Kathy ReidApr 10

Could we please go back to the version of the internet patched together by chewing gum and goodwill;

the domain of the well-meaning, Aloha shirt-clad, neck-bearded hippie;

the time of the lady poet-engineer who wrote spanning tree protocols and prose to match them;

where the only thing you had to do to connect to other humans was to be "capable of sending and receiving packets";

where we share spare GPU cycles to search for extra-terrestrial life or to run HPC workloads for curing cancer;

where the internet was wild and unstructured and embryonic and so full of potential and life and --- I'm not sure - vectors? paths? possibilities?

At which fork or trunk or change did the current slop-enshitti-net emerge?

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@KathyReid I often dream that dream too.

And then I remember: when the internet was domesticated around 2004 the usual scare tactics played their part. But above all it actually used to take some skills to grapple with the new inter-beast, learn html, ftp, menu trees, graphics conversion etc.

Guess who didn't like any of that?

Slop-enshitti-net's what we got because most had better things to do than learn, apparently.

Apr 10 at 7:39pmWeb