The Metric Is Not The Mission: The Full Paper

Over the last few months, we've been running the wonderful ten part series on The Metric is Not the Mission" by Konstantinos Komaitis. It's a deep exploration of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. The resulting series explores how things went from building a better, more open, more beneficial internet... to whatever it is that we have now.

In the latter half, it also explores what happens next, the reckoning that the big companies face from regulators and litigation, and points towards a way to think through what comes next: hopefully bringing back a better internet for all of us.

From the beginning, we said that once the series was published, we'd publish a combined version in PDF form, and that's what we have here: The Metric is not the Mission, in full as a single PDF file (also embedded at the end of this post).

If you didn't read it while it was coming out in serialized fashion, you can now read the whole thing in one sitting. Or if you did read it, but want to read the whole thing again. Or even better, if you think there are other people who should read it, feel free to send it to them.

We've heard tremendous feedback from people who really enjoyed the series, and said it made them think. Thanks to Konstantinos for writing it and agreeing to have it published here.