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Orphans of Netscape

Mid last year, Sandra at idiomdrottning.org wrote a fantastic post, entitled "Talking about my generation". I only read it much more recently. It resonated with me, I mulled it over a while, connected some ideas in it with what had previously been totally unrelated stuff in my mind, and it ended up doing a surprising amount of work in shifting my perspective on the modern internet and helping to lift me out of an aversive headspace, a bad tech funk, which I was deeply stuck in for most of 2022. This post is an attempt to share some of the thinking behind that experience, which might well be totally idiosyncratic and non-repeatable for people who aren't me, but oh well. If you think this post is mostly nonsense and you hate it, that's fine, but please do blame me and not Sandra because I am going waaaay beyond her starting point.

Sandra's 2022-07-21 post "Talking about my generation"

The original post is succinct and poignant and you should really just read it, but I'd prefer this post to be stand-alone intelligible, so I'll attempt a brief summary: Sandra points out that there is a general tendency for people from a specific age group to perceive the current tech landscape as rotten much more strongly than either those who are younger than them - who grew up with this landscape, so that its ugly defects are just an invisible background - or those who are older than them - who never deeply engaged with the internet before this landscape's lowered barriers let them in. Those of us in between those two groups are in the minority in feeling a genuine sense of loss when comparing the present to the recent past.

In passing, I should clarify that I've long been wary, even dismissive, of the notion of "generations", all this "baby boomers", "gen x/y/z", "millennial" stuff. Obviously it's not completely devoid of value, but I've always felt like a lot of it was cheap stereotyping, painting with extremely broad strokes, ignoring fuzzy boundaries and ignoring that some societal changes happen at different times in different parts of the world. Often it just seems to be deployed as an easy way to dismiss and "other" certain people based on their age when it's convenient to do so. There used to be a fantastic post somewhere in Gopherspace (I have it in my head that it's no longer up, but possibly that's wrong, and I've forgotten where on Earth it is/was - please email me if you know what I'm talking about!) which espoused the idea that generations were mostly nonsense but occasionally there really were genuine nodal points in history (I'm borrowing that term from Gibson's Bridge triology, it's not the term the forgotten Gopher author used), like WWII, which separated people born on either side of them, and if I remember rightly this post proposed that the creation of the internet was one of those points. I like Sandra's generational analysis despite my usual misgivings because (i) it explicitly acknowledges "exceptions in all directions", and (ii) it fits neatly into the nodal point model, rather than the usual weird clockwork cycle of "lol, kids these days". Maybe I also like it because I feel like it actually describes me accurately, whereas in standard generational discourse I'm supposedly a millennial, which is not a label I self-identify as at all, which carries a load of stereotypes that I don't believe describe me accurately, and which seems like a hopelessly ill-formed category precisely because it uses round numbers on an arbitrary calendar to lump together folks who grew up on either side of exactly the nodal point that Sandra identifies.

[UPDATE 2023-01-20]: The fantastic Gopherspace post referenced above has been found! Thanks very much to the author, SDF user undo, for reaching out to me:

undo's 2019-12-03 post "Alternative to Strauss-Howe Generations"

Anyway, onwards. This next paragraph is going to seem like a diversion, but bear with me.

Way back in the year 2000, a group of entrepreneurial space enthusiasts formed a private corporation with the intent of purchasing the ageing and ailing Mir space station off the Russian government and turning it into a platform for space tourism and other commercial activities in space. Obviously this didn't work out. Years later, in 2008, a documentary was made about this failed endeavour. I haven't seen the documentary, so I don't know if it's any good and this post is not an endorsement of it. I've only read that it exists on Wikipedia. I read about it on Wikipedia for the first time not very long after it was released, maybe 2009 or 2010, back in a time when Netflix was (in Australia, at least, then a land of expensive and unreliable internet connections which inevitably came with paltry monthly data caps) a company which snail-mailed you DVDs in pre-paid return envelopes (which sounds hilarious today but had genuine advantages: they couldn't ram recommendations down your throat, and if you borrowed a whole season of a TV show at once they couldn't drop that show while you were half-way through it). I would have had to chase down an obscure torrent to watch the documentary then, and so I didn't bother. Apparently it's on Amazon Prime Video these days. Anyway, the reason I'm talking about this mysterious might-not-even-be-good documentary at all is that, despite never having seen it, its *name* has stuck with me ever since I first read it, for more than a decade afterwards.

It's called "Orphans of Apollo".

English Wikipedia article: "Orphans of Apollo"

Quoting the Wikipedia article:

The film’s title refers to those people who came of age during the early years of the Space Age and expected to see progress continue at the rate seen in those heady early days, only to be disappointed — orphaned — by events of the last few decades. If they were going to have the kind of bold future they once envisioned, they would have to build it themselves.

Does that first part sound familiar?

