The web is a magical place. It started out as a way to link documents like research papers across the internet, but has evolved into the representation of the internet and the place where we get information and get things done. Writer Will Leitch on Medium:

It is difficult to describe, to a younger person or, really, anyone who wasn’t there, what the emergence of the Internet — this thing that had not been there your entire life, that you had no idea existed, that was suddenly just everywhere — meant to someone who wanted to write. When I graduated college in 1997, the expectation for me, and most wanna-be writers, was that we had two options: Start on the bottom rung of a print publication and toil away for years, hoping that enough people with jobs above you would retire or die in time for you to get a real byline by the time you were 40, or write a brilliant novel or memoir that turned you into Dave Eggers or Elizabeth Wurtzel. That was pretty much it! Then, suddenly, from the sky, there was this place where you could:

• Write whatever you wanted.
• Write as long as you wanted.
• Have your work available to read by anyone, anywhere on the entire freaking planet.

This was — and still is — magical.

The core argument of what Leitch write is that while the business and traffic models that fueled web publishing are collapsing—due to changing priorities of platforms like Google and the dominance of video on social media (i.e., TikTok and Reels), the essential, original magic of publishing on the web isn’t dead.

But that does not mean that Web publishing — that writing on the Internet, the pure pleasure of putting something out in the world and having it be yours, of discovering other people who are doing the same thing — itself is somehow dead, or any less magical than it was in the first place. Because it is magical. It still is. It always was.