It feels like 2004 again.

Interestingly, most of the people who’ve heard me say this over the last year or so think that I’m complaining or lamenting the situation, but I’m actually excited about it. That malaise by the big players in tech a generation ago yielded an exciting and inspiring new wave of innovations. While much of the money in big tech was chasing distractions back in 2004, many communities of small, independent creators on the open web were making the new pillars of web culture — many of which are still standing to this day.

Every year, the batteries in the iPhone get bigger and more capable. Instead of giving those gains back to us, as users, they instead take more and more advantage of the gains so the relative battery life stays the same (about 10 hours).

If you look at the payloads of any major website (let’s pick on the New York Times), you’ll likely see that less than 1% of the bandwidth goes to the actual text of the article. The rest goes toward ad tracking crap and all kinds of JavaScript nonsense.

The difference between 2004 and 2024 is that we have large amounts of insanely powerful, compact computers spread across the entire planet.

That, combined with more powerful servers and cheap hosting, should really allow us to build the cool stuff people are looking for again.

Which, at a time when it feels like the world around us is imploding, gives me a lot of hope.

We built Geocities pages on IE 4 back then. We can do a lot of good with Rails 8.