The Different Internets
Let's remember that the internet isn't always so bad.
The Teardown
Wednesday :: January 26th, 2021
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What we hear about today is an internet that has changed us forever, mainly for the worse. Facebook is a scourge, Instagram causes body image issues, and Twitter is full of flame wars. Google Search is increasingly full of in-search ads and less relevant. What is accurate information or not seems challenging to ascertain. But there are plenty of positive changes to life and society if you look a little deeper.
The Internet Changed My Life: Another Version
There aren't that many thought-provoking tear-jerker posts out there. Plenty of people write about personal experiences that are certainly capable of generating emotions. But, if you're like me, stories that describe and provoke actual memories from your younger years move the needle the most.
This post titled The Internet Changed My Life moved the needle:
I’ve seen multiple discussions online as to the negative effects of the internet on society. There’s definitely harmful content online. It makes me sad to see the internet being used as a tool to spread anger and hate, and to further the political divide, but today I’m going to share a personal story about how, in the late 90s and early 2000s, the internet changed my life.
There are lots of details in the article. Most of them differ from my own experiences, but the author’s ending thoughts resonated:
This [her post] is part of the story of how the internet changed my life for the better. I’m an early millennial and I was raised online. Through the internet, I found friends, support, and the human connection that I was lacking in real life. I also found valuable information that helped me help myself and sometimes help others. The key with information is always to effectively filter the good from the bad, which is a genuine life skill unto itself. My life today isn’t perfect, but it’s better than it’s ever been. My message to all the people out there who are struggling is to believe in yourself. If you help yourself and you let others help you, things are never hopeless.
The internet also changed my life. I’ll tell a different type of story.
The first computer we ever had in our house was a laptop that my dad brought home from work. I don't remember the exact year, but my guess is 1992 or so. The screen looked like this Siemens laptop screen from 1989, but the machine seemed hefty and more like this IBM Thinkpad from 1992. My brother and I took turns playing with the laptop after my dad finished whatever else he needed to do. Of course, the games were simple, but the early experience was entirely new and magical. As underpowered and spartan as it seems today, that laptop was fancy and fresh and not like any other toy or activity we otherwise had.
Not much longer after my parents purchased the first family computer. My dad's cousin was a computer enthusiast and recommended something reasonable at the time. If my memory serves me correctly, the machine had an i386 processor, part of Intel's 8086 and 8088 microprocessor families. We upgraded at some point to an i486 processor and also grabbed a copy of Windows 3.1.
This combination of hardware and software enabled many new things that are absolutely trivial today: multi-window desktop screens, drag-and-drop, graphical file managers, etc. As kids, my brother and I obviously cared less about those concepts, at least temporarily, and used the computer primarily for games. Some were new to windows, and others were already available through DOS (also Apple computers) like Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail.
Starting in the mid-1990s, the most critical application introduced to my developing and early teen brain was the web browser. You'll barely react to the concept in 2022, but it was a truly fantastic product in 1995. The premise was simple (in usage): navigate to a URL, and the browser displayed text and graphics organized using a markup language called HTML. HTML is still, today, what browsers use to render content when you visit a URL, but the details behind how that happens are far more sophisticated now than they were 25 years ago.
When I look back at this moment in time today, it's the first time I can clearly identify that my brain was unlocked, so to speak. I tinkered quite a bit with our computers before the web browser, but purely with hardware. I changed and upgraded various cards (e.g., graphics) in the machines if I determined we needed an upgrade and convinced my parents to loan me interest-free money. But the web browser unraveled lots of familiar routines in favor of new ones when paired with another piece of software, a gateway to access the internet. I'll use AOL as my example because I don't think my family had anything else in those early days.
Lots of my new routines revolved around activities that we take for granted today. Here’s a quick screenshot of the AOL interface to help you remember some of those activities:
Do you remember how magical this was? I do. I visited AOL Digital Cities (not pictured here). I created an entirely embarrassing but in-the-moment-gnarly screen-name: lilginzo16. And I maintained a buddy list.
The buddy list was the true revolution for me. I was an intermittently shy and socially anxious or outgoing kid. I can't tell you why to this day, but remember my first brushes with feelings of loneliness as early as 5th grade, or maybe even sooner. As I've written about, middle school opened up lots of potential new friendships but lots of obvious social chasms as well. You knew who had friends, and you knew who didn't. I thought I did, but it became increasingly evident that I didn't have many or any as I traversed grades six through eight. High school both improved and worsened the situation: I made some new friends early on, then essentially lost them all as the result of a nasty and untrue rumor, made another set of friends through my musical talent, and then near the end of high school lost some of them in a way as well.
