The Web is a City
It’s 8:00a.m, you wake up early to begin your day of work. You’re going into the office, and a slow and groggy commute lies ahead. So you scroll through Instagram for updates from your friends to kill some time. After finishing updates, you want to check the news. So you go through news websites and social media pages with the latest information.
Your parents are calling you, they’re in some other city, or just across the neighborhood. However there are some things you need to tell them, things that surely cannot wait, right? So you call and go through every topic you can fit into maybe two minutes. The signal cuts off, however, as you step into the elevator after arriving at the building.
You have three more messages to reply to, you should go through them before you finally enter the office. Alas, you don’t have that much time. So you keep one message still unopened and it is in the back of your mind for the rest of the day.
From your house to the office, you were physically moving through the city, but your brain was travelling through another city: The web.
The web occupies so much of society’s time and resources as it has supplanted many of the spaces that we were accustomed to. While someone is physically commuting on a bus, their mind lives online and means that they can live out their lives through engaging with content online.
As people consume through the web, markets that were traditionally controlled by a city’s landscape are now digitized. Uber Eats took over restaurant delivery, Airbnb digitized rentals, Facebook marketplace replaced newspaper postings.
We are all aware of the problems with web technologies and the platforms they have empowered. Instagram, TikTok, and many other applications are designed to maximize user activity. Where one would socialize or spend time in the city trying to keep busy, one is now scrolling. Since so many people share the same rhythm of life, the web becomes a city of people interacting to find a way to continue their physical lives online.
As people populate their digital urban communities, they need people to represent them and facilitate decision-making. Said people are chosen in some arbitrary way to represent the will of those who inhabit those spaces. Online, you have the Reddit mod, the Discord mod, the open-source contributor, or that random employee who is paid to answer queries on a support website. Sometimes, those people’s decisions are tied to the company employing them and there is nothing you can do about it.
If we are to think of the web as a substitute for the city, should we not have it be subject to the will of those who inhabit it as well?
The example of the morning routine of an office worker is but one of the numerous examples of life on the internet. Picture a musician, who has had record sales taken over by streaming platforms, who has to rely on live shows and lessons to make ends meet. If everyone is on the web, these professionals have to establish an online presence to reach students and promoters. To do this, they need to build a reach on Instagram, a YouTube channel or a TikTok.
Or take a newly-trained doctor who seeks to make a living through private practice. To advertise their skills, they have to build social media followings and have websites conveniently designed for people to book appointments. The doctor now lives on the web to reach their clients.
In regular cities, when people see that their livelihoods are being impeded upon, they can physically reach those who rule over them purely because they both share the same space. Just like the morning commuter faces the impasses of the web due to internet signals being unable to reach the elevator, so will the musician or the doctor when their platforms stop working for them. People have to continue with their daily lives when the web fails them, and physical spaces do not just disappear if signal is cut off. Citizens can always get together in a shared space and deal with an issue.
But now everyone lives online. The people who require assistance from those platforms should be able to reach them easily. However, the platforms do not always have an incentive to reach them: they do not necessarily live in the same physical place their users, or rather their citizens, inhabit.
