Mastodawn

Lots of snark and negativity (understandably!), but I am for one thankful for the internet/the web, and all of you being here with me.

We can still turn things around, together!

Jorge Candeias Dec 5

@stefan The question is how.

We won't do it while everybody else is still trapped in shit places.

We won't do it either bringing so many people over, with all their bad habits, that this (or whatever other good place we may come up with along the way) becomes yet another shit place.

It's a bit of a catch-22.

@jorgecandeias Fair point!

Honestly, the fact that fediverse exists does give me some hope for the future, even if we don't have all the answers quite yet.

BeeCycling Dec 5

@stefan Sometimes I wish they'd been right...

I'm also convinced someone at BT genuinely believed this was the case, as they seemed to be very slow to get into the ISP game back in the days people were first getting online. Like they were waiting to be certain it wasn't going to be a flash in the pan.

Mrs.Malice 👾🍕Dec 5

@stefan it’s me! i’m millions!

barning Dec 5

@stefan What are these millions of people doing nowadays?

@barning Discussing whether the internet was a passing fad.

Григорий Клюшников Dec 11

Stefan, on the internet, I hope?

J$Dec 5

@stefan The Daily Mail was not all that wrong. Most did give up on the Internet, choosing to lock themselves into abysmal megacorp siloes instead. The Internet’s breath has been very shallow for a very long time now.

We used to have open protocols, open standards, vendor- and platform independent communications. We now have gmail, SLOP instead of info, whatever Microsoft and Meta inflict upon mankind, and a handful of other nazi propaganda channels.

PaulaToThePeople 😷Dec 5

@stefan There is no better time to give up on the internet than today.

Andrew Dec 5

@stefan I feel like this is an artifact from right as the timelines diverged. One from the good future.

Rastal Dec 5

@stefan Had this happened it would create a

Worse world

35.1%

Better world

64.9%

Poll ended at Dec 6 at 2:55pm.

@Rastal Fascinating question to ponder!

I'd like to believe that we can still turn things around, have the internet and a better world.

proedie Dec 5

@Rastal @stefan I can’t answer this, because I miss the option ‘both’.

derptron Dec 5

@Rastal @stefan Instead of having sets of open standards for routing and communication we'd all be locked in to only what say AOL provides and nothing else.

That was the competing force that lost.

Open Source would have been murdered at infancy. Tech would be way behind but way more monopolistic and controlled. Think where we are headed, but back in the 90's.

Pretty sure the psychological abuse and experimentation would still be going on.

Anthropy Dec 6

@Rastal @stefan I find it somewhat funny that people argue the world would be a better place without the internet, while perusing the internet to say this

さよなら皆さん Dec 5

@stefan too bad it wasn’t right lol

@sayonaraminasan Ah, not too late to make something good out of it!

thejikz Dec 5

@stefan Happy Dead Internet Day!!!

Ronan Dec 5

@stefan I'm seeing the same article these days about electric cars and bikes. And the opposite articles about AI, "millions falling behind by not using AI"

Je ne comprends pas Dec 5

@stefan Interesting this quote: "e-mail [...] is adding to an overload of information".

So nothing has changed, really, we're just continually adjusting to overload.

@stefan Year 2000? That makes it way worse than the Norwegian version from 1996.

NinjaDebugger Dec 5

@stefan I worked for a company whose CEO said that in the late 90s and instead went hard on satellite. In 2016-2018, they still had a pile of satellite receivers, totally useless, in one of the office cubes as a deliberate monument to hubris.

Tuukka R Dec 6

@NinjaDebugger @stefan

Satellite what? Internet through satellite connection? Or something else?

NinjaDebugger Dec 6

@Tuuktuuk custom data pipe via satellite, like satellite tv except for other non internet data.

Tuukka R Dec 6

@NinjaDebugger , so a bit like online banking in the 1980's?

I remember my parents used a DOS program called Telix for directly phoning the bank's server and then using the bank pretty precisely the same way online banking works with browsers these days, except for the UI being basically ASCII art.

So, using satellite to connect to what essentially amounts to diverse intranets? Like a BBS?

NinjaDebugger Dec 6

@Tuuktuuk Like that but the other direction. They were pushing weather, crop, stock market etc data out to farmers.

It was a one way connection.

Tuukka R Dec 6

@NinjaDebugger

Ah, so, a very expensive device that does the same as teletext? Makes sense, obviously :D

NinjaDebugger Dec 6

@Tuuktuuk

YUP. And he bet everything on that instead of the internet.

derptron Dec 5

Don't look so frightened
This is just a passing phase
One of my bad days

Thad Dec 5

@stefan Wow, that's about a year and a half *after* Homer Simpson said "The Internet? Is that thing still around?" in a joke indicating he was clueless and out-of-touch.

Magnus Ahltorp Dec 5

@stefan December 2000 seems to be a bit late for that. About three years late, since I would put the tipping point at about 1997.

Ria Price Dec 5

@stefan
Yes, there is absolutely *no one* on the internet now, nope, not a soul :P

sentientsponge Dec 5

@stefan If only this had been true...

