# On web as newspeak: limiting features to corral people
### 20180726
People use the web basically as an appliance. It is an omnipresent
background item like a toaster. Whenever I am around a group of
people, adults or children, most are on their phones. Nothing profound
is being accomplished, games being played, text or instant messages,
social media, etc.
In 1984, the book by George Orwell writes that Ingsoc had created its
own language, [Newspeak](
gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/List of Newspeak words),
and the vocabulary shrank over time to steer people's thinking.
Today, corporations accomplish the same goal thru the removal of
features from products. Lack of replacable batteries, expandable
memory, lack of choices for cloud storage, etc. Along this vein, now
we have Mozilla attempting to futher kill RSS.
Feeds are not desirable from a corporate perspective because you are
viewing their content outside of their interface -- and without
advertising. The end user experience is very desirable -- they are
able to view the content outside of the corporate interface and
without advertising!
The bloated, cluttered, bullshit interfaces most large websites have
nowadays are terrible IMHO. RSS is a way to get straight to the part
that's actually meaningful. Doubleplusungood...
