Think about the internet in 2002. No Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, 4chan, Reddit or mobile anything. eBay was huge, as was Yahoo, Wikipedia was just a year old, the hottest meme was 'All Your Base Are Belong to Us' and the DotCom Bust had dropped napalm on a host of bad ideas. Weinberger takes us back that time, when he tries to explain how the web works.

Part of it, which might be exotic to surfers circa 2002, is common knowledge to pretty much anybody who isn't dead today; the blend of anonymity and authenticity that characterizes the multiple interactions that make up the web. But Weinberger draws a possibly erroneous connection between the distributed architecture of routers, and the distributed architecture of sites. The homebrewed, stitched together, hobbysites he writes about are very different from the slick, siloed internet that we experience today.

An interesting, if slightly outdated, philosophical look at the web.