I recently rewatched Wilson Miner’s eye-opening talk from the 2011 Build Conference called “When We Build.”

I remember when this first came out, I was at a really important moment in my career. I was just coming out of college, working odd jobs for a while here and there, and had started in the communications department at Sesame Workshop. The web had been important to me for so many years, but it was increasingly becoming part of my day to day work.

It was also around that time that there were conversations happening around responsive design, and the viral internet, and glut in advertising, and the influence of marketing to millennials, and so very many things all swirling around that was basically just the culture of the day (I feel like some of this all culminated into a single day in February when two llama’s escaped from a zoo and we got “The Dress,” which had a real end of history feel like everything was this big liberal post-culture paradise and then 2016 happened (and I’m not the only one with this theory – there are others), but anyway I digress).

What I remember from that time was a real sense of hope. I think Miner’s talk kicked off a whole genre of conference talks that were personal and broad and optimistic. They ran for years.

And we all got so focused on where we were headed we forgot to take a look around at were we were at. Instead of making a web that was more universal and accessible, we loaded it with glut and gunk until it became virtually unusable. Instead of creating dynamic tools to help us shape a new web, we chased after front-end trends, one after another, bloating the web and doing not much else. Instead of finding community we locked people up in walled echo chambers. And on and on. Everyone building the web made these decisions. Little by little. We did it in the aggregate. A tracking script here. A shortcut there. Death by a thousand cuts.

It’s all coming back around these days. I can see people casting off a decade of descent down a slippery slope and coming back around to hope. To the kind of hope that Miner, and so many others, pointed us too. I hope we get it right this time.

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Ruth Allen on the different kinds of time:

Time is so diverse, and experienced so differently between subjects in the present, that any prolonged effort to constrain what time is falls apart. There is the time of insects who live no more than a day, and the time of tortoises that outstrip our own. There is the time that for me is saved, but for you wasted. There is the time that can never be equal in an unequal world, where you can relax and I have to work or vice versa. There is the time we experience in chronological order (or chronos) but there is also the qualitative experience of “everything in its own time” time in the moment (or kairos)