It gives me no pleasure to report that the men are arguing about JavaScript again

Lately, there has been a debate about, god help us, JavaScript. (This summarizes it.) This happens every so often. In this text, I’ll be writing a little bit about my felt experience of the web as an end user, a little about the structural necessity of such debates in the first place, and some possible next steps that we can take.

I find arguments about technology preferences, and technological approaches, to be curious. Ultimately, I don’t care what technology you use. I don’t care what tools you use to solve problems. I don’t care what your interface looks like, I don’t care how much your devices cost, and I don’t much care what you do on the web.

I do care very deeply about what the general felt experience is on the web. As things stand, the web is mostly a Javascript application now, and that application gets very weird whenever you try to protect your personal privacy.

In practice, this means several things are objectively true: