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.
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.
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
The internet has plenty of people who don’t want to spend their effort for others’ moneymaking.
All we need is a transparent and simple process of using the real system.
Registering a DNS record is still cumbersome and done only by technical people, just like making a simple webpage. Or hidden someplace hard to find in Yandex/Google/other web interfaces. Despite it not being hard.
Maybe some simpler tools are needed too - say, Geminispace is an example of one such.
But in general what’s hard is as hard as things that are now easy were. Just the same effort didn’t go there.
Say, it’s not a common thing now to register a DNS record like one person’s “internet identity” (just personal websites maybe), but if it were, would it be harder than registering an e-mail account or a phone number? And then, if the system were used as it should, the rest could be done without users troubling themselves. Navigating that “internet contact directory” like you do in Facebook, sending DMs like you do in Facebook, but over an Internet protocol (say, XMPP or something new using that contact functionality) by a native application, having forums and feeds and e-mail and filesharing without platforms. All via native applications just as easy to use as the social media we have.
OK, I’m sleepy. Just - it’s technically possible.