The utopian visions of the future which were in the air in the Space Age, according to which by the time the current century rolled around we'd be living in a world of space hotels and moon bases and Mars colonies and asteroid belt mining operations, seduced an entire generation of otherwise very intelligent and technically savvy people, despite having retrospectively very obvious and very serious economic problems, political problems, and motivational problems of why the "man in the street" was supposed to actually really deeply want to live in a rotating tin can in the first place. How did this happen? Partially because I think idealistic young people are just very susceptible to narratives of trailblazing, pioneering spirit at exciting frontiers, but also partially because for a good chunk of those people's formative years, absolutely incredible real world progress was actually happening right before their very eyes at breakneck pace, progress which seemed for all the world like the plausible first steps in a path leading exactly to those utopian science fiction futures these people had also grown up reading and dreaming about. The world went from Sputnik in 1957 to man on the moon in 1969, just 12 years later. For some folks those 12 years started when they were too young to really understand anything about economics or politics, and covered about the entirety of their high school and university education. It's no surprise these people were able to suspend their disbelief about a glorious future in space.

During the 90s, lots of us received exactly the same Space Age narrative of trailblazing, pioneering spirit at an exciting frontier, but this time the frontier wasn't outer space, it was cyberspace. That word didn't sound quite so cringey yet. In 1996 cyberspace even got its own declaration of independence! Computer geeks were building a whole new world, and the governments and the huge corporations that people were so fed up with in the real world were on the fast track to obsolescence (never mind that the richest and most powerful people in the world had very little interest in being rendered obsolete). Sure, lots of people didn't understand what was going on at all, but that was strictly a temporary problem. The next generation of "digital natives" would grow up "computer literate" from day one. By the time they were adults, we'd be on IPv6 and the internet would be strictly peer-to-peer, with no artificial dichotomy between clients and servers. We wouldn't need gate-keeping, rent-collecting middlemen! Anybody on Earth could go and buy a little server box from Radioshack and plug it into their modem, just like everybody used to plug fax and answering machines into their phones, and then they could use free software to talk instantly and directly to anybody else on Earth, at costs too cheap to meter, and thanks to strong crypto ("crypto" was a *good* word until just a few years ago) they could do it without fear of eavesdropping or censorship. Repressive regimes would fall, unable to exercise control over access to information. Even nation states would eventually become obsolete! Humanity would become one big happy, unified "global village" in a "postgeographic" future, with totally democratised access to information and media.

English Wikipedia article: A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Maybe not everybody believed or wanted every part of this vision, but this was genuinely the kind of talk which was very seriously thrown around in very smart circles in those days. It all sounds loopy and naive today, but it seemed oh-so-plausible at the time. Why wouldn't it? We too witnessed absolutely incredible real world progress which seemed like the plausible first steps! Consider the 12 year period of time from 1993, when the first release of Mosaic was made (widely considered the first thing that could pass for a user friendly web browser), up until 2005. In that same window of time, just as brief as that from Sputnik to Apollo 11, we went from most people not having internet access at home to most people having slow and temporary dialup connections to many people having high speed and permanent cable or DSL connections. We linked all the disparate lands of the Earth together electronically with monumental and eye-wateringly expensive underwater infrastructure projects (a process that Neal Stephenson documented in 1996 in an unreasonably compelling and characteristically ultra-long essay for Wired called "Mother Earth, Mother Board", which conveys well the sense of scale and gravitas of the internetification of our planet). Napster used that infrastructure to shake the hell out of the music industry and gave the man in the street a concrete demonstration of the fact that old laws didn't matter much when breaking them was so cheap and so easy and so popular that it just wasn't practical to do much about it. Efforts by the US government to restrict the use and export of crypto by non-military users were repeatedly foiled by the efforts of idealistic internet activists like the EFF. The US government sued Microsoft for antitrust, and won. Starting with the boon of Netscape's donated source code, team FOSS fought and won in the browser wars with such a sense of revolutionary zeal that the official mozilla.org branding of the time looked like something right out of the Great Leap Forward, big red five-pointed stars and all. Mozilla/Firebird/Firefox crushed Internet Explorer, and Open Office looked on course to crush Microsoft Office. Those were straight up David vs Goliath victories! Wikipedia came along. The blogosphere and RSS/Atom came along. Ubuntu came along and promised to finally make Linux accessible to the mortal user. They didn't have final working hardware yet, but the idea of the One Laptop Per Child project was announced, and the idea was electrifying enough! Children in the developing world would grow up computer literate, too! All this, and there were no iPhones or Android phones, the very idea of a computing platform whose manufacturer acted as a gatekeeper for the software you could install on it being simply unimaginably dystopian. There was no Twitter. Facebook just barely existed, but nobody outside of the US college scene had heard of it or was allowed to use it. YouTube just barely existed, but true geeks ignored it because we didn't like / couldn't easily use something called "Flash" (later we crushed that, too). What a time to be alive!

