What Happened to the New Internet?

tags

World Wide Web

Notes

A Brief History of the New Internet

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free-flowing, ideologically-supercharged investment capital captured the attention of young technologists who otherwise would have carried the torch of the P2P web forward. In crypto, an entire generation of alienated tech workers saw potential to have their cake (create a better, decentralized internet) and eat it too (get very wealthy).

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the broader new internet movement, which had become nearly inseparable with crypto, was left stranded in a place it never intended to go.

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Personal computing companies like Apple, which, relative to the search and social media companies, didn't have their fingers in the honeypot of adtech, particularly espoused their newfangled pro-consumer morals.

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For some, tech's second order role in gentrifying the urban core of the US was just as problematic as its privacy practices.

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A Personal History of the New Internet

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Romanticization

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It paid ok; it felt meaningful enough. Life was good, but it distinctly wasn't great.

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Even if this logic wasn't bought into, most of us in Learning Gardens at the very least entertained the thing for no other reason than it being new and interesting.

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Professionalization

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The increasingly accepted stance towards profit-seeking behavior that came along with DeFi attracted a new crop of converts who cared less about cypherpunks and the Decentralized Web and more about personal wealth.

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It had all the euphoria of a gold rush and all the self esteem of high tech meritocracy.

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The feeling that all my friends were getting fabulously wealthy and I wasn't had some effect on me, no matter how much I wrote it off as delusional. It still does.

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Disorientation

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'governance' in the context of a cryptocurrency trading protocol was something of a misnomer. There wasn't actually a whole lot to govern, nor an engaged constituency of voters.

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Like a lot of software work, there was very little detailed discussion about the philosophy behind why we were doing the things we were doing. The catch-all banner of 'decentralization' was justification enough.

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It's actually laughable in hindsight – the thought that a crypto currency trading website could have ever been included in the same sentence as social change. But this is how I saw it, how we saw it, and how people we trusted described it to us. It's important to acknowledge no matter how naive it might feel in hindsight.

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What Happened to the New Internet, Redux

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In mainly focussing on the big talk and easy wins that can come from rethinking software and end-user experience, New Internet practitioners set themselves up to eventually run into infrastructural impasses. There's only so much you can change if Amazon still owns the server and Apple still makes the browsing device.

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Despite growing increasingly unpopular amongst young people, the old internet never really ceded significant power over the last decade.

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Reclaiming the New Internet

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pursuing something as open-ended as internet reform requires intentional scoping and goal-setting.

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I don’t mean to entertain a tired, ad hominem trope about the difference between architects and engineers, or ‘wordcels and shape rotators.’ Clearly, both of these jobs are important, as are the people who are able to do them. An idea that fails to consider the constraints of the real world is nothing more than vaporware. An engineering solution that prioritizes breakneck progress over thoughtfulness can easily recreate entrenched mistakes of the past. I’m arguing for more than just balance between these two dispositions. There needs to be respect for the power they command, legibility into the psychologies that undergird them and sociologies that they feed into, awareness of the positions they occupy along the lifecycle of a product, and most importantly, ability for their mutual translation.

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The New Internet must find a way to be more pragmatic about the business of technology creation – especially the costs of labor and low-level infrastructure. Efforts to reform the internet must reckon with the frustratingly simple fact that its designers and users both can have perverse, selfish relationships to money.

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Light Phone

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Autonomous Worlds

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Spawning

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Are.na

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the most compelling solutions in the short history of the New Internet have been those that are the most commonplace, slow, ambient, and avoidant of hype. Products that actually work and will continue to.

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