That world never existed. Yes, pockets did - IT professionals with broadband lines and spare kit hosting IRC servers and phpBB forums from their homes free of charge, a few VC-funded companies offering idealistic visions of the net until funding ran dry (RIP CoHost) - but once the web became privatized, it was all in service of the bottom line by companies. Web 2.0 onwards was all about centralization, surveillance, advertising, and manipulation of the populace at scale - and that intent was never really a secret to those who bothered to pay attention. While the world was reeling from Cambridge Analytica, us pre-1.0 farts who cut our teeth on Telnet and Mosaic were just kind of flabbergasted that ya'll were surprised by overtly obvious intentions.
That doesn't mean it has to always be this way, though. Back when I had more trust in the present government and USPS, I mused on how much of a game changer it might be for the USPS to provide free hosting and e-mail to citizens, repurposing the glut of unused real estate into smaller edge compute providers. Everyone gets a web server and 5GB of storage, with 1A Protections letting them say and host whatever they like from their little Post Office Box. Everyone has an e-mail address tied to their real identity, with encryption and security for digital mail just like the law provides for physical mail. I still think the answer is about enabling more people to engage with the internet on their selective terms (including the option of disengagement), rather than the present psychological manipulation everyone engages in to keep us glued to our screens, tethered to our phones, and constantly uploading new data to advertisers and surveillance firms alike.
But the nostalgic view that the internet used to be different is just that: rose-tinted memories of a past that never really existed. The first step to fixing this mess is acknowledging its harm.
I don’t think the parent was saying that everyone’s intentions were pure until recently, but rather that naked greed wasn’t cool before, but now it is.
The Internet has changed a lot over the decades, and it did used to be different, with the differences depending on how many years you go back.
Gavin is a perfect example of this, tho fictional. "Doing good" was a route to personal success and domination; Gavin under a Trump admin would have dropped the act, just as others have done.
What we are observing is the effects of profit maximization when the core value to the user is already fulfilled. It's a type of pathological optimization that is useful at the beginning but eventually pathologizes.
When we already have efficient food production that drove down costs and increased profits (a good thing), what else is there for companies to optimize for, if not loading it with sugar, putting it in cheap plastic, bamboozling us with ads?
This same dynamic plays out in every industry. Markets are a great thing when the low hanging fruit hasn't been picked, because the low hanging fruit is usually "cut the waste, develop basic tech, be efficient". But eventually the low hanging fruit becomes "game human's primitive reward circuits".
I have to agree. That's one of the dangers of today's world; the risk of believing that we never had a better one. Yes, the altruism of yesteryear was partially born of convenience, but it still existed. And I remember people actually believing it was important and acting as such. Today's cynicism and selfishness seem a lot more arbitrary to me. There's absolutely no reason things have to be this way. Collectively, we have access to more wealth and power now than we ever did previously. By all accounts, things ought to be great. It seems we just need the current generation of leaders to re-learn a few lessons from history.
You and I are on the same path, just at different points in the journey. Your response is very similar to my own tone and position a decade ago, trying to celebrate what we had before in an attempt to shepherd others towards a better future together. Time wore down that naivety into the cynicism of today, because I’ve come to realize that those celebrations simply coddle those who do not wish to put in the effort for change and yearn for a return to past glories.
We should acknowledge the past flatly and objectively for what it was and spend more time building that future, than listening to the victors of the past brag and boast, content to wallow in their accomplishments instead of rejoining contributors to tomorrow. The good leaders of yesteryear have stepped aside in lieu of championing newer, younger visionaries; those still demanding respect for what they did fifty years ago in circumstances we can only dream about, are part of the problem.
Sure it has. For every Woz, there was a Jobs; for every Linus, a Bill (Gates). For every starry-eyed engineer or developer who just wants to help people, there are business people who will pervert it into an empire and jettison them as soon as practical. For every TED, there’s a Davos; for every DEFCON, there’s a glut of vendor-specific conferences.
We should champion the good people who did the good things and managed to resist the temptations of the poisoned apple, but we shouldn’t hold an entire city on a pedestal because of nostalgia alone. Nobody, and no entity, is that deserving.
I would argue that cynicism is born of attempting to assert accountability and finding repeated harm from said attempts, rather than some intrinsic pre-existing apathy or laziness.
I think most people will snitch on bad behavior as children. However, our systems often allow other children to discipline the snitch, rather than correct the negative behavior the snitch raised. We see it in adult systems as well: whistleblowers often end up with substantially shorter and poorer lives for attempting to assert accountability or consequences on those who committed them, while the perpetrators often enjoy lives of immense wealth and reward regardless of the whistleblower's actions.
