It’s a dramatic one messy era on the internet. Everything changes quickly. There is widespread dissatisfaction with the dominant search engine, and activists worry about the privacy implications of increasingly intrusive online surveillance. While investors chatter on about esoteric topics like digital currencies and virtual reality, in the real world, users are concerned about how difficult it is to message all their friends on the many different platforms they use, and may be a little curious about the new social networks that keep popping up. Against the backdrop of all these changes, an obnoxious nerd named Elon Musk won’t stop talking about an “everything app” called X, which will help him manifest his extremist views. But above all, it’s a time when the Internet seems ripe for change, and perhaps even wide open to a new group of technologies and communities that could reshape the way it works. Millions of people seem ready to connect with each other in new ways as they rethink their fundamental relationship to technology.
The era I’m talking about is the year 2000. But it could just as easily be 2024, because this new year offers many echoes of a moment we haven’t seen in a quarter of a century. Some of the Internet’s most dominant companies are at risk of losing their relevance, and the rest of us are rethinking our daily habits in ways that will change the digital landscape as we know it. While the details are difficult to predict, we can look to historical precedents to understand the changes that are about to come, and even to predict how ordinary Internet users — and not just the world’s tech moguls — might be the ones who decide how things go.
In today’s internet, the stores that provide all the apps on our phones are bursting open, the walls between social media platforms are falling down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush to AI is making our search engines and work apps stranger (and often worse!) . But in the midst of it all, the human web, created by ordinary people, comes back to life. We’re about to see the biggest power shift on the Internet in 25 years, in a way that most current Internet users have never seen before. And while some of the driving forces behind this change have been hyped or even exaggerated, some of the most important changes have not been questioned at all.
The first thing to understand about this new internet age is that power is undoubtedly shifting. Regulators, for example, are now part of the story – an ironic shift for anyone who was around in the dot-com days. In the EU, tech giants like Apple are being forced to hold their noses and embrace mandatory changes, such as opening up their devices to allow alternative app stores to offer apps to consumers. This could be good news, increasing consumer choice and potentially enabling other business models. What about mobile games that don’t constantly bother gamers with in-app purchases? Back in the US, a shocking verdict in Epic Games’ (that’s the Fortnite people) lawsuit against Google leaves us with the promise that Android phones could open up in a similar way.
That’s not just good news for the billions of people who own smartphones. It’s part of a big change for the programmers and designers who build the apps, sites, and games we all use. For an entire generation, the imagination of people who create the internet has been limited by the control of a handful of giant companies that have had enormous control over things like search results, app stores, advertising platforms, or payment systems. If we go back to the freer nature of the Internet in the 1990s, this could mean we see a proliferation of unexpected, strange new products and services. Back then, a lot of technology was created by local communities or people with a shared interest, and cool stuff was as likely to be invented by universities, nonprofits, and eccentric lone makers as it was by giant corporations. Take the Web browser itself: It was originally created by Tim Berners-Lee in a government-funded research lab, and the most popular early version was created at the University of Illinois. And as the Internet took off, individual creators often pushed the limits of what their web browsers could do, with popular sites like Geocities letting millions of everyday people build individual websites with vastly different (if often terrible) aesthetics and designs.
Back then, people could even create their own small social networks, so the conversations and content you found in an online forum or discussion were likely the result of the efforts of a single creator rather than a giant corporate conglomerate. . It was a more democratized internet, and while the world can’t return to that level of simplicity, we’re seeing signs of a modern overhaul of some of those ideas.
Consider the dramatic power shift currently taking place on social media. Twitter’s slide into irrelevance and extremism as it falls into X has hastened the explosive growth of a slew of newer social networks. There’s the nerdy vibe of the non-commercial Mastodon communities (each with its own Dungeons and Dragons rules to live by), the raw hedonism of Bluesky (like your old Tumblr timeline at its most outrageous), and the at least -not-LinkedIn noise of Threads, brought to you by Instagram, which means Facebook, which means Meta. There are many more of course, and a new one will probably pop up tomorrow, but that’s what it is Great about it. A generation ago we saw early social networks like LiveJournal and Xanga and Black Planet and Friendster and many others come and go, each with their own specific audience and focus. For those who remember a time in the last century when things were less homogeneous and different geographic regions had their own distinct music scenes or culinary traditions, it’s easy to understand the appeal of an online equivalent of distinct, connected neighborhoods each with their own own atmosphere. While this new, more diffuse set of social networks may sometimes require a little more tinkering to get going, they embody the complexity and multiplicity of the stranger and more open web that flourishes today.
