The Web We Lost does a great job of contrasting the values of today’s big tech companies and the values that made the Internet and Web so radically different from the mediums it replaced.

The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we’ve lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.

It’s also available in video form:

He has a follow-up article called Rebuilding the Web We Lost that talks about some potential solutions.