On browsing knowledge

Prompted by one of TechSoup’s board members, I’ve been walking around saying, “Websites won’t exist in two years.” Every time I say it, I keep whittling down the amount of time—18 months, 12 months, 9 months. It’s getting closer both because of time passing, and because the time to the next iteration of everything is being compressed.

My thinking here is still pretty disorganized. These are the pieces I’m trying to put together:

  1. The “Webb” Store (See what I did there?)
    Imagine a dynamically built web store with an agentic backend. The store is built just for me—tires that fit my truck, the fishing lures I like, shirts from my favorite brands in my exact size. I still get the dopamine hit of shopping, comparing, and finally deciding to buy. The “shopping” isn’t just transactional; it’s about the knowledge that helps us choose. Once the choice is made, an agentic backend runs off and does the heavy lifting across different retailers.

  2. Surfing AI-Friendly Knowledge Vaults
    Now look at the data side. Imagine surfing knowledge files in a tool like Obsidian. Let’s say we organize our expertise in “knowledge bundles”—markdown files with agreed-upon YAML front matter. We define the edges of these bundles so we can surf across them as a knowledge graph based on relationships, not just explicit hyperlinks. My files, my expertise, owned by me, but contributed to a collective map.

  3. Putting the Two Together
    When you bring actions (the Webb Store) and the ability to surf knowledge (the Obsidian graph) together, we are engaging with the digital world in a completely different way. It isn’t SaaS—which is how so many of us are trapped using AI right now. It isn’t just a database. And it certainly isn’t the internet as we know it today. It’s a shift toward owning our data and using it to meet resource and referral needs in a way that bypasses traditional corporate gatekeepers.

  4. Many Fronts, Bespoke Backends
    This paradigm can have many front ends—it can be something we chat with, type with, or look at. It adapts to the user. On the backend, bespoke agentic processes handle the execution based on the relationships defined in our knowledge graphs.

  5. The Stakes for Civil Society
    My brain feels stuffed trying to understand, describe, and shape this because the stakes are incredibly high. There are massive dangers here—the kinds of systemic vulnerabilities highlighted in DeepMind’s AI Agent Traps paper. But the real opportunity is for ownership and shaping by civil society. If we get this right, we can organize for true community connection, coordination at scale, and decentralized ownership with an ability to surf across borders without being mined for profit.

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