Portrait photo of Tara Vancil

Tara Vancil

Imagine This: A Web Without Servers

The Web was envisioned as an open platform for publishing and sharing information, but that vision has been lost: most people will never publish independently on the Web. What went wrong?

We’ll see how a core facet of the Web platform—setting up and running a server—locks the vast majority of users out of participating in the Web. Finally, we’ll take a look at the peer-to-peer Web, an experiment to re-imagine Web publishing, this time without servers.

Feeling skeptical? I’ll build and deploy a website on-stage using only my browser and text editor.