Suppose the internet was still a major success and was sustainable without compromising for commercial interests. How do you think societies around the world may have changed, or not?
Consider the optimistic angles of such an unencumbered space extended out from the internet’s earlier days to the present. What if some of those possibilities had been realized?
I started using the internet in 1992 and it was a much different place - rather ugly, dreadfully slow and basically impossible to find anything except by either direct intent (knowing the exact URL you wanted to go to - browser software was crude, at best) or sheer accident. search engines didnt exist - and wouldnt until 1993 or 1994, I dont really remember when I was first introduced to that concept. wikipedia and indeed the whole notion of a wiki didnt exist. social media didnt exist, unless you count “online chat” via BBS’s, but I dont (closed networks like BBS’s arent “the internet”). streaming media was still years away.
much of the technology we rely on that ties into the internet didnt exist. there wasnt a lot to do on it - I mostly played MUDs, checked email via pinemail and browsed newsgroups (hobbies and porn). people looking back at those early years before the overwhelming mass commercialization of everything have a tendency to see that time in a positive light - but the truth is that without the ability to sell ideas on/about/using the internet, it wouldnt have been widely adopted except in educational settings, and only for information storage/retrieval.
There were books : “the best 500 Web sites!” filled with links you had to type yourself.
Half of them didn’t work of course.
Shit, I remember having one of those. Way back when we used that free dialup service from K-Mart where they had an ad banner at the top of the browser.
but the truth is that without the ability to sell ideas on/about/using the internet, it wouldnt have been widely adopted except in educational settings, and only for information storage/retrieval.
fwiw I don’t think you’re wrong given the circumstances the internet came about in, and that persist in a different form today, however the idea behind the question was to try to encourage one to try to imagine different circumstances. If the internet/the web had managed to develop and be widely adopted despite the circumstances around it and commercial pressures that have arguably warped it into something rather different than what it could have been, how might that have influenced society in turn?
It’s less about looking back with rose-tinted glasses, and more about trying to re-envision how it might have developed differently. One could very much say that the whole pitch of stuff like lemmy and federated software is an attempt at doing just that, but I think it’s even more interesting to consider on a broader scope.
i’m not really sure we can reliably re-envision how something could have been without being influenced by how it actually was - and that’s especially true for anyone who was directly influenced by it. just about every single kind of job in our society has some aspect that was directly changed by the internet, or by technology derived from globe-spanning interconnected networks. we’re several generations of technology deep now.
you have to keep in mind though that the mass commercialization of the internet didnt evolve in a vacuum - for example, without the technology to mass archive large amounts of data on optical disc formats in a time when the average connection speed to the internet was limited by your PSTN dial up modem, there would have been no ability to rip music from CDs. sharing music on the interwebs was just an evolution of the mix tape, but it was the commercialization of music itself and the fact that no one wants to pay for something that they dont have to that directly led to P2P networks/piracy.
in a certain sense, the FOSS/linux movement is as old as the internet (possibly older), but to a certain degree its mindset is much younger as well - rebelling against the older generation’s hegemony (apple, ibm, microsoft, etc) by striving to offer free options - though nothing is truly “free”.
That’s hard to answer without qualifying “commercial interests”. I think of banking and other financial institutions as commercial interests, and I like having control of my finances online. I don’t have to wait until the end of the month to see credit card charges (charge notifications that pop up on my phone are nearly instantaneous). I don’t have to make a phone call to my broker to place a stock order.
A lot of people disparage Amazon, but I like the convenience. No more driving to two or three stores to find what I need.
Other commercial interests like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X—yeah, they can disappear and I wouldn’t miss them.
That’s hard to answer without qualifying “commercial interests”.
That’s fair, I was aiming to keep it open-ended, but may have been a little too open in this regard. To try to clarify while maintaining that spirit, I’d note that I phrased it as “compromise for commercial interests”, so I don’t mean to ask as if nothing commercial would be done on the internet, only that it wouldn’t have been fashioned around commercial interests as much.
A basic example would be visiting a news site today that doesn’t require a subscription to read articles on it, and how littered it is with ads, or how commercial social media sites actively push you to their algorithmic feed rather than giving you filters and controls to adjust your experience, both to keep you there and in turn viewing more ads.
Not sure how much that may help, but I’m not looking for any particular answers/responses other than more imaginative/speculative ideas surrounding the idea of a less commercially driven internet & its possible influence on things.
Ah, so what would the Internet look like if it were built by altruistic, honest people. Sadly, I must be really jaded an cynical because that’s so hard for me to envision.
Commercial interests were always exploiting resources within their spheres of influence, even before the Internet. As technology improved and new pathways emerged, they ran full speed ahead.
Your example of a news site that didn’t push their algorithms never existed. Even pre-Internet, when news was printed, every newspaper had a certain slant. In New York City—back in the 70s—there were four major papers, NY Times, Wall St Journal, NY Post, Daily News. They all had their biases.
But the one thing they couldn’t do was collect user data. Ads were static and we had a choice to either read or ignore it.
As I’m typing and doing this brain dump—it’s 1:18am, why am I not asleep—I’ve come to realize that the thing I hate most about the current state of the Internet is the vast collection of user data how companies are mining and exploiting it. If we could stop it, I would be fine with most everything else.
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How do you define major success?
In this context: widely adopted/used by the public.
It is
The Internet sucked ass in the 90s. Yeah you’ll find nostalgic neckbeards pining the loss but it really sucked ass.
But if you actually look at what it was it sucked. Online shopping was garbage. Content sites were run by left and right wing nutjobs, forums were unregulated dumpster fires filled with hate. Fuck, 13 year old me found PLENTY of child porn searching on Yahoo/early Google children’s nude camps.
It was a shitty place is just most of your were kids and had no fucking clue.
