A Love Letter to the Old Internet

I got online when Mosaic was a new browser. Usenet and Gopher were big. It was more than a Wild West. It was a Wild Space Frontier.

It was also the most meritocratic, egalitarian idea-sharing space ever created.

Why? Constraints. Specifically, bandwidth constraints meant the early Internet was largely text-based. A few people had T1 or T3 access, but web pages built for everyone had to load fast, which meant text and low-res graphics.

There were few visual cues or status markers. If you posted online, no one had to know your gender, if you had gray or black or blue hair, how attractive or ugly you were, where you lived, worked, went to school or grew up, whether you were disabled or in the NFL. You were judged based solely on your words: the ideas you put on-screen.

Because nothing is perfect, English was the Internet’s primary language and a barrier to entry. (This is still true: More than half of websites are written in English, though Google Translate helps a lot.)

Even with its drawbacks, the old Internet allowed you to compartmentalize or unify your identity as it suited you. Your persona with fellow X-Files fans could be different from your persona with fellow college students, which could be different from your persona with close friends and family. That’s similar to real life, where we tend to show our truer selves to families and close friends rather than acquaintances or coworkers.

The Internet has transformed from a refuge for unvarnished self-expression into a reinforcement of social judgment.

Now the Internet is a dossier. A quick glance at a Facebook profile provides some or all of the following cues: name, age, gender, race, attractiveness, hometown, current location, academic history and work history. There is unprecedented opportunity to make 50 conscious and unconscious judgments about another person before ever speaking to them, let alone getting to know them.

Moreover, Facebook has compromised the ability to compartmentalize, putting dampers on free exchange of ideas. If my fellow students or future employers can see what I post to a Sherlock fan page, for example, I might be a little less likely to let my freak flag fly. Other people also might be a little less likely. In the end, the collective output is a lot less interesting.

The Internet has transformed from a refuge for unvarnished self-expression into a reinforcement of social judgment.

Our idea network may not grow at the same rate as our friend network.

Part of the problem is that the web has transformed from an organic network of links with excellent discovery capabilities into a series of walled gardens and semi-closed loops that tend to echo our existing ideas and opinions back to us. This issue has been discussed in several excellent articles on Medium and elsewhere.

Algorithms track what we like and share on various social networks, then show us more things like that. The things our friends like and share also influence what we see. When we click on and like those things, we reinforce the walls even more.

Friend networks tend to grow larger over time, which should introduce new ideas and discovery possibilities. But in general, people we add as friends tend to like similar things as we do, so our idea network may not grow at the same rate as our friend network.

Walled gardens may be pleasant places where we feel at home and supported. But they’re not frontiers, and they’re not fertile ground for discovery or growth, at least not the way they work right now. It’s possible that if we’d all ended up on Second Life instead of Facebook the world would be a better place, but there’s no way to know that.

Linux is a brilliant case study.

What we do know is that the Internet worked well before walled gardens of any stripe took over. At this point, with billions of people committed to walled-garden platforms, it would take monumental effort to shift back toward an open, decentralized model. But it is possible.

Linux is a brilliant case study for this.

In the 1990s, it seemed far-fetched that any company could successfully challenge Microsoft’s dominance. A company is a singular entity. It can be targeted, acquired, competed with and outsmarted according to easily understandable rules.

Linux was not a company. It started in obscurity as a Finnish grad student’s side project, made freely available for years before it evolved into usefulness. As it became more useful, companies and consortiums built business models around it. None of them owned Linux, though. The community owned it. Linux was a project that became a movement, not a typical product or service.

First it competed with Unix, and then it competed with Microsoft, especially on the server side.

As an Internet user, what can you do? If new projects arise that are more open, decentralized, community-owned, interest-based and user-driven: Use them. Help improve them, if you have the skill set. Tell other people about them.

In the end, it’s the people who use the Internet who determine how it will function.

I tweet @codexjourneys and blog at http://brilliantlyweird.com.