The Promise
On April 30th, 1993, a guy named Tim launched the World Wide Web into the public domain. This is commonly seen as the birth of the internet, which is a lovely thought, but isn’t strictly true. The internet had existed for a full ten years prior to that, but had no common standard, which is engineering speak for “it existed but was impossible to use”. This announcement was about how the recently developed standard, the nervous system of the internet, would be free to use. Like most other things on the internet, no one cared about it until it was free. It’s odd to me that we don’t celebrate the date.
It was a lovely spring Friday. Informer was all over the radio, Indecent Proposal was number one at the box office, and some guy named Tim had changed the world just in time for the weekend. The fact that the number one movie in the world on WWW day was about a billionaire using his unfathomable wealth to buy sex from a working class couple was an irony lost on us at the time.
That same Friday, I was a sophomore at Mount Vernon Township High School, class of 1995, Let’s Go Rams. I had no idea that the universe in which I would one day make my living, and that would be responsible for giving me everything I would ever get in my adult life, had been created. I was busy not doing well in school and trying to figure out the best method of being extremely poor and fifteen at the same time.
By the time I graduated I was aware of the internet and the promises we’d been made about it. We could communicate with anyone, anywhere, at any time. Even better, everything was free. Knowledge was free, communication was free, and even the porn was free. Best of all, it was ours. We could do whatever we wanted with it. We could say anything, share anything, learn anything, and all of it was entirely within our control. You could make a little space for yourself, free of gatekeepers and available to everyone in the world at any time.
This idea can still be found in the basic DNA of the web, and is what originally drew me to the technology. Anyone could publish anything. Who needed books and publishers and editors anymore if you could just bypass all of that and get your greasy little thoughts into the heads of everyone in the world at the push of a button? Could we do this with audio and video too one day? Were we all Walt Disney now?
While a lovely idea, this promise immediately ran into viability issues. Our first problem was with the “free” part. Anything that exists incurs costs. Even a rock sitting in a pile of other rocks has to persist from one moment to another, so must therefore be a useful enough part of the rock pile to not get replaced by a building, or a car, or something else that would like to use that space. Any time spent building things on the internet would be uncompensated. Add to that the computer you needed, the costs related to renting space on the other computers used to serve up your free content, the time and money spent learning how to make these computers do what you wanted them to do in the first place, the other assorted domain, design, and production costs inherent in this activity, and things very quickly proved to be substantially less free than was advertised.
Plus it was fussy. It took me years to learn the craft of web development. No normal person had time for that sort of thing, unless they happened to go to college in 1995 for Radio, Television and Film at a school without a Radio, Television and Film department and was looking for something to do in between drinking binges.
This is how, after being handed boundless intellectual freedom, we handed it right back again. We needed funding to produce things, and that meant getting it from the people you were producing things for. It also fundamentally shifted who those people were, but that is a discussion for another time.
Also, since putting things on the internet required expertise most people didn’t have, we started leaning on group posting solutions, where some other company would facilitate our communication, sell us ads to pay for their super yachts, and spare us the burden of having to bother with knowing how anything worked. As we live in a world where there are fewer nice people than mean ones, this meant we also needed some gatekeeping and moderation after all. The internet is made of people, people are complicated, and anything we ever engage in as a group has no choice but to eventually become a perfect reflection of who we are. Most societies aren’t planned. They grow organically out of the process of the present becoming the past. We needed things then, we need different things now, and the place where all of this need was met grows around the residue this process leaves behind. The internet is no different.
This is how our space became Myspace. As we know, this all worked out for the best, 100% good no notes, and we never ran into friction again. We didn’t want the original promise, as it was boring and hard. We wanted an easier version where we could yell at each other anonymously, as opposed to real life, where you risk someone punching you in the nose if you act like an asshole. We wanted to buy cheap products and argue, and that is the world we made. When given the opportunity to make ourselves a better world, we declined, so that we could remake the old one over again but cheaper.
The thing is, I miss the original promise. I want the product that fifteen year old was sold in 1993. I was looking forward to the new marketplace of ideas, but didn’t expect that marketplace to look quite so much the suburban malls it would eventually drive to obsolescence. I understand why that promise was broken the instant it was made. I should, as I’ve spent my entire professional career helping break it. My friends and I built this mall on the promise that we could someday have our own spaces in it. Most of us just never bothered to do it.
I’m a middle aged man now, and like many middle aged men, I’m circling back to all of my old unfulfilled promises, seeing if I can reap any fruit from these long abandoned orchards. I’ve never seen Indecent Proposal, but the same weekend that movie came out we entered into a morally questionable contract of our own, and I’m owed a debt. I made my first website in 1995, and have been making them for countless people on the road from then until now, hoping I could one day become my own benefactor. I fulfilled my end of the deal, and now it’s time for the internet to pay its debt to me.
This brings me to this website. I want to celebrate the original promise of the internet. Not this mean, cold, violent internet we have today, but the unrealistic, impractical, pointlessly noisy version I originally signed up for. I don’t want to sell you anything. I don’t particularly care if you read this or not. The only requirement this space has is to exist. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that real freedom on the internet can only be obtained when you let go of your need for attention. Just because you want to say something doesn’t mean that someone has to hear it. This entire exercise is to try to prove that if a tree falls in the forest unobvserved, that it still made a sound.
That’s the promise I was made, and the one I intend to keep in my little slice of our global mall. I want my small, out of the way corner on the upper floor, with no traffic or bother to get in the way of my patented brand of nonsense, and that’s what you can expect around here. You aren’t invited, but you are welcome. Let’s see what, if anything, I manage to do with it.