I think intent must be viewed more people-centric. My intent is my purpose for navigating inside any site — Dependent or Independent. Sure I could get sucked into browsing photos of my friend’s son’s Bar Mitzvah. But that seems to ignore me purposefully seeking out a range of content for specific purposes, such as a school a colleague attended for use in a company bio.

By making this argument purely based on things like social graphs, platforms, clicks and other technology signals, I think we ignore a huge factor in the design and utility of Dependent and Independent websites. In a sense we may be blinded by the bright and shiny tech object, and unable to focus on the human aspects of these social interactions.

Thanks for a great essay, seems like the beginnings of a fascinating book.

One of real milestones of the advance of human society is the relatively recent comfort with anonymity. Always and everywhere the first reaction to seeing a stranger – the ‘other’ has been one of caution and wariness (in the least extreme – the ‘hackles’ prickle). The arise of cities conditioned human to accept more easily encounters with the unknown other and the market system allowed societies to develop conditions for trusted impartial/impersonal exchange.

It is the experience of anonymity that introduced the idea that we could design a new identity or change or expand our identity. In the family, the clan, the tribe, the village – our identities become easily cast in stone and changing ourselves – can cause fear, disconcertion, turbulence in the identiesw of all those close to us (the shadow of close ties is the clentch on who we are). To explore new dimensions of being is to encounter the ‘other’ without presumptions of our old identities – each engagement with ‘other’ is an opportunity to constitute and reconstitute a fresh sense of self.

I think the browser could serve as the ideal gateway to a more honest and fair web experience between provider and end-user. The dependent web gets the data it needs and the end-user gets the control to their identity that they desire.