[mntmoss]

I think it helps to consider this a problem of "slow vs fast".

Society has displayed ways of sheltering and hibernating through tulmultuous times and subsequently developing some kind of response.

Chief among this is the reuse of the old. Of course you can build new quickly; that's what Andreesen calls for. And it's easy, as these things go: Hand some money and labor to someone who wants to bark orders and throw their weight around and they'll get a thing made, like Ozymandias building his monument. History always provides such people.

But reusing old successfully is the thing you need crafty witches and wizards for, and they usually only reveal themselves when a dragon shows up and needs a talking-to.

In this case, the dragon is that tendency to push information towards a model of legibility by the state and for the populace to in turn aim to be inscrutable, a back and forth that has occurred throughout history. Sometimes this shapes spatial life, as with the story of medieval taxation based on the number of windows in the house. At other times it uses political theory and precedent to assert rights. Here we have the opportunity to be inscrutable by a rather direct escape from the norm, simply using some less popular alternative.

This is a crisis mostly in the sense that we still crave to have a popular, inclusive, fast-moving discussion while being inscrutable to power, and you can't square that circle so easily. Rather, you have to look towards gradual redefinitions of reality and possibility to counter normalization. This is necessarily a slower process than simple surveillance and seizure.

With respect to the Web, it's clear enough that it was built with holes in it, and much of the resulting stack was further distorted in turn. Why? Because it was a new thing - and evolved defenses as it went along.

But now it is an old thing, and as a popularizer of concept has succeeded wildly. The concept is what we'll probably use, and the specific tech only in parts.