The Net is Dead, long live the net!
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Almost a year ago, when I wrote my about page I promised on that page that I would some day explain what the title of this weblog is about. More specifically, I promised to explain why I think the net is dead. I guess it's not dead in a literal sense because you're still able to read this article but things aren't looking all that bright if you ask me. Internet has come a long way but I sometimes feel it's demise has already begun. Let's have a look at what's already happened and what's currently happening with the internet. An essay stating the obvious: The internet is dead.
The early years
Even though I know there are people who have been 'online' for more years than I have I believe I'm quite a 'veteran' when it comes to being on the internet. I got my first email address in 1991 and started building my first webpages around 1993. At first we weren't using any web browser but gopher. I guess quite a lot of people won't even know what that is these days. A friend of mine told me that gopher was great for downloading guitar tabs. This made me want to go on the internet immediately as I'm a guitar player. Instantly I was hooked!
The premier browser at that time was called NCSA Mosaic. Netscape was still in it's development phase. I believe I started using Netscape at version 0.83 or somewhere around that version number. Internet Explorer didn't even exist back then and Microsoft didn't consider the internet all that important. The internet was something 'cool' back then. Most people who weren't either in college or working for some government institution had never been on the internet at all. Heck, they didn't even know what it was! So there I was with a couple of friends building websites for fun. Hosted on an old Mac IIcx running a webserver called WebStar. Yahoo! already existed at that time but things were a lot different compared to this present day. It was run by some friendly bunch at Stanford university. I remember the address being akebono.stanford.edu. The funny thing is that this original address still works. The same original machine is even still running to celebrate the start of what's now a billion dollar enterprise. In those days one could submit a new website to Yahoo! and receive a personal answer from one of the students who started the site. Unfortunately I suck at archiving my stuff which is why I don't have these original emails from the Yahoo crew anymore. I guess much has changed. The people that founded Yahoo don't comment on our websites anymore. Heck, those who work there don't even answer their email. The same thing goes for other online enterprises that became too big for their own good. (Yes I'm talking to you, Google!).
Only people with brains that actually function to some extent
A very nice thing about the internet in the early nineties was the fact that one would have a real hard time finding any morons online. At the present time almost the opposite seems to be true. Internet was rules by those who were blessed with a working set of brains. Usenet was flourishing and interesting discussions were everywhere. It was perfectly fine to have a 'mail me' link on your webpage. If someone were to send you a mail it was always something nice or at least something interesting. I guess one could call me an elitists because of this particular paragraph in this essay. Maybe I am. I'll just admit it, I hate dealing with stupid people. In those days they were hardly (if any) present on the internet which is why the internet was a really great place to meet interesting people. I hung out at places like ISCA BBS, a telnet-based bulletin-board system at Iowa University, Kobra MUD, a text-based multi-player game in Delft and some other places. It resulted in many real-life friendships of which many are still going strong. Usenet was great with hundreds of interesting groups containing discussions with people who actually had something to say on the subject the group was about. Asking a clever question would result in a clever answer. Satisfaction guaranteed.
Only meaningful content
Soon after I discovered web browsers there were the search engines. One can probably hardly imagine the internet without Google these days but at that time it didn't exist. Altavista was the major search engine of the early nineties. While Google still manages to come up with rather relevant results, things were a lot better back then. Whenever you'd search for something the search engine would present 100% relevant hits only. Excellent stuff indeed. Besides the occasional 'personal homepage' there wasn't much on the world wide web that didn't have content in it that actually mattered. There wasn't any advertisement ruining your experience when reading interesting content on websites. No popups, no ActiveX components trying to install themselves and take control of your computer. Just webpages with content that mattered. What a brilliant place the internet was.
Only emails that were actually addressed to YOU
Email was great in the early days. Whenever you'd receive one it would be from someone with genuine interest in you or someone who really had something to say to you. No advertisement, no spam, nothing you wouldn't want to end up in your INBOX. It wasn't necessary to install virus scanners or spam blockers to protect your INBOX from meaningless crap gushing in. It just didn't exist. If you'd send an email to the occasional company or institution you would actually get an anwer. You'd get an answer within a reasonable timeframe even. These days sending mail to an internet company is something I hardly ever even bother with anymore. Unless the company feels there's an opportunity to sell you something they won't respond to your mail anyway. Wasted time, wasted bytes.
I guess I could go on and on about how everything about the internet was so much better back then compared to how things are right now. That would however make me sound like some old fart mumbling about how everything from the past was better. I'm still enjoying the internet, it's just that I'm enjoying it in a different way, appreciating different aspects of it.
I told ya...
I remember saying it several times when we were discussing the internet and the great thing called cyberspace being part of our lives: "Wait untill the masses discover this... the fun will be gone pretty damn soon!". Money-hungry people come in large numbers. Stupid people come in even larger numbers. As we all know, stupid people in large numbers can be extremely dangerous. They can push countries into political directions you don't even want to think about and they sure as hell can destroy something as nice as the internet. And so they did. In the last couple of years of the nineties the internet started becoming mainstream. Spam started to infest our INBOX, completely irrellevant websites started to emerge and advertisement claimed it's place on just about any webpage on the net. And then there were the stupid people. They came in larger masses than one could ever imagine and they devoured our precious internet before we even realized. They bought the stuff spammers offered them, resulting in spam becoming the very profitable business that it still is. Together with the spammers they infested Usenet, killing it completely. It's hard to find anything USEful on Usenet anymore these days. It's either spam or off-topic babble combined with the occasional fight resulting in several parties calling eachother "nazi sons of bitches". Needless to say I left Usenet a long time ago.
So for how long is this going to last?
I sometimes wonder how long the internet is going to last. It's a known fact that a vast majority of all internet traffic consists of meaningless crap. We're talking spam in all of it's possible forms. Over 80% of all email send over the wire is pure spam. On this website over 80% of all incoming hits consists of referrer spam. Of course I'm blocking all that but the requests are still sent over the net. 20 hits per minute at least, pounding my server 24/7. And then I didn't even discuss all attempts to crack my machines. It's a proven fact that an unprotected Windows box with a somewhat older version of Windows will be hacked within minutes if you just connect it to the internet after a fresh install. It sounds pretty unbelievable but it's true. One simply can't be online anymore without installing a full suite of anti-virus tools, anti-spyware tools, anti-hacking tools and anti-spam tools. I guess any machine needs to be twice as powerful than normally required just to be able to run all this stuff in the background. Less fortunate souls with less knowledge of their webservers find themselves paying the price for all this because it eats up massive amounts of costly bandwidth. I put considerable amounts of time and efforts into maintaining Pivot Blacklist to keep my weblog clean of spam. Blogging just isn't possible without an anti-spam suite because in days your entire site would be completely infested with rubbish. We keep upgrading our lines but we can't really keep up with all this traffic. My DSL line has been gracefully doubled in speed by my provider two times over the last year but still surfing the net feels slow and sluggish most of the time.
There's more...
I haven't even discussed all reasons why I believe the internet has been killed quite a while ago already. There's phishing, hacking, spyware, adware, worms, trojans, the list goes on and on and on. All of these once didn't exist but are now here to stay unless someone comes up with something better than the current internet. Privavy doesn't exist anymore either. Anything you do online can and will be monitored by shady government agencies and may even get you into serious trouble in case they mistake you for some sort of terrorist. In case you feel like you should resist and use software such as Pretty Good Privavy (a.k.a. PGP) to protect your emails from other people reading it you've instantly become a suspicious individual. You better watch your steps. Then there's the DDos attacks which are now becoming a service offered by villains with access to huge network of infected machines owned by the earlier mentioned stupid people who don't how to administer a PC. They will attack anything online for you with their zombie networks as long as you pay their price.
So what are you still doing here you whiner?
Strange as it may sound, I'm still enjoying the internet despite the enormous list of annoyances I discussed in the previous part of this essay. However I'm enjoying it in a quite different way than I did in the old days. Today, pure technology is the key thing that keeps me going strong on the internet. These are exciting times when it comes to what the web is evolving towards. Better browsers, better programming languages and interesting technologies are emerging at a rapid pace. XHTML, CSS, Ajax, RSS, microformats, Tags, server-side frameworks that can do amazing things. I love it all. If you're a frequent reader of this weblog you've probably already noticed. I also get some sort of wicked kind of satisfaction out of the cat-and-mouse game between me on one hand and the blogspammers on the other hand trying to stay ahead of them and preventing them from touching my site. I guess it feels like trying to take a bit back of what's was once ours.
