The hyperlink was my currency six years ago. It represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web – a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralisation – all the links, lines and hierarchies – and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks. Since I got out of jail, though, I’ve realised how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete. Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The only way to stay outside this vast apparatus of surveillance might be to go into a cave and sleep’ … Derakhshan. Photograph: Arash Ashoorinia for the GuardianNearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object – the same as a photo, or a piece of text. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting. But links are not objects, they are relations between objects. This objectivisation has stripped hyperlinks of their immense powers.

Source: Iran’s blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web | Technology | The Guardian