You Can Now Look Back at the Early Trans Internet. Yes, There Were Memes

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.

Every tech product right now.

2.9K votes, 59 comments. 36M subscribers in the memes community. Memes! A way of describing cultural information being shared. An element of a…

Not now, not now...

36M subscribers in the memes community. Memes! A way of describing cultural information being shared. An element of a culture or system of behavior…

Was their any substantial backlash to the internet when it first started becoming popular? I can imagine that going from a comparatively disconnected world to one where instantaneous global connection 24/7 were commonplace was a rather massive (and not always positive) shift in many ways.

2.7M subscribers in the AskHistorians community. The Portal for Public History. Please read the rules before participating, as we remove all comments…

Modern problems require outstanding moves

36M subscribers in the memes community. Memes! A way of describing cultural information being shared. An element of a culture or system of behavior…

The Web We Lost - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

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.

Nostalgia Content

Gen-Z got a chunk of the Carboniferous, and now all their memes are about how pathetic and small today's dragonflies are.

The Fathers of the Internet Revolution Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, and other Internet pioneers issue a challenge on a day that just might go down in tech history

The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter: A Case Study of...

Following changes in Twitter's ownership in 2022 and subsequent changes to content moderation policies, many in academia looked to move their discourse elsewhere and migration to Mastodon was...