Meeting people online is something I hardly put time and effort in anymore. This has a lot to do with the amount of idiots that scrounge the internet these days. I've even lost interest in using my own online community site for mobile devices because of this very reason. It's hard to not get involved in a petty fight or even receive threats from people who just aren't able to communicate in a mature way. Writing about technology and cyberlife ensures I won't have to deal with people I really don't want any business with. Most comments I receive on this website and the articles on it are nice and often very interesting and challenging. So here I am, still online, still going strong! Now that all of this is finally off my chest after one year of blogging on this website let's finish with the following words:
The Net is Dead, long live the net! Let's dance on it's grave and celebrate!
At 20 September '05 - 13:32 Jurgen wrote:
(And that comes from a marketingstudent… You got to know something profondly before you can be against it ;) )
At 20 February '06 - 01:32 jayMoena wrote:
You just cannot see the internet as one anymore.
At 21 February '06 - 15:42 Jero wrote:
At 31 March '06 - 02:21 polarix wrote:
I’m online I guess since 1993 (Just Mailboxes) I went on to Internet in the year 1995 and I was realy excited and also dicuss the possiblities. But I was quite young (18) at this days.
Now I’m working for an ISP and I use Internet primarly as source of technical Information and inspiration.
polarix
At 23 May '06 - 04:54 Sibban wrote:
Anyway, thanks for the refreshing of my memory and let’s hope the net will someday become what the people want it to be, not the companys, so that it can satisfy both intelligent and less intelligent people. Perhaps one can create a sister net called the IQ Net which will only be available for serious users talking serious matters without spam and ads? =)
At 12 July '06 - 06:59 mauhiz wrote:
I get the feeling that the Net is just born. From an experiment involving – I don’t count myself in – mostly elite people, it went to a huge means of communication binding more and more people. Why should people be stupid when they don’t know how to patch their Windows box? They surely are more than a computer user, and they say it in their weblog most of the time.
To be honest, I liked the period when most people were smart. As a online game player too, I miss the days when helping people get better a the game would not result in insults. I even gave some of my time in forums to help people.
I’d better think of this year – 2006 – as the new beginning of the Internet – as what is was really meant to be. No, not a platform for computer freaks, but what ties the nations and the communities. Wikis, Weblogs, Forums are growing not only in numbers, but also in relevance, because you wouldn’t waste your time doing a website anyone can do.
I don’t like ads too – I consider they are a necessary evil when building a website, so that the advertiser supports me; anyways only people without efficient ad-blocking have to watch it. It gets back to elitism : there is quite a difference between surfing as an expert user, and surfing with IE5.5… ;)
At 08 August '06 - 09:56 Taipeimarc wrote:
I was wondering why you are using Pivot instead of Wordpress now?
Regarding your Net is Dead article, another negitive factor that you probably heard about is the Net2 issue where some telcoms want to charge extra for their content/bandwidth. On the plus side, quite a lot of valuble or at least interesting info is being posted. Just checking a site like popurl.com (a digg/delious/metafilter etc. all in one site) is information overload.
At 06 April '07 - 21:37 ronbravo wrote:
Oh, and you have a really nice design sense. Clean and simple. I like it. C ya.
At 13 April '08 - 06:54 Sneef wrote:
I agree that the net is full of “dead heads”, but i do not agree that it is dead… far far from it. When i started in 1999 the only money to be made was from Porn, eBay or Amazon… now the internet is thriving, people are spending more and more money online and it had become so simple for people to make money selling online that even my mother is doing it…
Now there is so much information on every topic, that if you are interested in just 3 or 4 different things, it can take you 1/2 the day just to catch up on blogs and RSS feeds, newsletter subscriptions etc… As a person who works on the internet everyday, i found that i must actually seclude myself from everything to actully get any work done.
At 11 February '09 - 00:29 Jucedupp wrote:
Thank you very much for this blog post. As an old nethead (since 1992) I absolutely hate what 90% the internet has become. I think that people should remind themselves that the internet is not a media or entertainment or emotional outlet and should not be used as one.
I will never user social bookmarking tools, all these link tools and clouds and web 2 idiocy and and…
The internet should always primarily remain a method or network for the dissemination of valuable information. Full stop.