In high school, I also learned how to talk to friends about things in a more intellectually engaging way. I suppose that happens to all kids at some point, but for me, it accelerated during the second half of high school as I was able to confide in and talk through lots of issues with at least a couple of friends. We would drive around and listen to music and talk. Yet the internet buddy list beckoned. I also made new friends on the internet.
Friends in this context differ from what I think about when I call someone a friend in my day-to-day life. Internet friends were acquaintances. Sometimes they were a member of the opposite sex, which is no surprise to most of you given that nearly all internet-enabled male behavior gravitates towards video games and more lustful activities. Don't forget that despite Facebook's evangelical desire to connect the world and make it a better place, it started as a glorified hot-or-not for Harvard students.
Suddenly and increasingly, I could express myself as I had not before. I talked about what was happening in my life in ways that never occurred in real life. I maintained a LiveJournal. And most importantly, I sometimes pretended to be someone else.
It's easy to look at something you're pretending to do from the adult lens and think it makes no sense. But at that time, it was easier to do something like that online and not fret about the repercussions. Suppose you were deathly shy in person but wanted to try instead to be an assertive person. That was possible through the lens of a chat with an internet buddy. Or maybe you took a picture that you didn't feel comfortable showing someone in person but wanted to share because you thought you looked cute. Your internet friends might've have showered you with praise and admiration.
So, yes, the growth-hacking that causes many addiction-like tendencies isn't always good. Doom-scrolling is wasteful in most circumstances. But the internet helped lots of people express themselves comfortably for the first time. It helped me discover new ways to build my personality and interests, despite many non-internet options. And it helped me get to the person I am today.
The Older/Newer Webs
Spending time on the internet in 2022 is a prioritization exercise. An incredible number of websites and millions of apps can add productively to your day or drown you in dopamine. During a typical day, you might find yourself flipping between NYTimes (or other major publication of your choice), Instagram, your inevitable emails, texts anxiously waiting for your approval, and maybe Twitter.
The latter is, these days, a weird world co-opted by whatever interest you've told Twitter you like because you've applied a heart to a post or follow an account. I've recently "liked" many posts about the internet and whether we are genuinely on the verge of a wave of decentralization. The Twitter interest graph now thinks I want to see posts that both support the notion that we are heading towards decentralization and that the whole movement is a complete scam.
I want to write about all of that at some point, but I'm recently thinking about it somewhat differently: remember when the internet was mostly just websites? The History of the Web posted an essay about, apparently, the first item that was ever purchased online:
If you happened to live in Santa Cruz in 1994 you could sit down at your computer, open up your favorite browser, and then go ahead and order a pizza online.
You could do all of this on PizzaNet, owned and operated by Pizza Hut. PizzaNet was an experiment that launched in the early 90’s, a way for Pizza Hut to test the waters and see if this World Wide Web thing had a real shot at a future. It was proposed by a particularly ambitious Pizza Hut owner in Santa Cruz, and developed by a few folks at a development shop known as Santa Cruz Operation (SCO).
I was twelve years old in 1994. My introduction to the web was just around the corner, likely 1996 at the latest. Most websites were pretty simple then. But it wasn't long after my introduction that I fully committed - teaching myself to program websites, learning how to edit my MySpace page, meeting and chatting with folks through AOL and other services.
The internet felt simpler then. Companies like Facebook and Google weren't the Goliaths they are today. They weren't thousands of frameworks and other tools to build websites like there are today. So, much of the learning that you could accomplish through the internet happened with the help of relatively simple websites and less obvious ways of accessing those websites. There were lots of very engaged and friendly communities as well.
The early uncluttered and raw feeling of everything was the magic of the earlier internet. It's easy to look back and see that we were in the midst of the early years of something that would fundamentally transform life and business forever.
Today, many people are rushing into the "new" internet - colloquially called Web3 - partly because it looks and feels a lot like the early internet. There are also scams. Lots of scams. So many scams that the whole movement seems entirely like bullshit. Yet, it's hard to look at the hysteria over the next web (3 not 2) and not feel the nostalgia for the earlier internet. We don't really know what much of this energy will become, create, change, or destroy. The only certain puzzle piece is this: digital assets, i.e., "tokens," are here to stay. Everything is still up for grabs. (Note: topic to come back to soon!)
This all might seem quite controversial, but I think it's pretty cool. It reminds me of when I was in middle school and high school, and none of us really knew what the internet would do or look like or transform. It was an early and exciting time to take a risk, perhaps an enormous one, but also to potentially reap the rewards. Something new and exciting or scummy that is brewing now will probably seem totally normal 5-10 years from now, and maybe sooner.