My journey to the heart of the forgotten internet

Slowly but surely, huge swaths of the internet are vanishing. But the artefacts of the early web are still out there, and they have lessons for the future.

How the Web Was Lost – James Gleick

This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Webby Tim Berners-Lee with Stephen WittFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 389 pp., $30

Semble — Make sense of the web, together

A place for mapping the web, connecting ideas, and building shared knowledge.

The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet

A book about how to survive on the internet. It’s about the cozy web, the dark web, the dark forest, the clear net, the dark net, and a new social world emerging around us. This is the Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet.

The rise of Whatever

This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.

Historical pragmatism and the internet

This article argues that the literature describing the internet revolution in the 1990s was characterized by the rhetoric of the technological sublime. This rhetoric suffered from three fatal flaws: (1) it was not sufficiently grounded in the historical development of technology; (2) it viewed the internet in isolation, failing to consider the wider technological context; and (3) it failed to examine the internet in view of the social, economic, religious and political circumstances of its users. Several examples from history are cited, demonstrating that changes in various systems for the production, dissemination and preservation of cultural information both border and deborder the world. The article suggests that if internet researchers take a pragmatic, historically grounded approach, they will discover that the introduction of internet technology can be seen to have similar consequences. While the technology overcomes many boundaries (of space and time, politics and economics), other social borders may be created at the same time. It is easier to see old boundaries coming down than to see new ones being erected. Rather than being swept by utopian or dystopian enthusiasms, the article insists that the really interesting discoveries are to be made in locating the subtle social shifts taking place, relatively unnoticed, as a consequence of technological change.

The Sites We Lost

A memorial to the weird little corners of the internet that lived on The Useless Web.

When the Internet Was a Place - Front Porch Republic

Not too long ago, the internet was a place you visited. The family desktop sat in its designated closet or back office. In schools, there were rooms filled with computers blinking in tandem, waiting for your class to arrive and hop online. You had to purposefully arrive at the internet, and when done, you left […]

How we got here

Wherein our hero, in this publication's inaugural, dates himself (as if others would) in a reminiscence of computers and websites past.

we were online

Turn the internet into a living, shared space with real-time traces of people browsing.

Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment

Most people have completely forgotten how chaotic it really was."