a brief history of the internet and everything

sorry if this is a long one, I hope you read it

Every time I think I know what I’m going to write about here, 20 other different topics and approaches pop into my head the second I sit down. Things I’ve been thinking about for years that I want to untangle here with you. But after last week, when I wrote about my realization of the interconnectedness of everything and all of us, I thought: Why not start there and build on it. That was my idea, anyway. But I tend to be a pretty tangential thinker and speaker, so I kind of went off piste right away. Rest assured, even if it doesn’t seem like I’m building on this topic, eventually I’ll get there. Or maybe I won’t, who knows.

Now, for those of you who don’t know me well, I want to give you some backstory. I’ve been on the internet for a long, long, long, long, long time (Drag Race fans, read that in Alaska’s voice). I got my first email address in 1992, and no, it wasn’t an AOL account. I was a freshman at UC Berkeley and made friends with a neighbor who helped run the server for the computer science department, so he gave me an address. This was the year before Cal made campus-wide email available for all students, and it was also nearly two years before Netscape released the very first web browser, which I vividly remember seeing for the first time in a computer lab. Before web browsers, people tended to use one of the big three services – CompuServe, AOL, or Prodigy – or they used text-based email systems like Pine, participated in forums and found communities on BBSes (bulletin boards) or The WELL, talked on IRC, telnetted into chat rooms, and so on. My friend and I met because we both went to raves, so we hung out in a chat room called vrave, made for ravers by him and another friend across the country at MIT.

My friend and I ended up going on a trip across the country in 1993 to hang out with the MIT friend and do a roadtrip down the coast to see others. This was highly unusual behavior. Like, everyone else in my life thought it was weird as hell and, frankly, kind of uncool. Remember that most people were barely using email on a regular basis. The movie “You’ve Got Mail” didn’t come out until 1998. Rudimentary websites were still a few years away. Blogs didn’t exist. Basically no one even had cell phones. Maybe a beeper. So to not only be online but to share with others, to make friends, to turn online into “IRL” was kind of freaky as far as most people I knew were concerned. And a lot of those people were in the SF Bay Area!

1990s rave by the image generator and I love it

But in those days I made a surprising number of online friends through BBSes and chat rooms, and an even more surprising number who I ended up meeting in person. Maybe it was something about that early adopter sensibility, or maybe it was that being Very Online in those days was so outside the norm that those of us who found our way to the chat rooms and forums were truly drawn by wanting to connect with likeminded people.

After college, I worked in the world of Web 1.0. I spent a year at an early online gaming startup before getting laid off for the first time in my career. That was when I was very good at online Quake and even played in the first all-female Quake tournament, making it to the semifinals – I played under the name bunnyhop. Then I worked for various online gaming publications.

In fact, I worked at a little website called IGN.com before it was even called IGN. We were the team that took the Imagine Games Network, then a part of Future Publishing, and turned it into a version of the IGN people are much more familiar with today. I remember one night staying very late at the office with the editor-in-chief, lying on the floor and sketching out how we could change the layout of the site. In those days, online publications were basically one page with a bunch of links. We had original content but also aggregated from a bunch of other video game websites, and everything was all lumped together, from PC games to Nintendo and PlayStation. We had the bright idea to create a central page with different hubs, and each one of those hubs could have its own spokes. I’m pretty sure we were the first online publication to do that – if I’m wrong, I know someone will correct me, this is the internet after all – and eventually all other websites followed suit. That was also when I became Ask Leah.

I think I’m getting off topic with all this backstory and bragging. The point is, I’ve seen the online world unfold from some relatively early days, and I’ve been paying attention from my own funny little vantage point for more than 30 years now. I’ve seen the ways a little bit of technology can possibly facilitate friendship, the ways a lot of technology can seem to drive us farther apart. I’ve also finally begun to understand that there are human problems and technology problems, and when we conflate the two and add money problems to the mix, that’s when the real trouble starts. And I’m interested in this primarily because I don’t think we’ve solved too many of the human problems. If anything, we’ve created new ones. But before I can pull apart the human problems, I feel like I need this foundation.

why is this Gen AI’s idea of “the early internet”

Let’s do a quick sort of sketch of the evolution of Being Online. Roughly speaking, things go a little like this:

• Pre-web internet, aka the Dawn of a New Era era: email, IRC, BBSes, telnet chat rooms, CompuServe, AOL – let’s connect with each other over the stuff we share in common

• Emergent mid- to late-90s internet, aka Web 1.0 and the Information Superhighway era: web browsers, online publications, personal websites, forums, online games, ICQ, AIM, more chat rooms, You’ve Got Mail

• Y2K madness, or the What The Hell is Blogging era: blogs, obviously plus the rise of things like Napster

• Early-ish 2000s to early 2010s, or the Golden Age of Social Media: Friendster, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter (lol remember it was originally called twttr, what did vowels do to deserve how they were treated in the 2000s), Reddit, tumblr, early Instagram, Snapchat, plus all the darker corners of the internet

