6 ms·

I wanna share a thought I had about this a couple years ago. I'm 33, so I was 14 in 1994, the first time I got onto the web. It was as bare bones as it got.

I wanna share a thought I had about this a couple years ago. I'm 33, so I was 14 in 1994, the first time I got onto the web. It was as bare bones as it got. I think I beat the IMG tag by a few months, maybe. Anyways, don't hold me to facts here, I am just imparting a general time frame. The idea of the Internet, and the world wide web, was terribly abstract, new, confusing, delightful. It made wizards of us that could navigate it. As a burgeoning geek in desperate need of a personal identity, this digital playground was an infinite resource to push against. Each chance encounter with an online stranger a blank slate. It was exotic and alluring and exciting. During this era, a huge swath of us all were experiencing this at the same time. It was an overlap of our youth, the loss of innocence, and the explosion of this new universe. It was a hell of a drug. And we got addicted to the newness of it all. There's a word for this. Neophilia. And this concept, I feel, best describes the ennui I have felt for years now, the booming homogeny the web has turned into. The web has long since succeeded, but we were children of the laboratory. We lost our home and we've been trying, in vain, to find a new one ever since. I can't believe I am alone in this sensation.

tdec 13y ago
You're not. Happy seeking !
alan_cx 13y ago
Im 41, I might have been mucking around with the internet before you, and while a hell of a lot is fantastic about the internet now, yeah, Im kinda lost and homeless too. Know what you mean. Not to say the internet , or web is or has gone wrong, just kinda forgotten something very important, very vital. What Neocities is doing is good, and I hope it works, but I'm not sure how this addresses that our, er, alienation (not sure if that is the right word) though. I read that they want to, and that is good, but I don't see anything they offer that really does that. What if we had some sort of SubWeb (have I just invented that word? I really like the sound of it!!!) which you have to use the command line to access? :)
- digitalsushi 13y ago
  I wanted to reply to you because you struck a chord with me - yes, emphatically I must agree that command line interfaces have forever been a sieve that collects a certain mentality. I don't want to label this subset of people because I will not do it correctly, but I believe it is assured that a predilection for CLI invokes precisely some sort of human artifact that is aligned with being a geek.
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    Yup, I agree. Same sort of thing where people put down the use of things like Dreamweaver, claiming note pad is better. Same mentality, I think. And even though I would argue logically for Dreamweaver, I would still sort of feel the notepad advocates had a point. Yeah, typing feels more "real", even more exciting. I then think is it a generational thing? But only yesterday was I sat there on that genetic car racing site watching live as people tried to hack the chat box. Command line again. I assume these were kids. Yet there they were in 2013 excitedly hacking away using the keyboard. To tangent even more.... That was great to watch. Kids (I assume) excitedly trying to hack the chat box, by typing stuff, while the admins updated and updated them away. A wonderful race and frankly a joy to watch. YES hacking and defacing is bad, it even pissed me off to start with, but then I realised that there was something so energetic, or alive, about it. It was like sort of watching life or something. It reminded me of one of those movies where we see the "geek hero" furiously typing away at a terminal trying to stop a nuke launch or some such. Dunno how to describe it really. Anyway, the admins won easily and quickly, and that's as it should be. Edit: All that waffle and I forgot the point... Basically, those kids reminded me of back in the day. I guess the spirit me and the OP were talking about. So, IMHO, it is still alive. Heh, unless such kids end up in US jails....
    - creamyhorror 13y ago
      This is why I loved (the idea of) MUDs/MOOs so much in the mid/late '90s. They were mysterious worlds to explore, and it was exciting to know that the admins ("wizards") were adding more areas purely through the magic of their keyboards. People would do crazy things sometimes to try to mess around with the world or other players. As a newish player, you didn't know what you might encounter. I still see a bit of that in the pirate Minecraft servers that my little brother sometimes plays on. Micro-communities with their own rules, custom mods and settings, and kids horsing around and building their own flights of fancy. That's the kind of organic exploration and worldbuilding I'd really like to be involved in eventually. I think I'd