Rob Weychert

🔗 Endgame for the Open Web

Rob Weychert — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:09:00 -0400

Anil Dash makes the case that we’re running out of time to save the last vestiges of the open web from the big-tech robber barons’ multifaceted (but mostly AI-shaped) rampage, which probably isn’t news to anyone who actually understands what’s at stake, but his post does a good job of enumerating and describing the threats for those who don’t.

Creators who fight hard to stay independent are often choosing to make less money, to go without winning awards or the other trappings of big media, just in order to maintain control and authority over their content, and because they think it’s the right way to connect with an audience. Publishers who’ve survived through year after year of attacks from tech platforms get rewarded by… getting to do it again the next year. Tim Berners-Lee is no billionaire, but none of those guys with the hundreds of billions of dollars would have all of their riches without him. And the thanks he gets from them is that they’re trying to kill the beautiful gift that he gave to the world, and replace it with a tedious, extortive slop mall.

I appreciate Anil’s efforts to educate, and I hope he’s right that collective action can turn the tide, and I hope he’s right about this, too:

Ultimately I think, if given the choice, people will pick home-cooked, locally-grown, heart-felt digital meals over factory-farmed fast food technology every time.

But… I just don’t believe that, and I’m not sure Anil does either, given this point he makes earlier in his post:

[The robber barons] see their chance to run the playbook again, and do to Wikipedians what Uber did to cab drivers, to get users addicted to closed apps like they are to social media, to force podcasters to chase an algorithm like kids on TikTok.

I’m always rooting for the open web, but it isn’t dying because people were pried away from it, and Uber and TikTok and ChatGPT aren’t successful because people are forced to use them. Like fast food, which exponentially outsells cookbooks and CSA shares, the closed platforms are simply more convenient. The weaponization of our personal data against us is apparently an acceptable price to pay for that convenience, and the unscrupulousness of its manufacture is generally shrugged off or ignored.

The information age, for all its triumphs, has been subsumed by the cult of convenience, and until we can figure out how to deprogram that cult at scale, it will continue to fall victim to whichever bad actors can most effectively exploit it.

🔗 Go to this link

Tagged: April 2026, technology, links, Anil Dash
Reply via email

Closed on Sundays

Rob Weychert — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 07:24:00 -0400

Yesterday, for the first time, I closed my site. Any page you visited turned you away with this message:

This site is closed on Sundays. I’m trying to avoid screens at least one day out of the week, and this is my way of encouraging others to consider doing the same. I’d apologize for the inconvenience, but I think in many ways modern expectations of convenience have gotten way out of hand, don’t you? Feel free to bookmark this page and come back another day, and I hope you’re able to step away from the screen and find another way to enjoy your Sunday. If not, well, there’s a whole lot more internet out there. But for today, this little piece of it is closed.

I took the idea from Sticker Ninja, and I was also inspired by Heydon Pickering, who once trolled the React-obsessed web-dev world with a devilish “Please disable JavaScript to view this site.” (My “closed on Sundays” message can likewise be subverted by disabling JavaScript, but wouldn’t you rather go for a walk?)

I don’t do any user tracking or other analytics on the site, so I have no way of knowing how many visitors will be affected, though I suspect the number is very close to zero. Nevertheless, if I can convince even one wretched, screen-addled soul that their Sunday might be better spent chasing an ice cream truck or learning to juggle, my work will not have been in vain.

Tagged: March 2026, projects
Reply via email

Weimar/Nazi/evangelical films

Rob Weychert — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 08:53:00 -0400

A watch list for progressive masochists from Becca Rothfeld’s “The MAGA Theory of Art” in Art in America.

Just as Weimar and Nazi films pandered to white-collar workers who refused to confront a new economic reality, evangelical films pander to a rural class that clings to an outmoded notion of small-town affluence—and thereby to a bygone socio-economic order. They present the rural as a refuge from modernity, a realm that economic history has happily bypassed. To escape deindustrialization and suburbanization, one must simply drive beyond the outer boroughs, beyond the billboards and the strip malls, and straight back into the mythic past.

Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morning to Midnight)

Karlheinz Martin (Germany, 1920)

Die Straße (The Street)

Karl Grune (Germany, 1923)

Die Verrufenen (In the Slums of Berlin)

Gerhard Lamprecht (Germany, 1925)

Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light)

Leni Riefenstahl (Germany, 1932)

S.A. Mann Brand

Franz Seitz (Germany, 1933)

Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Quex)

Hans Steinhoff (Germany, 1933)

Hans Westmar

Franz Wenzler (Germany, 1933)

Der verlorene Sohn (The Prodigal Son)

Luis Trenker (Germany, 1934)

La Habanera

Douglas Sirk (Germany, 1937)

Fireproof

Alex Kendrick (USA, 2008)

What If…

Dallas Jenkins (USA, 2010)

Last Ounce of Courage

Darrel Campbell, Kevin McAfee (USA, 2012)

Finding Normal

Brian Herzlinger (USA, 2013)

God’s Not Dead

Harold Cronk (USA, 2014)

Redeemed

David A.R. White (USA, 2014)

Christian Mingle

Corbin Bernsen (USA, 2014)

A Matter of Faith

Rich Christiano (USA, 2014)

War Room

Alex Kendrick (USA, 2015)

God’s Not Dead 2

Harold Cronk (USA, 2016)

A Walk with Grace

Nick Kellis (USA, 2019)

God’s Not Dead: We the People

Vance Null (USA, 2020)

God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust

Vance Null (USA, 2024)

A Wisconsin Christmas Pie

John Stimpson (USA, 2025)

Entries logged without comment for the week ending 3/28

Rob Weychert — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Added to the film diary:

Kiss of the Spider Woman
Héctor Babenco, 1985, ★★½
Harley Flanagan: Wired for Chaos
Rex Miller, 2024, ★★★

Tagged: March 2026
Reply via email

🔗 Claire Tabouret’s Stained-Glass Windows for Notre-Dame Divide French Society, with a Legal Threat Looming

Rob Weychert — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:06:00 -0400

Claire Tabouret’s new stained-glass window designs for Notre-Dame

Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s Notre-Dame windows, installed in the late 19th century

A project has been in the works for a couple years to replace a number of Notre-Dame’s stained-glass windows with contemporary designs, which has unsurprisingly caused an uproar. While the arguments for and against generally take familiar shapes—whether historic architecture should accommodate modern expression, whether these decisions should be top-down or community-driven—one functional aspect of the kerfuffle caught my attention:

The windows’ light gray, non-figurative glass allows more light to enter the cathedral, achieved via its contrast between light grays and colorful accents. The goal was also to “create a homogeneous system that governs the entire cathedral,” Bressani said. “That’s what Viollet-le-Duc was concerned about: bringing an overall coherence in the color and lighting system of the cathedral.”

He added that the bright contemporary imagery of Tabouret’s designs would “destroy the overall experience of the Gothic cathedral.”

However, that argument is apparently something of a straw man:

Blistène, the head of the jury that selected Tabouret, bristled at this accusation. Indeed, the artist chose her colors so that when combined together, they would form a white light, he said. (The cathedral also asked her to maintain the interior’s overall, existing lighting.)

“Saying that Claire Tabouret’s proposal destroys the harmony of the existing windows,” Blistène said in an email, “is truly a case of not wanting to recognize that, on the contrary, her proposal is extremely respectful of the theme and its iconography, of the colors and the light emanating from the building.”

Whichever side is right, I’m a little ashamed to admit I hadn’t previously given much thought to stained glass as a conscientious participant in a church’s lighting design. I guess I always thought of liturgical stained-glass windows as site-specific art that lighting designers would have to work around, rather than a collaborator in their process. In particular, the concept of a window’s color composition serving both a narrative/figurative purpose and projecting a functional, aggregate white light is kind of mind-blowing.

🔗 Go to this link