Reflections on the future of the web - Can tech be more ethical?

Reflections on the current unethical side of the tech-industry.

Anyone can build a website. It requires no education, no approval, no permission. You can sit down tonight, choose a template, click a few buttons, and by tomorrow you have a website that thousands of people could potentially visit. That was the idea. The internet was built on a philosophy of freedom, on the belief that everyone should be able to participate, and that idea has created incredible things. It has given voices to people who would never have been heard. It has made it possible for a person with a good idea to reach the entire world from their living room.

But that freedom also created something else. It created a space without rules, without oversight, and without consequences. A space where quality became optional, and where no one held accountable those who built the things other people had to use. Not because anyone actively decided that quality didn’t matter, but because no one ever demanded that it did.

And slowly, without us noticing, it became normal.

The wild west we built ourselves

Accessibility is a good example of how far things have drifted. WCAG, the guidelines meant to ensure that people with disabilities can use the internet, is in practice treated as something you add at the end. A plugin you install. A checklist you run through just before launch, if you even get that far. But accessibility is not something you bolt onto a finished website. It is something you design in from the beginning, because the structure underneath has to be able to carry it. When that structure is chaos, and it is surprisingly often, assistive technology breaks down. Screen readers cannot navigate something that has no logical structure. And the people who depend on that technology are simply shut out.

It doesn’t stop there. Clients upload enormous images and heavy videos because no one ever told them it matters. They don’t know that a 5 MB image makes their site slow. They don’t know that the video embedded on their front page counts every time someone visits, and that the energy it requires actually means something. It is not malice. It is ignorance. And it is an ignorance that the entire system has enabled, because we have never required that people know what they are doing before they do it.

That is one of the reasons why my company primarily sells static websites. Not because it is the easiest or the cheapest option, but because we believe that most website owners simply should not be making changes themselves. Not because they are stupid, but because they are not trained in it, and because what they do in good faith can damage their own website without them even realising. You don’t repair your own car unless you know what you are doing. You don’t fix your own plumbing. You let a professional handle it, because the consequences of getting it wrong can be bigger than you think. And a website is fundamentally the same. It is a piece of technology that affects real people, and it deserves to be treated with that respect.

It is not necessarily a licence we need. But it requires more common sense. It requires a degree of gatekeeping, not to shut people out, but to make sure that what we build does not cause more harm than good. Because if we don’t let people drive a car without learning how first, why do we let them run a website that can affect thousands of people?

That question has followed me for a long time. And the more I have seen, the harder it has become to ignore.

The surveillance we pretend is normal

There is a difference between ignorance and intention. One can be forgiven. The other demands that you look a little closer.

GDPR was introduced to protect people. To give them control over their own data. And on paper, it works. But in practice, many companies have found ways around it that are technically legal but in spirit the exact opposite of what the law was meant to be. Cookie banners designed to confuse. Buttons that make it easy to accept everything and difficult to opt out of anything. Consent that is in practice an illusion, because protecting yourself requires more time and energy than most people have available in a quick everyday moment.

I have sat through training sessions on how tracking is set up the way agencies do it. And I remember sitting there feeling almost physically unwell. Not because anyone in the room was evil or unethical as a person, but because the scale of what we were learning to set up was so far from what I had thought it was. How much was actually being recorded. How deeply you could see into a person’s behaviour. It was not abstract. It was concrete, detailed, and it felt wrong in a way I couldn’t quite put into words at the time. I just thought, is this really what we do? Is this really what the internet has become?

And the answer is yes. Because it is not about serving users. It is about harvesting them. Every click, every movement, every second spent on a page is recorded and packaged and sent on to Google, Facebook, TikTok, and whoever else will pay for it. It is not a service. It is a business model, and it is built into almost everything we touch online.

But it is not only an ethical problem. It is also a physical one. Every tracking script, every third-party tool, every piece of surveillance code adds weight to a website. And that weight is not free. According to the latest data from HTTP Archive, the average website in 2025 has grown to nearly 2.9 MB on desktop, which is an increase of over 200% since 2015. A large portion of that weight comes from JavaScript, and a significant share of that JavaScript has nothing to do with making the website better for the user. It is tracking. It is surveillance. It is third-party scripts running in the background, invisible to the person visiting the page, but very visible in the energy they consume and the strain they place on devices and networks.

The internet is getting heavier. It is getting slower. It is getting more intrusive. And we act as though that is simply how it has to be, as though it is a law of nature and not a choice we have actively made.