Wired Magazine: "Mother Earth, Mother Board", by Neal Stephenson

Of course we all know how the *next* 12 years went. The "computer literacy" idea sure didn't pan out. When was the last time you even heard that phrase before reading this post? As Ploum recently put it so clearly, the very notion of "learning to use a computer" has been killed. The next generation didn't naturally grow up with a deep and intuitive understanding of computing. Instead, genuinely bright young people studying astrophysics at top-tier universities don't even understand that filesystems exist. Every last bit of the common foundation that underlies all computing devices has been abstracted over so that there's nothing left you can learn from using device A to solve problem X which can be usefully transferred to using device B to solve problem Y. Basic UI stuff that used to ubiquitous stopped working reliably - have you tried using the mouse cursor to select text in a website lately? Often it just doesn't work. Personal computing got applianceified, consumption got prioritised over production, video and audio got prioritised over text, the internet became more centralised and more commercialised, and some parts of the end result honestly resemble nothing so much as all the worst parts of the previous century's broadcast media turned up to eleven. The internet gave us an amplified version of exactly what it was supposed to save us from! How could anybody not feel a sense of loss?

Ploum's 2022-12-03 post "Reinventing how we use computers"

The Verge article: "File not found"

Or at least, that's one perspective on the whole thing. Most of the young people who can't find their files are approximately as upset about the modern internet as most people my age were that didn't get the chance to spend their school holidays playing zero gravity football, which is to say it doesn't even cross their mind. My 90-odd year old grandfather, who last time I saw him was sitting in his caravan using an iPad to watch a YouTube video of an American guy with a metal detector hunting for Civil War relics, is also not upset that computers and the internet finally developed into something that normal people could use for normal purposes before he shuffled off this mortal coil; that they finally attained the status of mature and civilised technology, like the automobile and other convenient devices that only trained experts have to bother knowing anything about the insides of. Those of us who are deeply, achingly upset about the whole thing are definitely the odd ones out.

I humbly propose the title "orphans of Netscape" for us odd ones out. Sure, there are other "orphans of X" candidates you might prefer, maybe something less web-centric. I might like them too. But this is the first one that popped into my head and it's stuck there, and I like it because of the connection between Netscape and Mozilla, who used to be David but now have given up even trying, and that betrayal is a tangible part of the sense of loss for me. So, I'm an orphan of Netscape in my head going forward. If you're reading this now on Gemini or Gopher then chances are good that you are also an orphan of Netscape, because we are super duper over-represented in the smolnet.

This post isn't just about the name, though. It's about the fact there is a very simple outsider's perspective which explains why we're the odd ones out in the internet story, and it applies equally well to both of the orphans of Netscape and Apollo. It goes like this. From time to time, certain small groups of tech-savvy people happen to grow up in the same place and at the same time as certain powerful new technologies. Because of this unique background, these people - and these people alone - are able to very clearly perceive visions of the future which are both glorious and 100% technically feasible, the technical feasibility being something that they feel in their bones by virtue of direct experience, or at least direct observation. Those people therefore mistake these visions for being not just compelling but actually being inevitable, for being the obviously, undeniably natural and pre-destined state of the world, for being exactly what everybody else would want too, if only they understood things properly! But these futures aren't inevitable, they're actually mostly wishful thinking and they simply don't come to pass. Space cadets and net cadets alike come crashing down to Earth, hard, and some get lifelong scars, not on their bodies, but in their souls. The Earthbound majority who never took off in the first place simply don't understand what all the fuss is about. Life goes on.

This is a bitter pill to swallow, no doubt. I expect that lots of people won't like this account of how they became orphaned. I get that it sounds a lot like defeatism and surrender, like it dismisses everything we hold dear as childish fantasy. It sounds like "Grow up, quit dreaming, get a haircut and buy an Alexa!". Maybe I'm kidding myself and I really have just given up and surrendered, but right now that's not how this new view of things feels to me. I think that the pill is not merely bitter, but in fact bittersweet. I'm from the younger end of Netscape orphan age range, and I have pretty well exactly half my expected life still ahead of me. I don't want to spend half my life miserable and/or angry, fighting losing battles, desperately trying to turn back time, all the while cursing my "normie" friends and family and colleagues as idiot lemmings, eventually ending up even more burnt out and bitter and alienated than I already am. The orphans of Netscape perspective doesn't emphasise how miserable my future is going to be (I'm getting enough of that as it is from climate change and the Neo Cold War, both of which matter a great deal more than the internet, which by the way failed to prevent either of them). Instead it emphasises that I had the good fortune and privilege to live through a unique and short-lived moment in history, and got to experience the heady early days of mass internet adoption when anything still seemed possible, and that was great. Sort of a "better to have loved and lost" take on the whole thing. Maybe also an "acceptance stage of grief" thing. A sense of closure, and freedom to move on.