like to build a connectable MOO-like world in which people could set up their own areas/rooms and connect them to a limited number of neighbors. Give them item creation and scripting capabilities as well. Simple, hackable, and almost completely user-created. Woops, that'd just be text-based Second Life. Maybe with some unusual features like a resource/power grid that varies according to the average amount of players in each room (to incentivize building interesting, entertaining scenes and scenarios). Or maybe the initial set of rooms could be all these NeoCities pages converted to ASCII graphics and randomly connected. Who knows. Let me know if anyone's building a fun interconnected playground along these lines and is looking for contributions. I'm probably not good or energetic enough to do it alone.
ahsteele 13y ago
I am with you. I first got online in 1991, when I was 10. You and I both are firmly rooted digital natives. Members of the last generation who had a choice in that. At the time it felt awesome to be on the inside as the Internet "happened." Over twenty years later and I'm not excited as I once was. At this point the web is so interwoven into our daily lives (hacker or otherwise) it has become mundane. In many cases the Internet is not the new way or an alternative way, but the only way to do some thing. I am occasionally delighted by a burgeoning site or idea, but these moments are further and further apart. The homogeny of today's Internet feels stifling. Not convinced I am a full on Neophiliac, but I do long for the sense of discovery and anticipation that accompanied waiting for your modem to finish its handshake.
- l33tbro 13y ago
  The internet remains equally vitalic. It is you that has changed. Sure, the web is homogenous, but it is just one expression of the net. The hacker ethos is about making something do something it wasn't built for, not pining for when things were better.
  - ahsteele 13y ago
    Not so much pining as feeling nostalgic. Didn't say anything about better, though in retreading my comment I can see how it would be interpreted that way. I love the Internet. I have a career in a field that did not exist when I was born and because of this have had the unique opportunity of helping to define what it is. Not something afforded to many "classical" professions.
snide 13y ago
This brought a warmness to my heart. I remember those days well. As much as I know google and search in general is the defining technological advance of our time, there is a part of me that wishes that Yahoo and other human-curated directories ended up being the start point for the Internet. It felt like a smaller, friendly place back then.
kybernetyk 13y ago
> I can't believe I am alone in this sensation. You're not alone. I'm feeling the same. That's why I'm "exploring" TOR, I2P and the CJDNS mesh net nowadays. Because it feels like something new and unknown. And it certainly is more exciting than visiting Facebook & co. Though it's nowhere the same like back then when I hooked up the modem in the night (when my parents were sleeping), put it under a pillow to muffle the dial up sounds (going online was so expensive that I wasn't allowed to do so without supervision) to explore the internet.
- Nav_Panel 13y ago
  I'm not as old as you guys (I was born in 1993!), but I still remember some of these old feelings going on the internet as a young person. And I agree that surfing Tor is the closest I've come in a long time to re-creating that unknown excitement that "the web" once held for us. (I had about 30 minutes of computer time a day until I was in my mid-teens, so the internet remained novel for me for a long time). Part of it is HOW you explore the onion network: via links, often subtle, from other sites. There's no Google or Reddit to aggregate all the content; you need to know where to look. That's exciting and fun (although stumbling on illegal content isn't ):...). Feels almost like a game, with the whole idea of discovering hidden content in dark corners. I think what happened to the internet in the past decade or so could be described as gentrification. The "discovery" period began to fade, and we started cleaning up, resulting in the "suburban internet," as posted above. I feel like oftentimes this can be compared to the process of gentrifying a sleazy area in a city: early adopters move in and make interesting things, causing more people to come and try to participate. As more people move in, the early adopters are crowded/priced out, and the things that made the place interesting begin to fade out in favor of more bland/easily accessible things... Just some food for thought.
  - l33tbro 13y ago
    I would say the web has become suburban, but the internet remains dangerous and thrilling (tor, augmented, tpb, etc).
fallinghawks 13y ago
