we were online

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.

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 […]

Ambient Co-presence

Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web

Home

Connected places: understanding how the new social web works

Introducing Ringspace: A Proposal for the Human Web

For months, I've been working on a project to demonstrate how we can preserve humanity on the web. It's finally ready for testing.

The one and future internet

The internet has become inextricably entangled into our economies, cultural and social lives. We stand on the brink of the next technological revolution, in which the internet of things transforms ...

Meditations on The Human Web

To save the internet, we may have to rebuild it.

Cyberspace Innkeeping: Building Online Community

from the archive, 1992

Kast

Tossing something your way from the Atmosphere, a new internet built for people.

The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier

Howard Rheingold tours the 'virtual community' of online networking.Howard Rheingold has been called the First Citizen of the Internet. In this book he tou

ATmosphere Conf 2026: the internet built for people, not platforms

370 people in Vancouver, 500 online, all working on the same question: what does the internet look like when users own their data? Highlights from the AT Protocol community conference.

Digital Spaces Directory | New_ Public

As the social media landscape changes and a new wave of digital spaces emerges, this Directory is meant to be a resource for our field — a jumping-off-point for further exploration and research for anyone who’s interested in studying, building, stewarding, or simply using digital social platforms. We hope this will inspire creative exploration, spark new collaborations, and highlight important progress.

Architecture and the Internet: Designing places in cyberspace

Cyberspace, as the information space is called, has become accessible in the past decade through the World Wide Web. And although it can only be experienced through the mediation of computers, it is quickly becoming an alternative stage for everyday economic, cultural, and other human activities. As such, there is a potential and a need to design it according to place–like principles. Making places for human inhabitation is, of course, what architects, landscape architects, and town planners have been doing in physical space for thousands of years. It is curious, therefore, that Cyberspace designers have not capitalized on the theories, experiences, and practices that have been guiding physical place–making. While most 3D environments closely mimic physical spaces, they are, by and large, devoid of the essential characteristics that differentiate a ‘place’ from mere ‘space.’ And only rarely are they sensitive to, and take advantage of, the peculiarities of Cyberspace. We believe that this state of affairs is temporary, characteristic of early adoption stages of new technologies. As the Web matures, and as it assumes more fully its role as a destination rather than as means of communication, there will be a growing need to design it according to place–making principles. By looking at physical architecture as a case study and metaphor for organizing space into meaningful places, this paper explores the possibility of organizing Cyberspace into spatial settings that not only afford social interaction, but, like physical places, also embody and express cultural values. At the same time, because Cyberspace lacks materiality, is free from physical constraints, and because it can only be ‘inhabited’ by proxy, these ‘places’ may not necessarily resemble their physical counterparts.

Toward Wayfinding Infrastructure for the Living Web · Atlas Research Group

Our world is getting crazier by the day. Our old maps and compasses weren’t made for this complexity. While new tools may open up amazing possibilities, they also make it easier to lose ourselves – especially when they don’t belong to us, and make us vulnerable to other people’s hidden choices and unsavory intentions about what is worth attending to.

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.