Steve Wozniak Destroys Apple In Less Than 2 Minutes

After a full day of sharpening my web development skills, I fancied a little deep dive into weird content online, and eventually stumbled upon an article about Xanadu.

The homepage of Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu

Those of you who are better informed already know what I’m talking about, but for others, a brief explanation:

Xanadu is a content delivery system proposed by Ted Nelson in the 1960’s, which he’s been working on ever since. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, widely renowned as the “founding father” of the World Wide Web, adopted only some of Ted’s ideas in his Hypertext Project Proposal, while hypertext itself was a concept first invented by Ted.

If Ted Nelson’s ideas had reached their fullest potential, you would’ve been able to see both of the documents I had linked in a fashion similar to this mock-up I just made in 5 minutes:

Ultimately the idea behind Xanadu is an interconnected world of documents, in which you can always reach the source of the information that you’re reading.

One document would allow you to view all the source documents, without having to jump between links and open hundreds of browser tabs.

But that’s not how the Web works at the moment.

Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? I leave the judgment to you, after you’ve done your own research about Ted Nelson, Sir Tim, the World Wide Web and Project Xanadu.

But how does all of this have anything to do with Steve Wozniak?

It turns out that Steve Wozniak, the actual mastermind behind Apple Computers (Jobs was just a business guy, but a very clever one), and the pioneer of the personal computer revolution, is an avid fan of Ted Nelson.

It also turns out that the allmighty Woz doesn’t like what Apple, Google, and other giant internet companies are doing with the web.

For some of you this may be old news — but for me these are mind-blowing facts that I’m just now learning.

After watching a few too many videos from Ted Nelson’s YouTube channel, I found the gem that I clickbaited you with in the title:

Steve Wozniak’s breakdown of EXACTLY what’s wrong with Apple in under 2 minutes:

It’s a brilliant take on how big business destroys valuable products and useful concepts, based on what happened to Siri after Apple bought it.

The Woz is definitely onto something

There are many sceptics and conspiracy theorists out there who want to make you believe that every big company wants to control you.

But what if even the man renowned as the founding father of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is admitting that his creation has become so dangerous that he calls for caution in a Guardian article, saying that the web can be weaponised against us?

Yesterday, that is March 12th, 2018, marked the 29th birthday of the World Wide Web. Because of that, sir Tim has also published a public letter about the 3 biggest challenges facing the internet at the moment.

One of them is “make the web work for people”.

And I think a big part of making the web work for us is enabling free access to quality scientific research, and quality information.

You know, one of the things that Reddit’s founder and internet activist, Aaron Swartz, died fighting for?

In the aforementioned Guardian Article, Sir Tim admits that big tech is not going to save us.

Who else is there to save us, if not the companies that we’d entrusted so much of our information, money, and free time with?

We have to save ourselves.

I think we all need to become as badass as Steve Wozniak:

We need to stop being lazy, ignorant consumers of apps and sites built with the sole purpose of getting us to view more ads.

We need to retake the power of creation — we need to learn about the internet, about programming, about the whole backbone of the world wide web.

We also need to learn about radical ideas that allow us to re-imagine the internet, like Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project, to broaden our perspective about what technological progress is REALLY about.

The right time to start educating yourself about the internet was long ago.

Long before Ajit Pai’s move to kill Net Neutrality, long before the threats of ACTA.

But there’s still hope. We still have relatively good access to information on the internet, and so far only 50% of the world is online.

We can still fight back. We still have the power to bring the internet back to what it was supposed to be — for us, as well as the other 50% of the world.

But we have to learn. Why? Steve Wozniak said it best in his aforementioned lecture:

“We need a lot more bright people in the future.”

And I couldn’t agree more.

Do you want to be bright, or would you rather allow yourself to be controlled by big companies which generate profit from your ignorance?

Steve Wozniak Destroys Apple In Less Than 2 Minutes was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.