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>Before this decade, the Internet was by and large an aristocracy of liberal, competent tech workers discussing their career and their interests. This doesn't

by hnaccy 8y ago

>Before this decade, the Internet was by and large an aristocracy of liberal, competent tech workers discussing their career and their interests. This doesn't match my experience at all.

reaperducer 8y ago
This doesn't match my experience at all. Ditto. I remember when the internet was apolitical. Not liberal, not conservative. That only became widespread in the last five or ten years. Before this decade, the internet was mostly nerds working to solve problems involving math and science, not social studies and history. Then the nerds got rich and started caring less about technology, and more about “changing the world.”
- orev 8y ago
  Small “L” liberal means either “open to new behavior or values” or “seeking knowledge”. That’s not (or shouldn’t be) political.
  - Analemma_ 8y ago
    There is no question more intensely political than the question of which values people think “shouldn’t be political”.
    - matthewwiese 8y ago
      That reads more like a tautology than a genuine insight.
    - yesenadam 8y ago
      That's the most interesting, thought-provoking comment I've read on here for a long while. (I bother saying that, because it's been, amazingly, downvoted and accused of being closer to saying nothing than anything.)
- RRRA 8y ago
  The internet apolitical? When what where... Before DNS?
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    Since DNS is didn't go live until 1984, and didn't hit Windows until 1987, pretty much. I was thinking pre-web. When most personal communication over the internet was via e-mail, usenet, and finger. I don't remember ever seeing politics on Gopher, but I could have just missed that.
    - alxlaz 8y ago
      Maybe not political debates per se, but I definitely remember many posters' political views being easy to decipher behind their USENET posts.
      - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
        In the late 90s, parts of Usenet and IRC made modern Twitter look like a polite lunch date with your accountant.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > I was thinking pre-web. When most personal communication over the internet was via e-mail, usenet, and finger. Even aside from overtly political newsgroups like talk.politics.misc, and talk.abortion, politics was all over Usenet.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  I think the internet has been "political" for longer than that. The development of blogging systems like Movable Type and then Wordpress in the early millennium gave rise to some extremely popular and vigorous blogs like Little Green Footballs. Some of these got so much traffic that suddenly their proprietors could live off the money earned just by casually sharing their political views (thanks to some affiliate links here and there). The big political change of more recent years, I would say, is political discussion overflowing expressly political fora and contaminating pretty much everywhere because of how social media functions. A band or author will share some entirely innocuous, non-political post on their social media pages, but the comment threads below them can easily descend into a shitshow of partisan quarreling.
  - pacala 8y ago
    We could blissfully ignore that Little Green Footballs / Daily Kos / etc. ever existed and go on with our lives. Enter Facebook / Twitter and their hunger for "engagement" and all of a sudden inflammatory political rants pop in everyone's news feed multiple times a day. Advertisers are happy, technocrats are happy, people are connected, what's not to love?
  - AmericanChopper 8y ago
    >I think the internet has been "political" for longer than that. I would agree with that. Freedom of expression seemed to be a foundational value of the internet when I was growing up, but perhaps that was a less political idea back then. Nowadays, the top comment in this thread is lamenting that we have allowed people who don’t have ‘the correct values’ to participate in the internet.
  - pasabagi 8y ago
    I think the west has grown more political, to be honest. Until the last few years, the choices in basically every developed country has been between 'red neoliberal' and 'blue neoliberal'. Predictably, voters were bored. Recently, there have started to be genuinely different options on the ballot sheet, on both ends of the spectrum.
  - syshum 8y ago

by hnaccy 8y ago

>Before this decade, the Internet was by and large an aristocracy of liberal, competent tech workers discussing their career and their interests. This doesn't match my experience at all.

reaperducer 8y ago

This doesn't match my experience at all. Ditto. I remember when the internet was apolitical. Not liberal, not conservative. That only became widespread in the last five or ten years. Before this decade, the internet was mostly nerds working to solve problems involving math and science, not social studies and history. Then the nerds got rich and started caring less about technology, and more about “changing the world.”

orev 8y ago
Small “L” liberal means either “open to new behavior or values” or “seeking knowledge”. That’s not (or shouldn’t be) political.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  There is no question more intensely political than the question of which values people think “shouldn’t be political”.
  - matthewwiese 8y ago
    That reads more like a tautology than a genuine insight.
  - yesenadam 8y ago
    That's the most interesting, thought-provoking comment I've read on here for a long while. (I bother saying that, because it's been, amazingly, downvoted and accused of being closer to saying nothing than anything.)
RRRA 8y ago
The internet apolitical? When what where... Before DNS?
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Since DNS is didn't go live until 1984, and didn't hit Windows until 1987, pretty much. I was thinking pre-web. When most personal communication over the internet was via e-mail, usenet, and finger. I don't remember ever seeing politics on Gopher, but I could have just missed that.
  - alxlaz 8y ago
    Maybe not political debates per se, but I definitely remember many posters' political views being easy to decipher behind their USENET posts.
    - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
      In the late 90s, parts of Usenet and IRC made modern Twitter look like a polite lunch date with your accountant.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > I was thinking pre-web. When most personal communication over the internet was via e-mail, usenet, and finger. Even aside from overtly political newsgroups like talk.politics.misc, and talk.abortion, politics was all over Usenet.
Mediterraneo10 8y ago
I think the internet has been "political" for longer than that. The development of blogging systems like Movable Type and then Wordpress in the early millennium gave rise to some extremely popular and vigorous blogs like Little Green Footballs. Some of these got so much traffic that suddenly their proprietors could live off the money earned just by casually sharing their political views (thanks to some affiliate links here and there). The big political change of more recent years, I would say, is political discussion overflowing expressly political fora and contaminating pretty much everywhere because of how social media functions. A band or author will share some entirely innocuous, non-political post on their social media pages, but the comment threads below them can easily descend into a shitshow of partisan quarreling.
- pacala 8y ago
  We could blissfully ignore that Little Green Footballs / Daily Kos / etc. ever existed and go on with our lives. Enter Facebook / Twitter and their hunger for "engagement" and all of a sudden inflammatory political rants pop in everyone's news feed multiple times a day. Advertisers are happy, technocrats are happy, people are connected, what's not to love?
- AmericanChopper 8y ago
  >I think the internet has been "political" for longer than that. I would agree with that. Freedom of expression seemed to be a foundational value of the internet when I was growing up, but perhaps that was a less political idea back then. Nowadays, the top comment in this thread is lamenting that we have allowed people who don’t have ‘the correct values’ to participate in the internet.
- pasabagi 8y ago
  I think the west has grown more political, to be honest. Until the last few years, the choices in basically every developed country has been between 'red neoliberal' and 'blue neoliberal'. Predictably, voters were bored. Recently, there have started to be genuinely different options on the ballot sheet, on both ends of the spectrum.
- syshum 8y ago