48 here, and Geocities was my first foray into writing HTML. It was free and, if I recall right, you could FTP your files up. When I got DSL I chose ATT because they offered 20 MB storage, only to find that you could not actually have a simple, static website. They hashed the filenames upon upload AND each time you edited online, so it was really storage only. These days even a static website can be jazzed up nicely with some JQuery and/or HTML5. I'd like to see this develop.
jeremyjh 13y ago
I would guess young geeks feel much the same way about some things today (which I cannot comprehend) and will feel the same ennui when they are older. A lot of it is simply growing up. My first online experience was with bulletin board and Deversi-dial chat rooms with 8 300 baud modems. I had a blast there, and in the larger systems that came a little later and then the internet and IRC. I loved talking to other strangers, most of whom were also geeks. Whereas today, I have not ever tweeted and only ever looked at a few people's feeds. I don't login to IRC anymore either, even though in a lot of ways it hasn't changed. I'm the one who has changed.
smacktoward 13y ago
Robert X. Cringely has a term for this sort of experience: being an "airport kid." http://www.cringely.com/2013/02/07/accidental-empires-part-6-chapter-1c-the-airport-kid/ http://www.cringely.com/2013/02/07/accidental-empires-part-6... When aviation was new, in the 1900s and 1910s and 1920s, the technology of flight was growing at an incredible pace. Flying was new and sexy and constantly changing. And you didn't need to be a "professional pilot" to get in on it; all you needed to do was to find someone with a plane and convince him to let you take the stick. So kids who fell in love with the romance of the skies would hang around their local airfield, running errands and doing odd jobs, basically whatever it took to ingratiate themselves with the people who used it. Because any of those people could be their gateway to their own flying career. Eventually flying stopped being sexy, though. The seemingly infinite possibilities of the early days of flight got reined in by cost and regulations and simple physics. Educational and career paths for pilots settled into a few profitable grooves. Flying became safe, cheap, routine. And the airport kids disappeared. They disappeared because kids want to be where the action is. And the action isn't in mature industries. It's in the new, because the old is already hemmed in with grown-ups' restrictions, which slow down the pace of change. Those restrictions are usually put in place for good reasons -- lots of inexperienced pilots back in ye olden days got themselves killed by pushing their machines or their bodies too hard -- but the kids don't see that. All they see is that it's safe, which means it's boring. You and I (I'm a couple years older than you, but not much) were the airport kids of the Web. We gravitated to it because it was, as you say, a blank slate. You didn't need a degree or a certification or to even necessarily know what the hell you were doing. All you needed to do was find a computer lab somewhere that was hooked up to the Internet, and be willing to learn. That low barrier to entry meant that we made a lot of dumb, pointless, sometimes even dangerous things. (I came within an inch of getting drummed out of my university in the mid-90s for helping build a site where students could rate their professors; the professors came after me with torches and pitchforks because the results were accessible outside the campus network.) But it's also what made it exciting. Exciting places are dangerous by definition. But to a kid, the part about it being exciting is a lot more interesting than the part about it being dangerous. Eventually the Web matured, of course. Now it's Critical Infrastructure, which means it's important enough to be hemmed in with those grown-up rules and regulations. It became indispensible, and therefore boring. So now there are lots of online-technology majors, but not so many airport kids. The airport kids are somewhere else, waiting for the next Wild West. This one's gotten all civilized.
erickhill 13y ago
I honestly believe that what you're describing here is exactly why I recently built a complete C64 system. I relate to your post very strongly. I think that's why I was so intrigued by what NeoCities is trying to grasp. It's also why I looked desperately for old C64 BBS's a couple of months ago, but alas none seem to exist anymore. Who uses a phone/modem (in the city)? Remember, when the internet was new, everyone was on dial-up. I guess I don't entirely miss that part, but when you were hitting a BBS it didn't take long at all. This harkens to the terminal/command-line thread below, I suppose. I could try to use a VOIP phone to hook it up somehow, but there's no one to call... I digress. Perhaps this is part of getting old. Some grow weary of our current tech (or other work/interest/etc.) and look backward, when things were new and exciting to us.

