But on the other hand, the utopianism was definitely there. As I flagged a while ago, some of the earliest work in building out digital connections outside of the Western world happened thanks to charity fundingÂ
directly received from a Peter Gabriel concert. While the cyberpunk stuff probably gets overplayed in the modern day, the truth is that the Electronic Frontier Foundation came to life with many of these utopian ideals in mindâas it should have, given that one of its founders was literally a songwriter for The Grateful Dead.
But weâll never find utopia over the internet because the internet is made by humans, and humans are complicated. We complain a lot and we screw one another over all the time. And this was definitely true of the early digital eraâfigures likeÂ
like PKWare founder Phil Katz, the guy who created the zip file format and caused a major BBS turf war in the process, paint complicated images that undercut easy high-level explanation. But at the same time, itâs not like we can ignore the fascinating work of early digital architects likeÂ
Jon Postel orÂ
Vinton Cerf, either.
To claim that the old internet was better than the current one is ultimately futileâin part because real life is not very much like a science fiction novel. What we need to do instead is better protect this culture so that it can be researched in aggregate and at scale, so that our vision of the internet doesnât have a rose-colored tint to it, so we can understand it at the level in which it happened.
We threw out a lot of stuff from the early internetâmuch of the content from the formative years of the ânet, from 1992 to 1996, is largely gone. The Internet Archive wasnât a thing at that time, and much of this information was hosted on pre-Web services like
Usenet,
Gopher, and
IRC. While I was there during a portion of that time, I think itâs too complicated to say that we understand it.
Letâs avoid the broad brush of saying that anything is utopian or not utopian. Letâs approach this as good historians, and admit that every era has its complexities and needs to be better understood in fullâwhether digital or not.