How We Got Here

In the beginning...

...a few clever people invented the computer. The jury remains out as to whether or not this was a bad idea. It certainly didn't make anyone as mad as the whole "universe" fiasco did.

The computer did math. At its heart, it was a calculator: you could punch in some inputs, the circuits would sum them up, and the screen would display the result. But there were two things that set it apart from an ordinary calculator. First, it was much, much faster than an ordinary calculator. It could do thousands, millions, even billions of sums in the time it took a normal calculator to do one. Second, it had some special inputs that let you change how math worked when you used it. So instead of having "1 + 2" display "3", you could have it display "-1", or "Hello", or turn the screen green.

People soon figured out that the computer let you turn all sorts of things into math problems, even things you wouldn't normally think of as math. If you gave each letter of the alphabet a number, you could do math on them. You could give each pixel on the screen numbers for its position, brightness, and color, and do math on them. The computer never messed up, never complained about dull, repetitive sums, wasn't bothered by whether or not someone was trying to analyze a big dataset or draw a cat on their screen. If you could turn it into math, or tell the computer how to turn it into math, it was happy to do whatever you wanted it to.

Usually.

And people came up with all sorts of things for the computer to do. Some people wrote stories without pen or pencils. Some people painted pictures without a brush. Some people designed buildings, or managed finances, or made music, all on their computers. The more things people figured out how to turn into math, the more things the computer could do. Soon, people were sharing their programs with each other. Businesses sprang up around writing particularly useful programs and selling them to people with computers, who were happy to buy them because a good program made your computer better.

Then a few people got the idea to connect their computers together with wires and install a program on each to send electrical pulses back and forth between them. Each computer could send inputs to the other one, which meant you could tell the first computer to tell the second computer to do something, instead of walking over to the second computer and telling it yourself.

People, being generally lazy, loved it. Everything you could do on your computer, you could now do on someone else's—you just needed to connect your computer to the wire1 and to install a copy of the special "network program" on it. The more people who connected their computers, the more computers your computer could talk to. The more computers your computer could talk to, the more varieties of math it could do. Each new computer added to the network made everyone else's computer a little bit better, which made it more appealing to other people with computers to join, which made all the computers better, which got other people to join...

Thus, the internet was born

There were a lot of things to figure out. How did your computer know if the pulses on its bit of wire were meant as inputs it should do math on? How was it supposed to figure out which computer was which? What inputs could a computer send to another one? What if someone sent bad or dangerous inputs to your computer?

There were some people who were good with networks. They figured out how to separate out traffic so computers weren't talking over each other. They came up with a way for a person to easily remember where on the network other computers were.2 And they created a protocol around the inputs computers could send to each other, and the responses they would get back when they did.

It went like this:

Your computer could send a request to another computer if it knew its address.

If it didn't, it could try to look it up in the phone book.

If the other computer was accepting requests, it would send something back to you.

There were other protocols using the network which let computers communicate in different ways, but this one was by far the most popular. It was easy to write programs that could take advantage of it and it allowed people to send all sorts of things back and forth to one another.

Which they did. The most common program let you share stuff you had stored on your computer with anyone who made a request. If they asked to see pictures of your pets, your computer sent them pictures of your pets. If they asked to see your résumé, your computer sent them a copy of your résumé. It felt like letting people visit your house or your business, so people started calling these programs "sites,"3 and referred to people requesting those sites as "visitors."

It became cool to be "on the web." They even made movies about it. The programs letting you visit websites were called "browsers," and they came pre-installed on all new computers, so everyone could do it if they connected their computer to the network. Larry and Sergey made a site with lists of all the other sites, and ways to search those lists so their visitors could find other sites they might be interested in. It was super easy to use, and people loved it.

What wasn't easy was setting up your own website. There was a lot that went into it. You had to set up the program to let people visit your site, make it look good in browsers, get your address in the phone book, and make sure nothing broke. People with a lot of computer experience got on okay, but for most people hosting their own site was just too complicated, so they didn't bother.

The cloud is other people's computers

The thing about computers is they cost money. In order to afford computers and other things like food and mortgages, some of the people with computer experience decided to rent their extra computers to people who were interested in having a website. There were plenty of customers, plenty of extra computers, but each new website and server had to be built from scratch, which meant building a website without the expertise was an expensive, frustrating process usually involving a lot of phone calls and emails with a guy in a basement wearing a Hawaiian shirt.4

Spending money for the privilege of arguing with Dennis is not most people's idea of a good time, so there weren't a lot of people making websites. Businesses, always seeking attention, were happy to build sites for people to visit. Things really ramped up when a a bunch of cryptography geeks figured out a way for two computers to converse without anyone else understanding what they were saying. Using the same browser programs they always had, visitors could now do things with money without worrying about anyone eavesdropping or stealing their banking info. With the money they made from online commerce, businesses could pay the computer experts to run their websites for them.

But if you couldn't afford someone good with computers and you wanted to just share pictures of your cats with the wider world and you didn't know how to host a website, you didn't have any good options.

Then along came Tom.5

Tom wrote a program for his computer and put it on the internet. His program allowed people to sign up for a site on one of his computers. A user could upload pictures, design the layout, write articles or share links. The content would all be saved on Tom's computer, which would serve the user's website. No worrying about server administration or keeping your computer online—Tom would do it for you. The options were a bit limited, but for plenty of people the limited options were more than enough for what they wanted to do.

