It’s Time for Rana

The Web is now 35 years old, and it has remained a product of the Information Age in which it was born, but it’s time for the Web to move on to its next stage of life.

Web 1.0

When Web 1.0 started, processors were lucky to be over 100 megahertz, RAM was measured in single digit megabytes, and hard drives could hold a few hundred megabytes of storage at best. Connecting to the Internet meant an exchange of robotic screeching guaranteed to wake the neighbors, while also able to be immediately and catastrophically interrupted by any family member even momentarily picking up the phone. Data would trickle in at slower speeds than the transmission rate of modern headphones, not even fast enough to play songs at radio quality.

It was in this environment and with these restrictions that the Web was born, and with it, the first set of browsers, designs, and interfaces. Electronic documents were primarily text based, with pages largely filled with placeholders for graphics and photos arriving minutes later, and sometimes not even before navigating away. As digital documents, HTML pages included mild capabilities for programmability and interactivity, but largely remained consistent with the document analogy they were born from, with significant additional capabilities relegated to the realm of plugins and add-ons.

Rana’s 1st lesson from the Web was starting to be revealed: digital systems are capable of far more than their offline counterparts, so why should we resign ourselves to physical limitations in a digital world?

One digital-only capability, hyperlinks, became the killer feature of the Web, allowing any document to instantly link to any other document, as long as the URL address resolves and the server remains online. Stale and broken links quickly began to appear due to overloaded servers and lack of redundant distribution mechanisms, causing link rot even in the earliest days of the Web.

Internet connection bandwidth would gradually increase, unlocking the ability for end-users to create, share, and stream higher bandwidth content such as audio and eventually video, as well as unlocking the first real-time multiplayer gaming experiences for the world (using non-web technologies) and establishing a computer gaming industry that would eventually be worth more than almost all forms of traditional media.

Although technologies such as VRML and its descendants anticipated this development for the web, proprietary solutions would prove to be the most capable and performant given the vastly increased computational load required to render 3D graphics, and the web would not gain the ability to properly render 3D environments until WebGL almost 2 decades later.

Rana’s 2nd lesson from the Web was now being revealed: these technologies are powerful enough to create an unlimited number of multiplayer virtual worlds, as long as end-user devices are powerful enough to host and render them.

Web 2.0

As Internet speeds increased, server hosting costs were piling up, and users began creating and sharing content of their own creation, what once began as a network designed for academics and the free exchange of ideas had a choice to make: either spread out the costs among end-users, or find a means of subsidizing the costs for everyone through advertising and commercialization.

Here is where the Web went awry, at the dawn of Web 2.0, and Rana’s 3rd lesson from the Web was learned only by omission; it was not wrong to want to distribute the hosting costs of sharing content with each other, especially as increasingly large and bandwidth-hungry media such as sounds and videos began appearing, but this should have been accomplished by leveraging peer-to-peer (P2P) and distributed technologies rather than placing the entire cost burden onto centrally controlled systems, or they would find ways to pay these costs regardless of the consequences.

This resulted in advertising, tracking, surveillance, content monopolies, moderation monopolies, walled gardens, manipulative algorithms, shadow banning, social reach suppression, pay-to-play, profit incentives for not protecting young people, context collapse, speech suppression, thoughtcrimes, truthcrimes (exposing embarrassing facts), governmental suppression of political information, and the general undermining of free and democratic discourse by centralized powers.

Here is where Rana learned the 4th lesson from the Web: any technology with the potential to be as important and impactful as the Web has been must remain unencumbered, freely shared, and controlled by end-users in order to preserve a positive effect on the world.

Web 2.5

These advertising systems and walled gardens ossified, and despite progress in mobile technologies, personal computing, Internet speed, and graphics technologies, the Web largely looks and feels today like it has for more than a decade, refusing to live up to its potential and move out of the Information Age and into the Age of Intelligence.

So what is the state of the Web at the end of 2024?

• Web Browsers have the potential to be the new Operating Systems.
• Web Pages are still largely designed like documents when they should embrace their full capabilities as WebApps, and we have the technology to change this.
• WebAssembly is the last plugin environment we should ever need (once it reaches full maturity), and will be as universal as Web Browsers are.
• WebGPU offers full programmable hardware acceleration directly to the browser.
• File storage is cheap and universally available on end-user devices.
• Internet connections are fast and ubiquitous, largely thanks to streaming video.

And where is the state of mind of users in 2024?

• Sense-making is at an all-time low.
• Information overload is at an all time high.
• Truth-seeking is growing dramatically in importance.
• Decision-fatigue has been weaponized against average users, through individual targeting algorithms, infinite recommendations, and never-ending playlists.
• Context-collapse is almost complete on many platforms of social media.
• Misinformation and disinformation are running rampant, requiring even higher levels of discernment to sift through in order to find knowledge and reason successfully.
• There is extreme confusion about which rules make for healthy communities compared with which rules make for healthy societies, and where the line should be.
• Smartphones make this even worse, where the most personal of devices is used to interact with the most global and public of communications systems, resulting in excessively amplified emotions and virtual territorialism in online spaces.
• Among those who remember, there is a growing nostalgia for the Web of the Past: a quirky place, free of ads, full of uniqueness, built as an expression of enthusiasm by its creators, and not designed or intended for any algorithm.

Web 0

Now is the time to learn from our history. We get to choose our path forward, and it’s time for the Web to take those roads not taken, to build a better future together, and address the shortcomings of the choices from the past.

This is why we have built the Rana Ecosystem, a suite of tools designed to work together in order to provide AI super-powers to the world for free, at scale, privately, without surveillance advertising, without tracking, and without the ability to even see end-user data. How can we do this? By taking those paths not taken from the history of the Web:

• RanaEngine can run many of the most popular open-source machine learning models available today, with compatibility improving all of the time.
• Instead of hosting large numbers of servers in the cloud, end-users host their own data and compute when using Rana, from their own devices, using decentralized graph databases.
• By using local-first Web technologies, Rana can run entirely in the Web browser, without manual installation and even without a server, and can run on any device, even phones and tablets.
• Each device that a user owns can be added into a computing cluster in order to pool resources using P2P technologies.
• P2P technologies are fundamentally social technologies, so Rana supports encrypted private messaging between users and groups, and the ability to temporarily share computing resources and work together on common tasks.
• RanaRemix offers the ability to add notes, commentary, and markup to any web page, and share your individual thoughts with others, all without affecting the original site.
• Rana integrates easily with Discord, and can generate both images and memes at scales never before imagined.
• The entire Rana Ecosystem is based on open-source technologies, meaning that end-users are able to easily examine the baseline code of foundational technologies, to easily import and export data, and to integrate with and extend the Rana Ecosystem without obstacles.
• Although Rana uses decentralized, distributed, and P2P technologies, Rana is not a Web3 project, does not use blockchain in any way, and does not have any coins to sell you.

It’s time to dream a better dream, to map a path to a better future based on the lessons of the past. We have the technology, now we just have to use it. The world is transitioning from the Information Age to the Age of Intelligence, and if we are going to make it, we are going to need to work together, so let’s equip the world with the tools to build a better future.

It’s time for Rana.