In December 1993, the New York Times published an article about the “limitless opportunity” of the early internet. It painted a picture of a digital utopia: clicking a mouse to access NASA weather footage, Clinton’s speeches, MTV’s digital music samplers, or the status of a coffee pot at Cambridge University.
It was a simple vision—idealistic, even—and from our vantage point three decades later, almost hopelessly naive.
We can still do all these things, of course, but the “limitless opportunity" of today’s internet has devolved into conflict, hate, bots, AI-generated spam and relentless advertising. Face-swap apps allow anyone to create nonconsensual sexual imagery, disinformation propagated online hampered the COVID-19 public health response, and Google’s AI search summaries now recommend we eat glue and rocks.
The promise of the early web—a space for connection, creativity, and community—has been overshadowed by corporate interests, algorithmic manipulation, and the commodification of our attention.
But the heart of the internet—the people who built communities, shared knowledge, and created art—has never disappeared. If we’re to reclaim the web, to rediscover the good internet, we need to celebrate, learn from, and amplify these pockets of joy.
Rediscover is a good word. Discovery depends on the entry point.
We start with the entry points designed for entrapment.
Should just avoid them. That’s hard, because their creators use all the casino-style and other means possible, since their power and profits depend on them functioning.
I’ve recently realized that all things I blamed on the Internet as it’s designed being obsolete, they are not caused by that. It’s not obsolete. It’s a system that can function well into the next millennium, even.
And even the Web as in year 2000.
Encryption, hashing, signatures, all the cryptography are the only qualitatively new thing.
But they can be applied to the old model, and it’s simple - we use a reserved range of v6 addresses and we map identifiers to them. An identifier is derived from person’s public key. Overlay networks are a thing.
We can do other things, say, publish user contacts and public keys in DNS. That allows secure store-and-forward communication over any service, not just trusted one, with encrypted messages.
The model itself allows bloody everything, people just don’t use it to the full extent.
The people who create for the sake of creativity are not doing it to be flashy or attract anyone or anything. The internet had a groundswell of people who want to make money, so here we are
This is probably a bit “I’m 14 and this is deep”, but I was thinking the other day about how “pull down to refresh” is weirdly similar to pulling a slot machine handle. 😬
I don’t think that was ever part of its design (didn’t the Tweetie dev invent it?), but still.