This is a bit of a rant centered around a piece of recent news that seriously bugs me.

Actually, it’s not the news itself that bugs me, it’s the truth that the news represents. The truth that the Web basically sucks.

The news was detailed in an Opinion column in Nature about a new “Massively collaborative mathematics” project. Called “The Polymath Project,” it’s a new technique whereby a mathematical problem would be solved in such a way that “anyone in the world could follow along and, if they wished, make a contribution.”

This new technique is being called Open Source Mathematics or some such thing:

The widespread adoption of such open-source techniques will require significant cultural changes in science, as well as the development of new online tools. We believe that this will lead to the widespread use of mass collaboration in many fields of science, and that mass collaboration will extend the limits of human problem-solving ability.

In a word: Bullshit.

Don’t get me wrong. I want it to be true, I just have very little faith that it will actually be true. At least not anytime in the near future.

Why?

Because it’s freakin’ 2009, people!

Why is that significant?

Because the World Wide Web became a publicly available internet service on August 6th, 1991! That’s 18 years ago!

Still don’t see it?

Well, head over to Wikipedia’s article on The History of the World Wide Web, for a short lesson on why Tim Berners-Lee developed the WWW. Pay particular attention to the excerpt from his short summary on the project which states that:

The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow all links to be made to any information anywhere. [...] The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data. Collaborators welcome!

See it now?

The entire purpose of the World Wide Web was to share scientific information, data and techniques.

Once more for the zombies:

The entire reason the World Wide Web was created was to have a  fucking Polymath Project! A project that should have been created 18 fucking years ago!

Now, one could argue that the tools and techniques weren’t available 18 years ago to allow the actual development of The Polymath Project, or any such collaborative efforts such as the Wiki, blogs, etc.

Again, I say bullshit.

Why?

Because some people did just fine developing the tools they needed to accomplish a goal.

I mean, right out of the starting gate– roughly 16 seconds after the first iteration of the WWW went live– we had advertising. 42 seconds later, we had snazzy advertising. And roughly a minute and twelve seconds after that, we had stealth advertising.

The Web, like so many things, instantly became a place primarily dedicated to the making of money.

Oh, sure, there were great things going on from the beginning, I’ve worked on some of them, but I’d like to see a graph with two lines on it: one showing how much stuff was created solely to make money, and another showing how much stuff was created for the good of mankind.

I know which one I’m placing my bets on to look like a hockey stick.

Seriously, for every web project centered on the betterment of mankind, there are 14 million dedicated to stripping someone’s wallet and in the mid-90s, The Web was a promise land filled with gold, and the Gold Rush was on!

We all know who won.

Is this a somewhat cynical view? Sure, but you should know that the definition of a cynic is “A hopeless romantic who’s had his rose-colored glasses stripped off his face and smashed on the ground.”

Probably by an advertising executive.

Now, arguments can be had. If there wasn’t that much money, there wouldn’t have been that much development of things like AJAX and PHP. Sure, I can partially believe that. I’m sure there’s truth to all of these arguments. Lots of good medical advancements are discovered in wartime too.

(I’m just sayin’!)

But I stick by my central thesis. The fact that a Polymath Project would be news presented in Nature magazine, in 2009, proves to me that the web basically sucks.

And by “sucks” I mean “sucks the life out of the humanity-centered goals of it’s original designer like a charming and sexy money vampire.”