The net is filled to the brim and choking with MLM’ers, these so called “internet marketers” (again, the internet should not be a marketing tool it is an information network), spammers, and varying forms of Homo Idiotii. And they are ruining the experience for the rest. My bandwidth costs more because of them. My time is endlessly consumed by them. My life would be so much better without them.
It’s like that utterly stupid Nokia ad they are running now, “The internet, now made by hand.” What a load! Rather: “The internet, now made by any idiot who can only thumb-type with a overpriced cellphone and prepaid airtime. “
So yes, the internet, in it’s original intention (and it still remains, to my mind, the most valid one) is dead. But then so are most good things in this world due to stupid consumerism and the “I want it too” syndrome.
My message to all of you who clog up the net and make it suck for people who really need to use it: Go play miniature golf in the trailer park you live in, and leave the internet alone. You are not making it better, more inclusive, more global or anything. You are making it unusable. Go away.
At 20 February '09 - 04:30 Charles wrote:
Typo Since 2005.
At 20 February '09 - 05:31 dpd wrote:
At 12 March '10 - 11:05 Muxx wrote:
Although I don’t really call myself a ‘veteran’ I have been using the net since 1995. I was only about 9 years old so I grew up on it basically.
I forget a lot of what I did when I first started using it however I do have this overwhelming sense of nostalgia.
I enjoy that I had to hunt down information instead of it just being one search away, it gave the net this kind of “finders” feeling – the same I used to get from finding those obscure electronic tracks from the early 90s to send to my friends.
The net did have a lot less morons, it was a collective of people that wanted to share information instead of becoming rich off of it.
I couldn’t stop laughing when the news was reporting about the “dot com bubble burst” cause all I could think is “yes! we’re taking it back!”
I do enjoy the net now, I still find a ton of information I would not have but I do miss the old forums that I used to visit that are long since dead.
Social media is fun to an extent but it’s too much chatter at times. I enjoyed the one on one experience you had in those lonely chat rooms or having a heated debate on forums.
Although I missed the BBS days, I still enjoy reading the old posts on TextFiles because all the information there was so relevant and still holds such great value.
There’s always going to be a subnet on the internet. I think Bruce Sterling had it right in Islands of the Net, we’re breaking up into these tribes. I just feel a bit disharmonious at times because all of my old favorite sites are either dead or were bought up.
Oh well, death to the net! Long live the net!
At 06 May '10 - 05:24 David H wrote:
It is truly a pity one the one hand that, as you say, so many “idiots” have usurped the net. And, of course, that is an elitist view. I knew that the internet could not help but be the biggest communications development of the 20th and 21th centuries and confidently preached back in ’93 that one day every company would have its own website(s) and would print that URL on their packaging, letterhead, business cards, advertising, and even vehicles.
On the other hand, the internet has brought about some advancements that are worth the while. Such as being able to book flights and hotels from half way around the world while taking an advance look at the location and picking and choosing places to stay or see.
The ability to instantly discover fascinating subjects that I had never considered or known about before..and, yes, email.
On and on.
But, the marketers, the sellers, the promoters have really trashed things up, as you say, Marco.
And if browsers are the chief way we access, sort, and use the internet the appalling divergence of standards means continual headaches to web designers. You cannot simply fix a page as if printing a page and be done with it. No, competing browsers and display and program quirks muck things up and there is no fix in sight.
I also wonder how fast we could cruise around on the internet even with our existing patchwork of cables and routers IF bandwidth was not being eaten alive by trillions of bytes of junk email, bots, Denial of Service attacks, and all the cyber warring and explorations being done by the mercenary opportunists, criminals, and hostile governments.
We have to enact so many filters at every step of the way that so many computer cycles are being devoted to just STOPPING malicious bytes.
Computers and routers at every point of the journey must consume so much processing power running filters and algorithms just to spot, crosscheck, compare, analyze the intent of packets passing through.
We are clogged with so much junk its a wonder we can get any business done at all.
Surely the net cannot continue on this course twenty years down the road. But, what is the answer?
Horribly, there may have to be a proprietary, regulated network devoted to just subscribers who fulfill certain requirements….exclusionary in nature. Back to the “nice” and “intelligent” people only in this club.
But who is worthy themselves to determine the requirements and judges the worthiness of applicants to join this net?
It sounds sort of like a private network throwback to the AOL concept.
None of the options, if there are truly options, sounds good or feasible or less than “big brother-ish”.