I started writing my recent post, "Orphans of Netscape", with lots of positive energy and conviction, and the first part of it came together really quickly and easily. But I found it difficult to derive a good conclusion from the comparison between the orphans of Apollo and Netscape which didn't come across as sounding a lot more defeatist than the whole thing felt in my head. I wrestled with the draft for days without really making a lot of progress on this front. I became frustrated with how long it was taking to get right (there's not supposed to be any sense of urgency on the small internet, of course, but I had - and still have - lots of posts that have developed unwritten in my head during my recent quiet year or so that I'm now keen to get down "on paper", so I supplied my own internally generated urgency). So in the end I tacked what I clearly felt at time were way too many caveats and softening paragraphs on the end and posted it. I didn't really feel good about it and even wondered if I might take it down the next day (something I can't remember ever doing before). Instead I got quite a bit of positive feedback about it via email, so decided maybe it wasn't as bad as I'd feared.
But there have been some less than wholly positive responses, too. That sounds like a bit of a tortured euphemism, like "the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage", but I really do think that's an accurate characterisation, much more so than calling them "negative responses", anyway. A post in Geminispace by Sunset and a response to it in Gopherspace by jns are perfectly reasonable and thoughtful in pushing back a bit, while still finding stuff to agree with, and I think these posts are entirely worth engaging with, especially as I myself was not really 100% satisfied with my original post. And it seems to be exactly the parts of the original post that I was least happy with that people want to push back against, which seems significant. I think everybody is more or less onboard with the comparison between the generations which came of age during the space race and during the early public adoption of the internet. jns says the parallel is "fun, compelling, and valid to some degree". And nobody seems to question the correctness of Sandra's initial insight, that there's a generational cohort who (mostly) sees - and perhaps more importantly who feels, acutely - this whole thing differently from (most of) those who came before and after (exceptions in all directions, never forget). The question is what should we conclude/predict/do in light of this insight. So, I'll try explore that question a bit more in this post.
Sunset's 2023-01-13 post "The Internet of Money"
jns' 2023-01-13 post "Dreams are essential"
But a quick update first. You might remember that my original post made reference to a mysterious other post in Gopherspace that I'd read years ago and been influenced by but forgotten where to find. Well, the author of said post, SDF user undo was one of the people who reached out to me via email, so I've updated my original post to link to their original post, and I'll repeat that link here. I just love how the small internet works this way!
undo's 2019-12-03 post "Alternative to Strauss-Howe Generations"
So, let's start with the potential shortcoming of my post which is the most grounded in objective reality. Part of my original claim was that the smolnet population is dominated by orphans of Netscape, or if not dominated by then at least that they are over-represented there. Following from that I suggested that one of smolnet's functions was as a "retirement home" for said orphans. I didn't claim that was its only purpose, or its most important one. Well, maybe I claimed that implicitly by putting it as the first item in a list of purposes. If pushed I probably would have explicitly weighted its value pretty highly. Anyway, jns asserts that I'm just plain factually wrong about this, and estimates that there are actually more 20-somethings joining pubnix communities and Geminispace today than there are orphans of Netscape.
This might well be true! I certainly do not have my finger on the pulse of Geminispace demographics; I have had my head stuck in the sand for the past year or so (I am slowly but surely emerging, and enjoying it). Heck, just yesterday I learned about the Yestercities community for the first time, and as I was poking around the user capsules there I found one by somebody claiming to have been born in 2006! That's younger than anybody I ever have met or ever expected to meet in these spaces. Considerably younger. Maybe it really is just my little corner of this space which is dominated by orphans. If people who have grown up in a world where the only mainstream internet paradigm is smartphones and social media silos are still finding something appealing in Geminispace, then that's a (pleasant!) surprise to me and certainly runs counter to some of the thinking in my previous post. Huzzah! The interesting question for me is: what is attracting them here?
Yestercities internet community.
