Comment by keiferski
1 year ago
I think this is a consequence of elite takeover of the internet. The culture you describe still exists, but it's largely found in places considered unsavory and uncouth by mainstream organizations.
1 year ago
I think this is a consequence of elite takeover of the internet. The culture you describe still exists, but it's largely found in places considered unsavory and uncouth by mainstream organizations.
I‘ve always considered it to be exactly the other way round: in the old days of yore, the Internet was dominated by a certain kind of elite, and then the Endless September happened and commercialization followed.
I'd say there's been (at least) three overlapping generations: The academics (.edu email addresses), the geeky amateurs (dial-up internet), and the app users (the social media crowd).
Not trying to denigrate the third generation there, it's just that for them it's a mature product, like a TV or a car. They feel no need to tinker with what BigCorp is selling them.
Instead of overlapping generations, there's a gap of a whole generation of 'mainstream' internet users between the geeky amateurs/dial-up internet which arguably ceases being the dominant usecase already in mid-1990s before the dot.com boom starts due to this generation, and the app users which get seriously started only from around 2010.
Those users were large numbers of mainstream non-geeky people, but they used websites on desktop computers, not through the walled garden of facebook on a phone.
Where do the aol users fit? Part of the early app crowd?
3 replies →
It was dominated by an academic and intellectual elite somewhat detached from real world politics and economics, and was replaced by that political and economic elite.
>> elite takeover of the internet.
Wasn't the internet solely the domain of the (techno) elite for a very long time? It's the masses that have wrecked what we had, the the "new" elite profiting off of them. Maybe the societal gains outweigh what we lost, but if you were part of the original elite 20+ years ago, you're now in a much worse place.
I wouldn’t consider academics and technologists to be the “elite” in a societal sense. I’m talking about the people that go to Ivy League schools and make up positions in top companies and government organizations.
For example: the New York Times ran an editorial in the 90s about how the internet would have a similar effect to fax machines. They are an elite organization and didn’t care about the internet much then. Now, twenty five years later, they do care a lot about what’s on the internet.