The Internet Is Much Better Than Its Early Days
Nostalgia can't hide the grim truth about the early Internet
I sometimes see people having nostalgia for the early days of the Internet.
The days of BBSes, Dial-ups, early forums, and their online communities…The period from the late 90s until the late 2000s…
They say everything was much better then. That the quality of people online was much higher. Interactions were of higher quality. There wasn’t any misinformation.
And they say everything is much worse today. That there is crappy content all over the Internet, short video sites, meaningless posts, misinformation, fake news, influencers, monetization. Everything has gone downhill.
But all of it is rosy nostalgia.
They forget how the Internet really was back then.
A One Way Street
Gigantic corporations of the old establishment dominated the Internet back then.
Not even ‘upstarts’ like Google, Twitter, and the likes. With their new culture, the new way of work, and the new way of doing things.
For sure none of the things like ‘User-oriented technology’, ‘communities’, ‘ecosystems’. Which every ‘big tech’ company seems to be focused on, for empowering people on the Internet.
These old establishment corporations used to run the Internet like the society and economy of the late 1990s — a one-way street in which the people (us) were the passive ‘consumers’… Whose job was to shut up and buy or consume whatever content or service the outlets of those big corporations had.
God forbid an ordinary person like you and me to dare make a comment under an article published by a major news corporation’s outlet. There weren’t even such comment forms.
The very possibility of the ordinary person having a right to say something about what the ‘respectable’ corporations were saying and doing was an unimaginable thing.
What? User-generated content?
Hahahahahahahaaa!
Are you crazy? Who would read content created by ordinary people?
Everybody knows that content creation is something that can be done only by proper writers from the ‘right’ socioeconomic background or the ‘right’ Ivy League college with the ‘right’ social connections.
So shut up and read this New York Times article…
Then you can go back to your small community forum on the fringe of the Internet and dabble in whatever drivel you small people are talking about these days…
Meanwhile, these gigantic old school corporations from the old world can set whatever public agenda they want, sell whatever they want, including the next war, just like how it always was.
That was the real Internet of the ‘good old days’. The big, actual Internet outside the community forums on the fringes…
Today’s Internet Is A People’s Internet Compared to That
Me, writing these lines. Being able to reach you. You, being able to hear my voice. Even being able to reply back.
Today all of these are possible. Today, all of these are commonplace.
Today, we, the people, can set the agenda not only on the Internet but also in society.
Today, we can just launch an online business and try our luck while we would have to do tens of thousands of dollars just to set up a small website that could sell a few products to a few people every other day.
A lot of the old corporations are either dead or had to adapt. The ‘new’ corporations, the ‘upstarts’, the ones who came with their ideas like ‘user-first’, ‘community’, ‘people’, won the Internet. And they killed the malicious dinosaurs and their old ways.
When people have an opinion or sentiment, corporations are obliged to react and change. Not the other way around like how it was before.
Today’s Internet is a people-powered Internet when compared to the old, nostalgic Internet which still belonged to old-world corporations which should have been dead long ago.
True, it also allows the worst among us to channel their thoughts, ranging from nonsensical conspiracy theories to lies and hate, but it's not like these people did not exist back in the old days of the Internet. They just did not have a voice — like how we, the majority, did not have one. Now that everyone has a voice, you can hear the ugly voices too.
But it goes without saying that everyone having a voice is much better than no one having a voice.
Even if only because of that, the Internet is now a much, much better place than compared to its early days.
But of course, it's not only because of that — today the possibilities on the Internet are endless: We can share knowledge, spread news, launch projects & protests, do crowdfunding, make a living as creators, collaborate on software, influence politics, and even create large-scale, democratic, egalitarian economic organizations that can finally challenge what is left of the old-world corporations.
Today’s Internet is a heaven compared to the old days…
…
Subscribe for free to hear when I post next time: