ours.
Centered around ourselves and our lives. It's about what matters. It's about cherishing the moments, connecting with things that make us feel good and share them with people that can fully receive and enjoy them. It's not about how much you consume or how many people you know, it's about unique experience of lives. It's about quality, happiness and emotions.
It means building slow products putting the users first and, instead of being the conductor of their lives, are a silent observers, a coaches. It's all about being there without altering the experience.
I am sure we will see more products coming in the next year. To start a slow web product, it should definitely respect these 3 rules:
In 2016, after the Paris attacks, I came back to this concept and deepened it.
As some of my friends have noticed, over the last few years, I have not been very well. I've been drifting. My body and my mind were detached, like floating in the ocean and going wherever the current would take me. It was such a very weird feeling. And I knew exactly what the reason was. The uncomfortable truth is that I fell out of love with the technology world and that I am not excited by the future anymore. At least the future that is being built today.
With the terrible Paris attacks last year, I kept asking this question to myself: If the world we are building is so amazing, why would someone take a gun and kill my friends? I couldn't find any answer. So I escaped Paris and traveled to the first destination I could find: Bali. I was drifting again.
Bali had that incredible impact on me. Being far away from the craziness of this world, slowing down gave me the opportunity to better understand the source of my recurrent discomfort. In the world of technology, we are taught to build things fast. Sometimes too fast. But Life and people are not like lines of code. We can't break things just to see how it will work out. Everything we create online can have a huge impact on the real world. And we spend so little time studying the consequences of what we build. Competition for attention has slowly replaced the values of the founding fathers of the Internet.
I have personally witnessed this change in technology. Because my daily life is now affected by the consequences of this change. I have identified at least three things that make me fear this future.
For many people, entering this new digital world means the end of ownership. At first it was more like a conceptualisation. But now I can see the impact this has on my daily life.
I used to own CDs, books, magazines, art, and so many things that helped me shape my own personality. Now it's all about subscriptions. I didn't mind subscribing to some services until I started to see, in Paris or everywhere I would go, that it also meant closing bookstores, record shops and even public libraries. That struggling magazines have to lose some of their identity to the advertisers. And Culture is becoming increasingly commoditized. Every once in a while, some famous artist dies and my entire news feed lights up with old nostalgia videos edited overnight. Now that I have 30 years of online experience, I truly believe that the offline world treated with much more respect subcultures than the digital world. Mega platforms have become the McDonald's of the minds.
It scares me so much. I feel that when people don't own anything they don't have anything to lose.
My relationship with content and ideas has always been obsessive and intense. Today, it's really hard to accept the fact that the machine should decide what's important for me. Because as good as the algorithms are, they are black boxes with very little control over them.
Of course I hear all the arguments on machine filtering. Because we live in a super busy world and because our friends are producing so much information (or noise), an entity should mediate and organise it wisely. But honestly, are we busy because of our lives or because of our tools? I reject the underlying philosophy of this new technical design.
I don't believe we should optimize and apply machine learning to everything. Content, like life, is about finding pleasure in messy and unpredictable situations. It's about content serendipity and friends mentorship. It's about all these little things technology wants to make impossible in the future.
There's an incredible paradox to see the rise of meditation and mindfulness in Silicon Valley while most products that are built are designed to accelerate time and stress. While the Dunbar number of meaningful interactions with other humans is around 120, our social graphs are breaking records every day about how many people we can talk to.
Most of the tools I have in my phone can't help me enjoy the present time. Because none of them live in the present. For one simple reason. On the Internet of today, the past or the present are not interesting. The new gold rush is about dominating the near future. A world where our next actions, our next intent, our chats and our searches can be turned into monetisable actions.
It has an incredible impact on who we are. We can't be in a place without the urge of telling our friends what we do. The idea of impressing others comes before our own satisfaction of the present moment.
At any given time we are stuck in an infinite number of conversations. With humans or robots. And our mobiles are trying constantly to stimulate our senses with notifications.
Like many, I have been caught into the craziness of the last technological decade. I've seen billion-user platforms emerge from the ground up without any deep thinking about how it would impact the world we live in.
I have started to engage that conversation, but in our tech world it's taboo. We have designed an unsustainable world for the planet and for your brains. Seriously, do we need to sell to the same people every year a slightly updated new phone with marginally better software?
I wish something different could come up. A sort of Slow web that is to technology what slow food is to processed things.
We need to give people access to other choices, other life narratives, other tools, and other ideologies. A sort of "organic sustainable slow technology" that fights this commoditization of everything online and offline.
I feel it's time to build this and for that I want to stop drifting and get back to building products that make me love the future again.
There's never been one truth and one path, especially in technology. We just need more people to raise their voice and be part of this.
Thanks for listening.
Design products that do not hide what they do with our content and personal data.
Create products that are not pushing us to do things we had not intended to do.
Combine strong privacy while keeping the full benefits of the product.
Give users the power to quit a service, remove all their data, and terminate the relationship without any hassle.
Created in 2020, the Slow Web Initiative gathered a small group of developers, designers, and legal experts to look for better and ethical alternatives to technology's unrestrained growth.
Through keynotes, interviews, and advisory work with companies, institutions, and governments, Tariq raised issues that were largely overlooked at the time but have since become central to the tech debate:
Transparent and ethical design of online services and platforms
Lighter, surveillance-free software and entropy reducing computing
The new geopolitical complexity of the digital economy: Tech Cold War, Deplatformization, GDPR vs. Cloud Act
Data residency, Data portability, and self-sovereignty
Transitioning to a digital sovereign model that relies less on Big Tech and more on locally grown technology providers