Furthermore, the people who quietly kept the spirit of the human, personal, creative Internet alive are seeing a resurgence as the Internet is once again up for grabs. Take someone like Everest Pipkin, an award-winning digital artist and activist who has created games, videos, interactive sites and video streams that all explore the boundaries of digital culture. They evoke the openness of the 1990s Internet, but with the modern sensibility that comes from someone who wasn’t even born when the web browser was first invented. Or check out the Society for Poetic Computation. It’s an eccentric, very charming, self-organized school for people who want to combine art and technology and a social conscience to make things completely different from the generic production of the trillion-dollar titans. An extraordinary example is Neta Bomani, one of the co-directors of the SFPC, whose unique and compelling digital works could never be built on the model of the latest generation of homogeneous social media tools. Then there’s Mask On Zone, a collaboration with artist and programmer Ritu Ghiya, which provides demonstrators and demonstrators with in-context guidance on how to avoid surveillance before, during and after attending a protest. And Bomani’s work often harkens back to another staple of 1990s fan culture: print zines. Often in the form of zine-making workshops, it’s an example of taking online culture back offline, showing young creators how their digital relationships influence real-world creativity now, just as they did a generation ago happened. It seems likely that almost everyone’s daily digital diet will include a few wonderfully quirky creations like this, alongside the latest memes on their For You page.
There are many more. Stefan Bohacek has been working for years to enable almost anyone to create simple, automated bots that provide everything from a constantly updated picture of the weather at the South Pole to one that pulls snippets from the city of New York’s citizen data archives York places (here’s a map of every Latin cultural organization in the city!) to organizations that post obscure and beautiful images from the collections of museums around the world. That kind of creativity was stifled as Twitter fell apart and other platforms like Reddit cracked down on independent developers, but the rise of new networks and alternative platforms has led to a resurgence of this kind of creation not seen since the early 2000s . . Elan Kiderman Ullendorff has explored a similar space, encouraging people to ‘escape the algorithm’ through a range of tools and websites that show ordinary internet users that another digital world is possible, with examples like ‘Youtune’, which allows users to create original songs explore. that have only been streamed a few times, so you can find music that may have been ignored by the algorithm, but might still be worth listening to.
And then there’s someone like Darius Kazemi, a computer programmer and community organizer who has worked patiently to build tools that help others build healthy, constructive, human-scale online communities—the kind that are full of acts of kindness and genuine connection. of incessant battles over hate speech. Interest in Darius’ work has soared as networks like Twitter have collapsed and a new generation is discovering the joys of an internet as intimate and connected as a friendly neighborhood. And this harkens back to that surprising and delightful discovery that often underpinned the Internet of a generation ago: sometimes the entire platform you used to talk to others was simply run by one passionate person. We’re seeing the biggest return to that human-run web on a personal scale that we’ve seen since the turn of the millennium, with enough momentum that it’s likely that 2024 will be the first year since then that many people have the experience of making a new connection or seeing something go viral go on a platform controlled by an ordinary person rather than a commercial entity. It will make many new things possible.
I’m not a fan of the fact that there will still be a lot of bad things on the internet, and too many tycoons ruling the tech industry are trying to make the bad things worse. (After all, look what the last wild era of online has led to.) There won’t be a new killer app that replaces Google, Facebook or Twitter with a love-powered alternative. But that’s because there shouldn’t are. There should be many different alternative human-scale experiences on the Internet that offer home-cooked, locally grown, ethically produced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the Internet. And they should be weird.
Anil Dash is a tech entrepreneur and writer based in New York City. He was recognized by the Webby Awards in 2022 with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
