i might be writing an essay about the internet
i’m tired of career internet users posting thinkpieces like “the internet used to be good! now it’s bad! we can make it good again!”
no, you can’t, an essay in three parts :—
• you say the internet was good? what made it good? more importantly, WHO?
• what happened to those people?
• what is stopping that from happening to those people again?
no, career internet user, the people who made the internet good are not you
the people who made the internet good are not here anymore, and you can not bring them back
do you really think you and the people who read your bland {career internet user}⹀level takes are a workable substitute?
the thing is, i mean, the other thing, is if you really think that the tools and technologies which made the web great never left us, why do you speak about the death of the web as primarily a technological phenomenon? if we have the tools, but have all collectively decided to stop using them, surely there is something else going on? something important?
« “I used to joke that the same student might be able to burn down a Bank of America branch in 1970 and still successfully sign on as an executive trainee at Bank of America in 1971,” said Rick Perlstein, a historian who has chronicled midcentury American politics.
“Today, anxiety about achieving economic security after graduation is far more pressing,” he added. “The consequences for identification and arrest are, simply, much greater.” »
@Lady The people who made the internet good, who keep the good parts alive, and who can make it good again are the people who:
"""
This is a little project to build a web 1.5 posting board. The community is currently using an ancient bulletin-board system, several members have been extolling the virtues of a PHPbb setup with subforums and whatnot, and I opened my big fat mouth and said "Hey! This looks like a perfect use for the Model-View-Controller design pattern!"
I may come to regret this.
"""
(The project has 6 total contributors and 7 total issues ever opened. Its most recent commit is 4 months ago. It has as far as I know a single instance running, serving a single community. It has been serving that community for 12 years.)
@Lady (There are many different people not like that at all who also made the internet good differently. This is only one person who made the internet good, not all, most, or even a representative sample of them.)
@gaditb i agree and disagree. the part of me that is a tech worker is on board with this take 100%; the internet is made up of lots of people with little passion technologies they built or hosted that served little niches but all interlinked together as part of a broader Web. absolutely
but i think this is a biased perspective. the internet was/is not good because of its technology. it was never good because of its technology. the only reason the technology mattered at all is because it hosted people and culture. who were those people, and what drove that culture? isn’t it presumptuous to say we can bring the culture of the 90s back as tho it never left? and when you look at all the people who don’t have tech backgrounds who used to have the time, energy, and freedom to contribute to the Web: how many still have the time? the energy? the freedom? they, not the technologists, were the source of what mattered
it was your apathy that got us in this situation, and now you think you can save us from it? you, who can’t even properly name what was lost