This is Maciej Cegłowski's now-classic 2015 talk from Web Directions in Sydney, and the fact that it's being reposted in 2026 with zero traction is itself a punchline that proves the essay's thesis. Cegłowski — the mind behind Pinboard and one of the sharpest essayists writing about the web — takes aim at the absurd bloat of modern websites, where an article containing a few kilobytes of actual text arrives wrapped in megabytes of JavaScript frameworks, trackers, ad networks, autoplaying video, and analytics beacons.

The talk is famous for its rhetorical device of comparing article sizes to literary works. A single Medium post about minimalism weighs more than the collected works of Dostoyevsky. A news article about obesity itself becomes an object lesson in the crisis it describes. Cegłowski documents pages where the payload-to-content ratio is thousands to one.

Why this still matters in 2026:

• The problem has gotten dramatically worse. The median web page has ballooned further since 2015, driven by React hydration bundles, third-party SDKs, cookie consent theater, and the newer sin of client-side LLM chat widgets that ship entire tokenizers to the browser.
• The environmental argument Cegłowski made — that heavy sites drain phone batteries and burn coal at data centers — has become mainstream ESG discourse, but the actual page weights have marched in the opposite direction.
• His prescriptions (server-rendered HTML, restraint with JavaScript, respect for user bandwidth) map almost perfectly onto what the HTMX crowd, the Astro team, and the "web components revival" folks are advocating today. He was a decade early.

What makes the piece worth reading rather than just nodding at is Cegłowski's writing itself. He's genuinely funny — the "chickenshit minimalism" section, where he skewers websites that look sparse but weigh 15MB because the whitespace is served by React, remains one of the best pieces of tech criticism ever written. He also makes a moral argument that's uncomfortable: bloated sites are a form of contempt for users on slow connections, older devices, or in the global south.

For engineers who've spent the last few years shipping ever-larger bundles because "storage is cheap" and "everyone has fiber," it's a bracing reread. For anyone new to it, it's a foundational text that explains why the web feels worse every year despite hardware improvements.