@sentientsponge Well, we got the fediverse out of it, that's a success!

Nicole Parsons Dec 5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail_and_General_Trust

Even then, vested interests were funding malign influence campaigns because they always fear the new.

Even then, the rich feared the disruption of unfettered access to information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_Mail

Daily Mail and General Trust - Wikipedia

mahadevank Dec 5

@stefan the article was good, the timing was wrong, we're getting there now :P

Douglas Edwards

Dec 5

@stefan Does anyone have page, section, and edition for this? (The image gives author, title, date, and column).

@dedicto Tried to find an online archive, no luck. Definitely would love to know as well!

https://academic.oup.com/book/52617/chapter-abstract/421806907?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

소주한잔 Dec 5

@dedicto @stefan no but it looks like research being quoted is here: "they came, they surfed, they went back to the beach"

and here is the entire ESRC "virtual society?" project book
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Virtual_Society.html?id=OEgVDAAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y

@scaramanga @dedicto Nice find!

소주한잔 Dec 5

@stefan @dedicto yeah and the points being made by the researchers seem reasonable: access costs to the internet are high so out of reach of teenagers, the dot com bust slashed ad budgets of dot coms leading to downgraded growth forecasts, lack of digital money combined with the fact teens dont have credit cards limits growth of online shopping...

The issue here is just typically bad science reporting and bombastic headlines...

소주한잔 Dec 5

@stefan @dedicto then again "teens like the real world too much" seems quaint now, but then again the real world probably had a lot more to offer in 2000!!

Douglas Edwards

Dec 6

@scaramanga @stefan The real world did have more to offer in 2000 — but I'm 68 years old, I was a teenager in the 1970s[!], and I can assure you that AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER kids AND ADULTS have been fascinated with fantasy worlds. Have people forgotten that "Star Wars" was a hit in 1977? That the first edition of D&D was published in 1974? Affordability of access was indeed an issue, but thinking the Internet would lose out from LACK OF INTEREST was every bit as abysmally stupid as it looks from the perspective of 2025 with the benefit of hindsight.

lonely extrovert Dec 6

@scaramanga @stefan @dedicto par for the course with the Daily Fail though

@stefan Millions!

@stefan
I recall an interview with an AT&T exec who claimed the Internet was a fad

katzenberger Dec 5

https://www.sohocommunications.co.uk/our-team/

How dare you.

»James Chapman has unrivalled experience at the top of both journalism and government.«

OUR TEAM - SOHO COMMUNICATIONS

katzenberger Dec 5

https://www.cityam.com/the-notebook-james-chapman-on-getting-big-money-out-of-politics/

In all fairness, he also said:

»Some 25 years ago, as a gauche young science reporter, I wrote an article for the Daily Mail about a think tank report highlighting the fact that two million former internet users had given up on the technology, frustrated by high costs and slow dial-up speeds. The piece itself was fairly nuanced, but a Mail sub-editor, perhaps reflecting corporate unease about what the impact of the internet might be on print titles, christened it with what has since become an infamous headline: ‘Internet “may be just a passing fad as millions give up on it”.

After someone dug out the cutting, this has gone viral to such an extent that barely a day goes by on social media without someone sending it to me with understandable amusement to ask for an update on my prediction. I used to point out that the research was not my own, having been sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council, was based on then verifiable facts and widely reported by other outlets, including the Guardian. Now I roll with it and embrace the infamy.«

The Notebook: James Chapman on getting big money out of politics

James Chapman takes the Notebook pen to talk about the internet, the boat race and getting big money out of politics.

City AM

Stumpy The Mutt Dec 5

@stefan I still have nightmares of modems endlessly trying to set up a link on a noisy line...

四 Dec 5

@stefan Would be better if Daily Mail would have been a fad and gone. Vile publication.

Tim 🛥️🌈Dec 6

@yon @stefan
Instead they became the most popular newspaper website 🤬

Talisyn Tailfeather Dec 5

@stefan Cautionary tale for those who wish that #AI will magically vanish.

Kerry Mitchell 🍁Dec 5

@stefan I’m imagining 2 million Britons still happily disconnected

Kraftwerk-Das Model Collapse Dec 5

@stefan pfff, I dismissed it in a fad in 1997 already

David Cohen Dec 5

@stefan @purplepadma I see that the Daily Fail’s reliability was just as good as today back at the turn of the millennium

That Eric Dec 5

@stefan It might have been better if they had.

My name is Gordo Dec 5

@stefan My feelings are a complicated mixture of remembering a better time when the young internet expanded my worldview in every dimension and made me the person I am today, and the recognition that those days are long gone and never coming back and we'd be far better off right now without the past decade and a half (ish) of shinternet that replaced them.

@gordoooo_z

"the young internet expanded my worldview in every dimension and made me the person I am today"

Love the way you put this!

Definitely feel the same way about the past decade or so, but I am hopeful we're still going to see better days.

Something like the fediverse was hard to imagine taking off just a few years ago, and here we are!