I don't ask that because I think that the smolnet has absolutely nothing of value to offer to young people. Far from it! I never meant to suggest that I believe that. Of course the smolnet can still offer something to people who have grown up in siloland. Sunset passionately and convincingly sings the praises of the smolnet (which she conceptualises as one part of a greater "Outernet", which is a term I love!) as a clearly demarcated space where the internet is about communication between genuine communities of humans happening on their own terms, free from corporate control and from the requirement to turn a profit. She casts the commercial capture of the internet as a repeat of processes which have happened before throughout history even in non-technical contexts (and one of the positive emails I got in response to my post noted that the same process happened within numerous other technical contexts before the internet, too). I am in very broad agreement with her about this! There's an informed perspective from which the smolnet is superior to the mainstream internet which is based exclusively on considerations which are timeless, and that perspective is in no way dependent upon a special magic generational experience that nobody young can have. No question.
But that perspective is *not* an easy "on ramp" to the smolnet. You can only see that advantage by learning to question and see through a huge and invisible system that pervades every aspect of your life. You have to be a magic fish who can see water, and who can conceive of non-water! It doesn't happen easily, it's not the default perspective of intelligent people. I grew up watching commercialised television and never questioned for a second why it was commercialised or if it could be otherwise. The idea that some of my favourite shows like G.I. Joe or Transformers (those were cartoon series, once upon a time) were actually in and of themselves advertisements for toys first and acts of story telling for the sake of story telling second was so far beyond my understanding of how the world worked that I had to read about it on the internet as an adult twenty years later. If you grow up with a heavily commercialised internet, why would things turn out any differently? Seeing through that stuff and learning to see the world in terms of concepts like "capital" and "commons" is rare and unusual and a lot of people never get there. I would say that *most* people never get there. jns makes this very point themselves:
You can't even explain this to most people, because they are so caught up in the reality manufactured by capital, that anything that clashes with that reality triggers a fight or flight reaction. Most people will either get defensive and dismiss you as some radical nut job or they won't want to talk about it at all
Part of the super power that the orphans of Netscape have, the "X-ray specs" as somebody else put it to me in an email, is that they don't need to pull off this big political backflip and adopt an adversarial anti-capitalist worldview in order to look at a community of freely associating humans communicating on their own terms outside of corporate control without a profit motive and think "yes, this is good". They just *know* that it's good through their own lived experience. They had it and they miss it and they can recognise it for what it is and its innate value even if they are politically apathetic, even if they don't have "commons" and "profit motive" and other such terms in the vernacular of their inner monologue. Heck, they can see its value even if they are pro-capitalism! There was *plenty* of anarcho-capitalist and libertarian political philosophy on the early internet. But without any direct experience of being part of that kind of community, and without a political stance that makes you question commercialism and corporatism as a default reaction to seeing them, then what would motivate you to seek something like smolnet/Outernet out, and if you stumbled upon it what would stop you seeing it as strange and quaint and backwards and slow and populated by nut jobs who think that stuff you have done your entire life without a second thought is actually the work of the devil?
You can squeeze some predictions about smolnet population dynamics out of this attitude: that maybe the smolnet would be predominantly built and initially populated by a large and rapid pulse of orphans of Netscape, to whom its value was familiar and intuitively obvious, who would be (relatively speaking) less politically engaged and more politically diverse, and then that early founding population would be slowly but steadily augmented over a longer timespan by a trickle of younger people who would be (relatively speaking) more overtly political and almost exclusively anti-capitalistic, who turned up motivated by a perspective like Sunset's. I think this loosely matches what I imagined but didn't put into words when writing my post.
But if jns is right and orphans are already a minority in Geminispace, then there's less of a trickle of younger people coming in and more of a genuine river. And I certainly don't have the impression that Geminispace is becoming super politicised, so the reason there's a river and not a trickle isn't just because I've underestimated how strong of a draw the anti-capitalist angle is. Something *else* is giving people the eyes necessary to see the rot beneath the surface of the mainstream internet. Maybe I sound totally clueless acting like that's a hard problem that requires a powerful driving force or unique formative experience to achieve. Maybe the toxic nature of living your whole life inside gamified influencer silos and the attention economy is so obvious that even people who grew up without exposure to anything else can still come to see it for what it is. Maybe you'd have to be terminally jaded and cynical to doubt that this would eventually happen. Maybe that's what I am. In my defence, there was close to a decade of time where saying a sentence like that would absolutely have invoked the "radical nut job" response from almost anybody, and the collective shrug of "meh" in response to the Snowden revelations kind of left me with the impression that people would put up with just about anything online. I don't think you can *be* an online privacy activist for decades without ending up jaded and cynical. But if I'm wrong about all of this, and more and more people from diverse age groups and walks of life are starting to see the light and that's driving them to the smolnet, then I am happily, gloriously wrong. We can move "retirement home" a little further down the list of this space's functions - but I see no need to remove it entirely. I am convinced that it does play that role for a lot of people and there's nothing wrong with that all.