tdec 13y ago

You're not. Happy seeking !

alan_cx 13y ago

Im 41, I might have been mucking around with the internet before you, and while a hell of a lot is fantastic about the internet now, yeah, Im kinda lost and homeless too. Know what you mean. Not to say the internet , or web is or has gone wrong, just kinda forgotten something very important, very vital. What Neocities is doing is good, and I hope it works, but I'm not sure how this addresses that our, er, alienation (not sure if that is the right word) though. I read that they want to, and that is good, but I don't see anything they offer that really does that. What if we had some sort of SubWeb (have I just invented that word? I really like the sound of it!!!) which you have to use the command line to access? :)

digitalsushi 13y ago
I wanted to reply to you because you struck a chord with me - yes, emphatically I must agree that command line interfaces have forever been a sieve that collects a certain mentality. I don't want to label this subset of people because I will not do it correctly, but I believe it is assured that a predilection for CLI invokes precisely some sort of human artifact that is aligned with being a geek.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Yup, I agree. Same sort of thing where people put down the use of things like Dreamweaver, claiming note pad is better. Same mentality, I think. And even though I would argue logically for Dreamweaver, I would still sort of feel the notepad advocates had a point. Yeah, typing feels more "real", even more exciting. I then think is it a generational thing? But only yesterday was I sat there on that genetic car racing site watching live as people tried to hack the chat box. Command line again. I assume these were kids. Yet there they were in 2013 excitedly hacking away using the keyboard. To tangent even more.... That was great to watch. Kids (I assume) excitedly trying to hack the chat box, by typing stuff, while the admins updated and updated them away. A wonderful race and frankly a joy to watch. YES hacking and defacing is bad, it even pissed me off to start with, but then I realised that there was something so energetic, or alive, about it. It was like sort of watching life or something. It reminded me of one of those movies where we see the "geek hero" furiously typing away at a terminal trying to stop a nuke launch or some such. Dunno how to describe it really. Anyway, the admins won easily and quickly, and that's as it should be. Edit: All that waffle and I forgot the point... Basically, those kids reminded me of back in the day. I guess the spirit me and the OP were talking about. So, IMHO, it is still alive. Heh, unless such kids end up in US jails....
  - creamyhorror 13y ago
    This is why I loved (the idea of) MUDs/MOOs so much in the mid/late '90s. They were mysterious worlds to explore, and it was exciting to know that the admins ("wizards") were adding more areas purely through the magic of their keyboards. People would do crazy things sometimes to try to mess around with the world or other players. As a newish player, you didn't know what you might encounter. I still see a bit of that in the pirate Minecraft servers that my little brother sometimes plays on. Micro-communities with their own rules, custom mods and settings, and kids horsing around and building their own flights of fancy. That's the kind of organic exploration and worldbuilding I'd really like to be involved in eventually. I think I'd like to build a connectable MOO-like world in which people could set up their own areas/rooms and connect them to a limited number of neighbors. Give them item creation and scripting capabilities as well. Simple, hackable, and almost completely user-created. Woops, that'd just be text-based Second Life. Maybe with some unusual features like a resource/power grid that varies according to the average amount of players in each room (to incentivize building interesting, entertaining scenes and scenarios). Or maybe the initial set of rooms could be all these NeoCities pages converted to ASCII graphics and randomly connected. Who knows. Let me know if anyone's building a fun interconnected playground along these lines and is looking for contributions. I'm probably not good or energetic enough to do it alone.

ahsteele 13y ago

I am with you. I first got online in 1991, when I was 10. You and I both are firmly rooted digital natives. Members of the last generation who had a choice in that. At the time it felt awesome to be on the inside as the Internet "happened." Over twenty years later and I'm not excited as I once was. At this point the web is so interwoven into our daily lives (hacker or otherwise) it has become mundane. In many cases the Internet is not the new way or an alternative way, but the only way to do some thing. I am occasionally delighted by a burgeoning site or idea, but these moments are further and further apart. The homogeny of today's Internet feels stifling. Not convinced I am a full on Neophiliac, but I do long for the sense of discovery and anticipation that accompanied waiting for your modem to finish its handshake.

l33tbro 13y ago
The internet remains equally vitalic. It is you that has changed. Sure, the web is homogenous, but it is just one expression of the net. The hacker ethos is about making something do something it wasn't built for, not pining for when things were better.
- ahsteele 13y ago
  Not so much pining as feeling nostalgic. Didn't say anything about better, though in retreading my comment I can see how it would be interpreted that way. I love the Internet. I have a career in a field that did not exist when I was born and because of this have had the unique opportunity of helping to define what it is. Not something afforded to many "classical" professions.

snide 13y ago

This brought a warmness to my heart. I remember those days well. As much as I know google and search in general is the defining technological advance of our time, there is a part of me that wishes that Yahoo and other human-curated directories ended up being the start point for the Internet. It felt like a smaller, friendly place back then.

kybernetyk 13y ago

> I can't believe I am alone in this sensation. You're not alone. I'm feeling the same. That's why I'm "exploring" TOR, I2P and the CJDNS mesh net nowadays. Because it feels like something new and unknown. And it certainly is more exciting than visiting Facebook & co. Though it's nowhere the same like back then when I hooked up the modem in the night (when my parents were sleeping), put it under a pillow to muffle the dial up sounds (going online was so expensive that I wasn't allowed to do so without supervision) to explore the internet.

Nav_Panel 13y ago
I'm not as old as you guys (I was born in 1993!), but I still remember some of these old feelings going on the internet as a young person. And I agree that surfing Tor is the closest I've come in a long time to re-creating that unknown excitement that "the web" once held for us. (I had about 30 minutes of computer time a day until I was in my mid-teens, so the internet remained novel for me for a long time). Part of it is HOW you explore the onion network: via links, often subtle, from other sites. There's no Google or Reddit to aggregate all the content; you need to know where to look. That's exciting and fun (although stumbling on illegal content isn't ):...). Feels almost like a game, with the whole idea of discovering hidden content in dark corners. I think what happened to the internet in the past decade or so could be described as gentrification. The "discovery" period began to fade, and we started cleaning up, resulting in the "suburban internet," as posted above. I feel like oftentimes this can be compared to the process of gentrifying a sleazy area in a city: early adopters move in and make interesting things, causing more people to come and try to participate. As more people move in, the early adopters are crowded/priced out, and the things that made the place interesting begin to fade out in favor of more bland/easily accessible things... Just some food for thought.
- l33tbro 13y ago
  I would say the web has become suburban, but the internet remains dangerous and thrilling (tor, augmented, tpb, etc).