The obsolescence we manufacture ourselves

There is a consequence to all of this that we rarely talk about, and it is physical. It is not about code or data or screens. It is about the devices we hold in our hands and the resources it costs to produce them.

We replace our phones every two or three years. Not always because they are broken, but because they feel slow. Because apps demand more than they did when we bought them. Because websites have become so heavy that a phone which worked perfectly fine two years ago now struggles to keep up. That is not coincidence. It is a cycle we have created ourselves. Bad code makes devices slow. Slow devices get replaced. Replaced devices end up as electronic waste. And the internet keeps getting heavier, because we assume that everyone will just upgrade.
But they won’t. And they shouldn’t have to.

The numbers are hard to ignore. According to the UN’s Global E-waste Monitor from 2024, the world produced 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022 alone. That is an increase of 82% since 2010, and only 22.3% was formally collected and recycled. The rest disappears. Into landfills, into informal systems, into the soil and groundwater of countries that are rarely mentioned in the conversation. By 2030, that figure is expected to rise to 82 million tonnes. As Gerry McGovern has pointed out, 80% of digital waste is created during the manufacturing of the device itself. Holding on to your devices for as long as possible is the single most important action we can take. But we are doing the opposite. We are building an internet that forces people to upgrade, and we call it progress.

If we built lighter websites, if we wrote leaner code, if we thought about what we actually need instead of throwing everything in because we can, devices would last longer. People would not have to buy something new every other year. And the mountain of electronic waste that is growing faster than we can manage it would at least grow a little slower.

The internet could be part of the solution. Instead, it is part of the problem.

The yes we keep saying

Until now, I have been writing about systems and companies and the industry out there. But the truth is that this is not just something happening around me. I am part of it.

Developers know what is right. We know that accessibility takes time, and that the time is rarely set aside in the budget. We know that tracking setups are invasive, and we set them up anyway. We know that shortcuts compromise the quality, and we take them, because the deadline is tomorrow and the discussion about quality can happen another day. A day that never comes.

I have done it myself. Not because I don’t care about my work, but because the system rewards speed over care. Because saying no has consequences. It can mean losing a project, being seen as difficult, falling behind in an environment that measures value by delivery speed. And so you say yes. Again. And again. And every time you do, you know it. You feel it. That quiet sense that what you are building is not good enough, but doing it anyway because the alternative feels too costly.

It is easy to see yourself as someone who is simply carrying out a task. To place the responsibility with the client, with the project manager, with the market. And there is truth in that, because the pressure is real, and it does not only come from within. But the truth is also that every time we say yes to something we know is wrong, we become part of the problem. Not as villains. As bystanders. And that is almost harder to sit with, because there is no clear enemy to point at. Just a mirror and a long series of compromises that each seemed small on their own, but that together have shaped the internet we have today.

The cycle and the question

The internet is becoming more central to our lives with every passing day. We work on it, we learn on it, we connect with each other through it. Our children grow up with it as a given, in the same way as electricity or running water. And yet, the people who build it are actively making it worse. No longer out of ignorance, because that excuse may have held in the beginning, but not now. Now it is exhaustion. It is pressure. It is a conviction that there is no other way, that this is simply how the industry works, and that you either keep up or fall behind.

Developers compromise. Clients demand more for less. The internet becomes heavier and slower and more invasive. Users pay the price, in time, in data, in devices that become obsolete faster than they should. Developers burn out. And then it starts over. It is a cycle, and right now I do not see what breaks it.

I usually end my articles with something that resembles a direction. Not always an answer, but at least a sense that there is a way forward. This time I don’t have that. This time I only have a question.

Can this change?

Not whether it should. It should. We all know that. Not whether it will, because I cannot know that. But whether it even can. Whether the structures, the incentives, the pressure and the pace of this industry allow for someone to stop and say, this is not good enough, we have to do it differently.

Because right now, I am not optimistic. The industry is moving faster, not slower. The pressure is increasing, not easing. AI is accelerating the pace even further, and while it can be used wisely, what I see more often is that it is used to produce more, faster, without anyone stopping to ask whether what we are producing is even worth building. And unless developers start saying no, unless decision makers start valuing quality over speed, unless someone somewhere demands that there is accountability attached to building something that millions of people use, nothing will change.
But maybe that is precisely the point. Maybe the first step is not hope. It is honesty. Admitting that we are part of the problem. Admitting that we are tired. Admitting that we don’t know how to fix it, but that we know we cannot keep going like this.

I don’t know what the next step is. But I know it starts with saying it out loud.

And that is what I have done here.