None of which is to say that the sense of loss we feel isn't valid. I'm not denying that things really were better. I still wish things were different. What we had wasn't an illusion. But it *was* an illusion that things would stay that way forever, or get even *more* that way, and that most people wanted that, that most people cared about it anywhere near as much as we did and would actively resist change. We really had our heads in the clouds big time there, no less than the 1960s space cadets did. When we conceptualise ourselves as having been robbed of the glorious digital future that we deserved, we are actually making ourselves into victims of our own imagination. It hurts less, I think, I hope, when you realise that was an illusion. It makes the present a bit less of a cosmic catastrophe when you don't look at it like you just crawled out of the wreckage of an express train to paradise which got derailed at the last minute by a small number of moustache-twirling villains.

Our sense of loss is likely more acute than those of the orphans of Apollo. They grew up just watching other people fly to the moon, whereas we got to be active participants in better internet. But there's another way in which the orphans of Netscape are much, much luckier than the orphans of Apollo. Hand-me-down space stations are rare and expensive, and you can't even fit a dozen people in one of them. DIY colonisation of outer space by a minority group still clinging to their dreams is out of the question. But DIY colonisation of cyberspace is cheap and low risk and there's room for everyone who wants to join. The real internet isn't gone. It's been marginalised and sidelined and it's likely going to stay that way forever now, but nobody can completely take it away from us as long as the TCP/IP bedrock is still there. The small internet movement is exactly this kind of DIY cyberspace colony, which explains perfectly why so many of us are from the orphan of Netscape generation.

This change in perspective also helps me to keep the small internet, well, in perspective. Let's not kid ourselves. We aren't building the future here. We are not launching a revolution. We are not rescuing hordes of people from the forces of evil. We are building a weird and wonderful combination of retirement village, sanatorium, group therapy practice, rural retreat, museum, art gallery, fleamarket, classroom, and a whole bunch of other things. That's not supposed to be dismissive, or deprecating, or trivialising. There are some important institutions in that list! But most people spend most of their time outside of them. That's fine. That's good and that's healthy! Understanding our actual place in the big picture frees us up from having to worry too much about hard problems. Nothing we build has to be able to scale, technically or financially, up to the entire planet. Thank God! If we make bad design decisions they will not burden untold numbers of future users for decades to come. Somebody else already made those bad decisions, it's why we're here playing around on the sidelines! The scope for further damage of that scale is minimal. I'm not trying to provide excuses for building a slapdash smolnet. We can and should still maintain a sense of pride and of craftsmanship about the whole thing. I'm just trying to give permission - mostly to myself - to *not* feel the weight of the digital world on our shoulders every day, for the smolnet to be an important part of our lives but not the only part or the most important part. I'm sure most people don't need to be told this, but I somehow lost sight of it.

I want to clarify that I'm not saying that the small internet in any way "belongs" to those people in a certain narrow band of ages, or that it cannot be understood by people outside of that band, or that we don't want them here. None of that is true! I was born well after the last moon landing, and I have no lived experience of the space age. I grew up during a time when manned spaceflight was notable mostly for shuttles blowing up and killing people and Mir constantly breaking down and/or catching fire (but somehow never killing anybody). That didn't stop me from reading books about the space race, books written during it, or after it by people who had taken part in it, and I absolutely got the excitement and the sense of wonder and the grandiose scale of the vision, all that stuff was transmitted faithfully across the generation gap. There's no reason that young people who had "Okay, Google" amongst their first words can't also understand our experience and perspective, at least a bit. We should do our best to facilitate and encourage and welcome this. The number of people who really truly feel the sense of loss in their bones like we do is only ever going to decrease with time, but the ideas and the values and the stories and some of the tools can and should live on. The small internet is always going to be small, and most people are never going to really get the appeal, but that doesn't mean that it is futile or without value.

Finally, I acknowledge that it's kind of a very weird time to write this post. On the one hand, Musk's shambolic tenure as CEO of Twitter has some people more optimistic than I've ever seen anybody about the impending deaths of the first generation of social media platforms, and with them the arrival of a golden opportunity to roll back some of the damage. On the other hand, NASA's Artemis 1 mission eventually went off without a hitch and now it really seems possible that I will actually get to witness humans walking on the moon in my own lifetime. Maybe in another 12 years time this post will look like pessimistic nonsense and both sets of orphans will have simply proven to have been decades ahead of their time. I kind of doubt it, but who knows?

Responses

Here are links to some resonses to this post which have surfaced in Geminispace or Gopherspace:

Sunset's 2023-01-13 gemlog post "The Internet of Money"

jns' 2023-01-13 phlog post "Dreams are essential"

screwtape's 2023-01-23 phlog post "Young Feynman Repaired Radios"