fallinghawks 13y ago

48 here, and Geocities was my first foray into writing HTML. It was free and, if I recall right, you could FTP your files up. When I got DSL I chose ATT because they offered 20 MB storage, only to find that you could not actually have a simple, static website. They hashed the filenames upon upload AND each time you edited online, so it was really storage only. These days even a static website can be jazzed up nicely with some JQuery and/or HTML5. I'd like to see this develop.

jeremyjh 13y ago

I would guess young geeks feel much the same way about some things today (which I cannot comprehend) and will feel the same ennui when they are older. A lot of it is simply growing up. My first online experience was with bulletin board and Deversi-dial chat rooms with 8 300 baud modems. I had a blast there, and in the larger systems that came a little later and then the internet and IRC. I loved talking to other strangers, most of whom were also geeks. Whereas today, I have not ever tweeted and only ever looked at a few people's feeds. I don't login to IRC anymore either, even though in a lot of ways it hasn't changed. I'm the one who has changed.

smacktoward 13y ago

Robert X. Cringely has a term for this sort of experience: being an "airport kid." http://www.cringely.com/2013/02/07/accidental-empires-part-6-chapter-1c-the-airport-kid/ http://www.cringely.com/2013/02/07/accidental-empires-part-6... When aviation was new, in the 1900s and 1910s and 1920s, the technology of flight was growing at an incredible pace. Flying was new and sexy and constantly changing. And you didn't need to be a "professional pilot" to get in on it; all you needed to do was to find someone with a plane and convince him to let you take the stick. So kids who fell in love with the romance of the skies would hang around their local airfield, running errands and doing odd jobs, basically whatever it took to ingratiate themselves with the people who used it. Because any of those people could be their gateway to their own flying career. Eventually flying stopped being sexy, though. The seemingly infinite possibilities of the early days of flight got reined in by cost and regulations and simple physics. Educational and career paths for pilots settled into a few profitable grooves. Flying became safe, cheap, routine. And the airport kids disappeared. They disappeared because kids want to be where the action is. And the action isn't in mature industries. It's in the new, because the old is already hemmed in with grown-ups' restrictions, which slow down the pace of change. Those restrictions are usually put in place for good reasons -- lots of inexperienced pilots back in ye olden days got themselves killed by pushing their machines or their bodies too hard -- but the kids don't see that. All they see is that it's safe, which means it's boring. You and I (I'm a couple years older than you, but not much) were the airport kids of the Web. We gravitated to it because it was, as you say, a blank slate. You didn't need a degree or a certification or to even necessarily know what the hell you were doing. All you needed to do was find a computer lab somewhere that was hooked up to the Internet, and be willing to learn. That low barrier to entry meant that we made a lot of dumb, pointless, sometimes even dangerous things. (I came within an inch of getting drummed out of my university in the mid-90s for helping build a site where students could rate their professors; the professors came after me with torches and pitchforks because the results were accessible outside the campus network.) But it's also what made it exciting. Exciting places are dangerous by definition. But to a kid, the part about it being exciting is a lot more interesting than the part about it being dangerous. Eventually the Web matured, of course. Now it's Critical Infrastructure, which means it's important enough to be hemmed in with those grown-up rules and regulations. It became indispensible, and therefore boring. So now there are lots of online-technology majors, but not so many airport kids. The airport kids are somewhere else, waiting for the next Wild West. This one's gotten all civilized.

erickhill 13y ago

I honestly believe that what you're describing here is exactly why I recently built a complete C64 system. I relate to your post very strongly. I think that's why I was so intrigued by what NeoCities is trying to grasp. It's also why I looked desperately for old C64 BBS's a couple of months ago, but alas none seem to exist anymore. Who uses a phone/modem (in the city)? Remember, when the internet was new, everyone was on dial-up. I guess I don't entirely miss that part, but when you were hitting a BBS it didn't take long at all. This harkens to the terminal/command-line thread below, I suppose. I could try to use a VOIP phone to hook it up somehow, but there's no one to call... I digress. Perhaps this is part of getting old. Some grow weary of our current tech (or other work/interest/etc.) and look backward, when things were new and exciting to us.