💾 Archived View for reptilic.us › log › 2021-05-08.gmi captured on 2023-07-22 at 16:17:39. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Around 1999 or so, we all got a good laugh out of looking at articles written just a few years earlier, in which venerable old opinion writers reassured us that this "Internet" thing was just a fad. As personal computers became more common, people were eager to try out all the features, and that included these newfangled modems, but in time the novelty would wear off and it would go back to being a niche thing. Remember the 1970s, they asked, when truckers were momentarily cool, and everyone got a CB radio? Surely this would be no different.
When these guys said "internet," they usually meant "web," (a mistake that everyone has been making for the last 25 years) which made those articles especially embarrassing in hindsight. If they had been dismissing newsgroups and IRC chats as a fad... they would have kinda had a point. Those things are still around, but curiosity about them waned among normies as soon as the web became an option. It had pictures and you could use a mouse! And once someone figured out how to make money on the web, there was incentive to get as many people on it as possible.
These writers weren't critiquing the idea of networked computers, or of sharing documents via hypertext. Their real critique was of the web's content, which - to be fair! - was often extremely stupid. It still is, but back then it was a different, very specific type of stupid. People would get sick of the web when they realized there wasn't actually much to do there, and all the sites were run by dorks who quote Holy Grail.
What happened instead was, tech companies hid all the dorks in the server room and sanded off all the web's rough edges, until using the web was as effortless as _not_ using it, and it came already-working on our magical pocket supercomputers.
Admittedly, expecting a 1990s op-ed writer to predict that is kind of asking a lot.
But if we're judging by content, then does today's web really resemble the thing everyone was complaining about in the 90s? Some of that early content is still out there, or at least archived reasonably well, but the typical user never looks at it. Hell, the weirdos who actually remember it STILL never look at it. Whatever it was, it stopped updating reliably in 2002, and we all just stopped checking. The old web - the thing documented in ten thousand mid-90s thinkpieces, the thing they published glossy magazines about - barely exists anymore.
So we now find ourselves at a point where the dorks are jumping ship to alternate protocols like this one, while the web transforms into TV plus shopping. Too weird and protracted a life cycle to call a fad, maybe, but I'd hardly call that built for posterity if its distinctiveness can be drained so quickly.