The scientific consensus has shifted so much that Richard Dawkins, in the 30th-anniversary edition of “The Selfish Gene,” wrote that he could just as accurately have called his book “The Cooperative Gene.” Perhaps decades of our economic and political lives would have been much less harmful if he had.

I’m quite interested in concepts of the “Small Web” and adjacent topics, but it is definitely true that “small web” itself is a vague term that different people use to talk about different kinds of projects. What unites all these different concepts is the kind of web they define themselves against; that kind of bloated, corporate, algorithm-ruled and ad-ridden mess that constitutes the majority of highly-trafficked websites these days.