If you want people to stop being "lazy" and "cynical", then you have to support them when systems turn against them. In my experience, none of ya'll actually want to also walk out of work when layoffs happen following a profitable quarter for no other reason than to juice the share price, none of ya'll also want to walk off the job because your employer is taking contracts from authoritarian regimes, none of ya'll also want to put yourselves in the line of fire and risk harm over your purported values.
Don't blame us cynics when we have the battle scars showing our commitment to a better tomorrow. What have you done to prevent cynicism?
I think it did and still does today - every single time an engineer sees a problem an starts an open-source project to solve it - not out of any profit motive and without any monetization strategy in mind, but just because they can, and they think the world would be better off.
Coincidentally, and as another pre-1.0 fart myself :-) -- one who remembers when Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib / Dream Machines" was still just a wild hope -- I was thinking of something similar the other day (not USPS-specific for hosting, but I like that).
It was sparked by going to a video conference "Hyperlocal Heroes: Building Community Knowledge in the Digital Age" hosted by New_ Public:
https://newpublic.org/
"Reimagine social media: We are researchers, engineers, designers, and community leaders working together to explore creating digital public spaces where people can thrive and connect."
A not-insignificant amount of time in that one-hour teleconference was spent related to funding models for local social media and local reporting.
Afterwards, I got to thinking. The USA spent literally trillions of dollars on the (so-many-problematical-things-about-it-I-better-stop-now) Iraq war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
"According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report published in October 2007, the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers a total of $2.4 trillion by 2017 including interest."
Or, from a different direction, the USA spends about US$200 billion per year on mostly-billboard-free roads:
https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
"In 2021, state and local governments provided three-quarters of highway and road funding ($154 billion) and federal transfers accounted for $52 billion (25 percent)."
That's about US$700 per person per year on US roads.
So, clearly huge amounts of money are available in the USA if enough people think something is important. Imagine if a similar amount of money went to funding exactly what you outlined -- a free web presence for distributed social media -- with an infrastructure funded by tax dollars instead of advertisements. Isn't a healthy social media system essential to 21st century online democracy with public town squares?
And frankly such a distributed social media ecosystem in the USA might be possible for at most a tenth of what roads cost, like perhaps US$70 per person per year (or US$20 billion per year)?
Yes, there are all sorts of privacy and free speech issues to work through -- but it is not like we don't have those all now with the advertiser-funded social media systems we have. So, it is not clear to me that such a system would be immensely worse than what we have.
But what do I know? :-) Here was a previous big government suggestion be me from 2010 -- also mostly ignored (until now 15 years later the USA is in political crisis over supply chain dependency and still isn't doing anything very related to it yet):
"Build 21000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA"
https://web.archive.org/web/20100708160738/http://pcast.idea...
"Being able to make things is an important part of prosperity, but that capability (and related confidence) has been slipping away in the USA. The USA needs more large neighborhood shops with a lot of flexible machine tools. The US government should fund the construction of 21,000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA at a cost of US$50 billion, places where any American can go to learn about and use CNC equipment like mills and lathes and a variety of other advanced tools and processes including biotech ones. That is one for every town and county in the USA. These shops might be seen as public extensions of local schools, essentially turning the shops of public schools into more like a public library of tools. This project is essential to US national security, to provide a technologically literate populace who has learned about post-scarcity technology in a hands-on way. The greatest challenge our society faces right now is post-scarcity technology (like robots, AI, nanotech, biotech, etc.) in the hands of people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity (whether in big organizations or in small groups). This project would help educate our entire society about the potential of these technologies to produce abundance for all."
That doesn't mean it has to always be this way, though. Back when I had more trust in the present government and USPS, I mused on how much of a game changer it might be for the USPS to provide free hosting and e-mail to citizens, repurposing the glut of unused real estate into smaller edge compute providers. Everyone gets a web server and 5GB of storage, with 1A Protections letting them say and host whatever they like from their little Post Office Box. Everyone has an e-mail address tied to their real identity, with encryption and security for digital mail just like the law provides for physical mail. I still think the answer is about enabling more people to engage with the internet on their selective terms (including the option of disengagement), rather than the present psychological manipulation everyone engages in to keep us glued to our screens, tethered to our phones, and constantly uploading new data to advertisers and surveillance firms alike.
But the nostalgic view that the internet used to be different is just that: rose-tinted memories of a past that never really existed. The first step to fixing this mess is acknowledging its harm.