XKCD #908

Because all the websites were on Tom's computers, there were also some things the users could do that a self-hosted website couldn't. If you were logged into Tom's computer, you could post things on other users' sites for anyone to read. They could do the same to your site. It was easy for people to find each other since anything they did Tom knew about and would tag to your site. Entire communities grew up on Tom's computer, a network living in one node on the global network.6 It didn't matter to most people that it wasn't their computer; everyone was having a great time with their websites and Tom was by all accounts a chill guy.

The best part?

It was completely, utterly, 100% free.

It's all downhill from here

Not immune to needing money to run his computers, Tom was able to pay for it by selling ad space on each user's website to businesses interested in showing ads to possible customers. They'd pay money per person who saw or clicked on an ad; Tom would spend the money on keeping his computers running, and his users would get a website for free. Win-win-win.

What became apparent pretty quickly was that advertisers really liked buying these sorts of ads. Unlike TV or radio, where you were never really sure who saw the ads, if you saw an ad on one of the sites Tom hosted they knew you'd seen it. If you were also hosting a website with Tom, the advertisers knew exactly who had seen it, since Tom had your profile information right at hand.

Knowing who has seen their ads is worth a lot to advertisers. Pretty soon, Tom was making a lot of money, so much that he decided to sell his computers to someone else for a massive amount of money and go do something else. The buyers squeezed as hard as they good, and soon ended up shutting down most of the services provided by those computers, leaving their remaining users without a website.

Tom's former users were sad, but other people saw an opportunity. If you could get enough people to use your computer for long enough, you could get rich. The more information you could give advertisers about your users, the richer you could get. Mark set his computers up to be closer to a forum, but force people to use (relatively) real information about themselves. Jack set his up to facilitate lots of short, informal conversations between people. Steve and Jawed focused their computers on sharing videos instead of pictures and text. Even Larry and Sergey got in on the action, tailoring their search program to show ads based not just on what you'd searched, but what you'd searched and where you'd visited before.

So that was the game. The businesses realized most people didn't understand or care what computer they were doing things on, they just wanted to be able to do the things they wanted to do. You just had to do those things better than other people and they would flock to your computers, where you were in control.

Which worked great for the users! They got a free service that was actively focused on making things better for them. Right up until the service they were using was the only game in town... at which point the service would do the bare minimum to keep them around while it started squeezing the advertisers for as much money as they could get.7

Even worse, some of the people running the services also realized they could mess with the users who did stuff on their computers. After all, they owned the computer. If they wanted to, they could hide you from the other users, or show you stuff designed to make you mad at the people they wanted you mad at. They could take the stuff you'd put on their computer and use it to build the Torment Nexus, or sell it to someone who was.

Once that process started, if the service wasn't getting worse for the users, it certainly wasn't improving. But the problem with doing all your stuff on someone else's computer is they have all your stuff. If you wanted to leave one of the new tech monopolies, where could you go? The network lived entirely on Gabe's computer, or Kevin's computer. If you wanted to remain part of it, you had to stay, no matter how bad it got. The vast majority of people owned computers purely so they could do things on one of a few dozen computers owned by very rich people.

This is the world as we know it. The world as it was at the end of the twentieth century.

How is The Matrix almost 30 years old?

Your stuff, your computer

Some mildly radical people didn't think it was a good idea to be doing lots of things on other people's computers. It made sense to visit someone's computer to buy something from their store, or to go to a bank's computer to manage your account. But those places actually had things your computer didn't, like a vault of your money or a pair of limited edition sneakers you'd been drooling over for weeks. Until you gave it to them, they didn't have your art, your writing, your front porch where you grilled and shot the shit with your buddies.

What was especially frustrating was most people agreed with them! They just didn't agree with them enough to do anything different. People wanted to get together in shared spaces online and do the things you did together. The problem was the businesses were the only ones making online spaces big enough or nice enough to do the things they wanted to do. There were virtual coffee shops, theme parks, and bookstores; lots of places owned by someone else. There were no truly public places: no parks or cul-de-sacs or libraries. You could not come to a fete with a trunk of pottery to show your friends and take it home at the end of the day; you gave it to the church and it lived in the churchyard forever.

The network was not a public good. The network lived on someone else's computer.

The mildly radical people want to change that.8

Not for everything. Not for the virtual banks or the shops. But for art, and communities, and people who just generally felt icky about living their lives on someone else's computer.

There are lots of different ideas about how to change the internet. People generally agree the physical network doesn't need changing.9 The trick seems to be changing how we think about using a computer.

It might be like owning a house in a neighborhood. You can have people round if you tell them your address. If you decide to leave the neighborhood, you have to tell everyone or they won't know where to find you.

Maybe it's like being a CB radio enthusiast. A few people build relays we all broadcast and listen to. No one owns the airwaves.

Perhaps it's like having an RV that fits in your pocket you can drive around town and use to access any space that will have you.

What is clear is we do things on the internet in a way that doesn't match how we do things in real life. Most people are doing most things through connections to a few big computers. It was first convenient, then lucrative, and so it has calcified over several decades. But it's not inherent to the internet to do things this way, it's just the way we've done things so far.

Perhaps we'll do things differently tomorrow.

Which turned out to be the phone lines at first, since it was expensive to put a lot of wires everywhere and everyone already had a phone.

DNS. The computers themselves had no trouble remembering; they were very good at math and didn't make mistakes.

For the pedants: the data (HTML/images/etc.) is the website, the program that replies with it is the server.

At least I assume so. I never tried to get a website built this way but I have seen Jurassic Park, so...

Who wasn't first but did it best.

Forum sites did and still do this today and do it well.

This is the process of enshittification

Key change tense shift BOOM!

"Generally" is doing a lot of work here.