• Mid/late-2010s to 2020ish, or Social Media Enters its Villain Era: FB descends into angry comments, social irrelevance and the destruction of democracy; Twitter turns into a polarized hellscape full of trolls; IG becomes overrun with influencers and is perceived as being too polished, too fake, too performative; 4chan and 8chan turn out to be hotbeds of extremism, violence, and hatred; people start retreating to private Snap sharing, Slacks, WhatsApp and Telegram groups, and chat rooms

• The current moment: TikTok takes over; Twitter literally falls apart; Clubhouse has a flash-in-the-pan moment; BeReal tries to get people to actually be real and not be online all the time; Discord and other server-based or federated options are significantly more popular than ever; and teenagers understand there’s not much of a difference between online and offline, it’s all “real” in different ways, plus being public about everything absolutely sucks so let’s find smaller, more private ways to connect with one another over the stuff we share in common

Ok! This brings us to now. And yes, I know, this is a very rough sketch and probably incorrect in different ways but I still think it’s useful as a way to look at the evolution of the situation I’m interested in here.

It’s tempting to look at this and see an absolute full circle. There are some elements that feel full-circle-ish, but I don’t think that’s what’s happened.

Instead, I see a pattern repeating, expanding and narrowing and blowing apart again.

The early internet is often referred to as both an era of rose-tinted optimism and a sort of “Wild West,” open and full of possibilities. At the time, even with all the truly bananas cash-grabs of the late 1990s*, there really was a sense of anything being possible – including a hopeful sense of a better future for human expression, creativity, and connection. It’s not coincidence that in the early 1990s Bay Area ravers, with their PLUR (peace, love, unity, and respect) sensibility were so drawn to the potential that this uncharted territory offered. It was free of corporate presence, of the old bad ways of existing, of the conservatism of the 1980s, of the constraints of existing IRL. Burgeoning technology was our LSD (although there was plenty of LSD too), and being online was our Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. (I guess that makes Twitter our Altamont?)

In the beginning, it was ostensibly not about any one of us, but about all of us. Now look again at the progression. The way we moved from forums and bulletin boards to personal websites to blogs to social media. The way the internet shifted from connecting with others to sharing cool stuff we were into to sharing our literal selves. The way the focus narrowed down over time so that we were no longer sharing the stuff we cared about, we were simply showcasing ourselves. Everything was honed down from the community to the individual, so that being online eventually felt horrible. Of course it felt horrible! Every comment, every nasty opinion, every instance wasn’t about an idea or a shared interest, it was about YOU. Like a referendum on you as an individual, or the you that you’d chosen to present.

this is more like it: the self on display

I don’t think the human brain is designed to deal with a constant existence of the self on display for others to comment on. I think that’s a path to losing our shit and short-circuiting our sense of well-being, which is kind of where we are right now.

In 1956, Irving Goffman published his hugely influential work, [The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life]. Look at me!! Putting my PhD to use!! This book did a couple of major things. It introduced Goffman’s “dramaturgical analysis,” or his idea that, in social interactions, humans have a front stage self and a backstage self. In other words, we’re engaged in performance in front of most people. Only certain people get to see or experience our backstage selves. This is because, as Goffman also posited, people want to control how other people perceive and think about them. We care about self-presentation and what everyone thinks. This may seem absolutely obvious to you now, but in late 1950s sociology, this was groundbreaking. Like there’s a reason we still talk about it!

The 1950s were years with strict social mores and heavy emphasis on appearance(s). It was also the decade that preceded a time of extraordinary social change. Sort of like the 1980s and the 1990s, with the internet. But Goffman was obviously writing when the idea of social media was not even a glimmer on anyone’s horizon. He wasn’t thinking about how humans would one day be presenting and performing on a near constant basis, to broader and more constantly present audience than ever before. Not even Andy Warhol could have dreamt that one up.

When Goffman was writing about front stage performance, the distinction between front and back stage was very real. In person, you can retreat. Where do you retreat on social media?

This has been a long-winded way of saying: As the internet tilted towards the dominance of social media, and as money poured in and concentrated power into the hands of a few megacorps, online existence crystalized into two distinct and divided poles: Our actual selves on one end and heavily produced entertainment on the other, with all the mechanisms controlled by billionaires. No wonder this wasn’t sustainable. No wonder TikTok has exploded. No wonder people are retreating into federated apps and private spaces. No wonder people are more connected but lonelier than ever. No one has yet to solve the actual human problems of communicating and making friends, sharing with each other instead of sharing to an audience.

But let’s save that for another time.

*You don’t know how bananas it was. I mean, I was in a television commercial for a website, for god's sake.

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Three recommendations from me, if recommendations are your thing

1. Tara Brach’s talk from 2008 called “Let Everything Happen To You” is one of my favorite talks ever. I’ve listened to it at least five or six times, and every time it’s like I’m hearing it anew. I love it so much.

2. Gochujang sriracha, two great tastes that really do taste great together. Now that I’m on this website I realize I need to try the curry sriracha too.

3. Robert Nathan’s Autumn Sonnet No. 24