The possibility that perhaps I'm wrong about the empirical question of just how big a slice of the smolnet the orphans of Netscape represent was not really the main thrust of jns' response, though. The point that I suspect they would consider the most important one was actually about the value and importance and power of dreams, presented succinctly in three sentences:
Our visions of the future were (and are) not some naive dream of an unattainable future. Our dreams shape the future, and if we want a brighter, better future, we had better be able to dream brighter, better dreams. We can't hope to build a better future if we can't even envision it in the first place. These dreams are essential.
I am actually 100% onboard with this! In fact, I hope to publish something solarpunkish in the near future which leans pretty heavily on this very attitude. Dreams can certainly inspire and motivate real world change for good even if they never come to fruition themselves, and that's certainly an argument against stopping dreaming entirely. I never meant to suggest that I had stopped dreaming entirely, but I also never explicitly said anything like "I am deprecating my old unrealistic dreams for the following shiny new ones", so maybe it was kind of implied that I had. Maybe this is why I couldn't shake the feeling that the post carried an air of defeatism, or at least acquiescence, which I didn't really feel in my heart.
I don't think that believing dreams in general can be important or even essential means that there's no such thing as a naive or unattainable dream. Some dreams function better than others for the purpose of bringing about real change. Some might even be counterproductive. I think maybe there's a "golidlocks zone" for dreams. But what Sandra's original post helped me to see clearly wasn't even that the kind of internet I dreamed of was impossible anyway. It was that it was a niche, minority dream, that most people would not perceive my dream world as a dream world, that most people do not perceive the technosocial status quo as a nightmare. When that's the situation, the feasibility of the dream itself is irrelevant. Maybe that's semantic nitpicking, maybe "the dream" is supposed to encapsulate all the prerequisite shifts in social attitudes for it to come true. If that's the case, then I suppose I just really do believe a lot of Utopian internet dreams from the late 90s or early 00s are unattainable. Dreaming of those things in 2023 feels like dreaming in 1993 that the majority of people would stop consuming commercial television and radio and just read books instead.
I still believe a better future can be built. Maybe letting go of the last vestiges of some of my earlier dreams was easy precisely because they don't really fit so well into how I think about the future these days. I used to think within a framework where the future of the internet and the future of the world were more or less one and the same thing. For the orphans of Netscape, the internet was the most important thing in the world! But these days I think a better future for the world is a future with less internet, not different internet. Well, less *and* different, but the "less" is the bigger part. Perhaps. And all the parts of this better future which involve the internet are themselves the smaller part of the whole future picture. I am fully aware of how vague and handwavey all that sounds. I don't apologise for that because, well, I'm still in the very early stages of this ideological pivot. But I know I'm still dreaming!
One last time, for emphasis in closing: I'm not at all "down on the smolnet", and I'm certainly not abandoning it. I plan to be more active in it this year than I was last year, a lot more active. I believe the smolnet could very plausibly grow to ten times its current size, maybe even a hundred times its current size. It would still be niche if it did, but it might become a kind of visible, recognisable, familiar niche, a niche that isn't completely unheard of by and incomprehensible to people outside of it. Something like retrocomputing or amateur radio. Something big enough to support real-world clubs and events, at least in large population bases. It can be a thriving little "dreamworld on the side" for the small slice of people who are inclined to perceive it as such. I don't think it devalues it at all to believe it's unlikely to be much bigger than that. If you believe it *can* be much bigger than that and you're fired up to work hard to help make that happen, then, sincerely, more power to you! I'm not opposed to that in any way. I am always happy to be proven wrong when I get pessimistic about something. Heck, that's the great part of being pessimistic! When you're wrong, it's good news. :)
Wholesomedonut has offered the perspective of somebody who has made their way into Geminispace, seemingly happily, without being an Orphan of Netscape *or* a raging anti-capitalist: