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Heart of the Net
The Net has evolved, and radically. It's much too big and diverse for a single locus. It's also much too corporatized, and its new kinds of messaging systems increasingly too personalized and subterranean. Unless you're selling things via AOL or MSN, there's no longer any way even to reach a significant chunk of the Net universe, including the tech elites who still wield so much influence in cyberspace. The new media sites are all struggling; Wired has become a homogenized bulletin board for computer execs; and the most successful and heavily trafficked sites are about products, games or entertainment.
Since the Net has always been an almost organic, free-form entity -- nobody's in charge of it, or really decides how it will evolve and grow -- its epicenter floats all over. For a while, the heartbeat resided in the dream of new kinds of virtual and media communities -- the WELL, ECHO, Salon, Slate -- that popped up to connect people of common cultural or political interests. They were supposed to herald the movement of traditional media online. They were top-down, agenda-setting and, almost without exception, marginal or unsuccessful.
Enter AOL, then and now a Main Street for middle-class access. Its labyrinthine commercial sites, shameless peddling of goods, vast network of messaging boards and sex sites a form perfect metaphor for the evolution of the modern Internet -- people selling things like mad, and forming ever smaller, more specialized groups to talk to people much like themselves, with the same interests and ideals.
Of these developments, probably the early design era -- the Net's actual construction -- was its most idealistic. The early BBS's felt -- and were -- revolutionary, and few of the people first going online could help but feel they were participating in and witnessing the birth of a new kind of culture. Engineers and defense researchers like Postel, Licklider set out to build a free and open information network that would theoretically be open to and benefit everyone. Net architecture was certainly designed that way, and government, media and business paid little attention to the network, dismissing it as the handiwork of tech-heads and kids, irrelevant once the Cold War had passed.
The hacker period was the most revolutionary, and the open source phase one of the most political, especially when that movement rose to challenge the Microsofting of the desktop. The rise of the dot.coms might have been the most purely American era, in its speedy rise, greed and eventual collapse. Open source didn't stop the Microsofting of the Net, but it might have forced programmers to write better code, and greatly influenced the culture in other ways, creating a community of programmers committed to the idea of open access to information. And panicking corporate lobbyists into co-opting intellectual property legislation.
In between, enterprises like Amazon.com, which teased and tantalized investors and analysts with the retailing promise of networked computing, served as the heart of the Net, at least for a time, because they were so closely studied and monitored, and in some ways, highly innovative. For better or worse, Amazon has changed marketing in America for good.
Napster, which freed millions of music lovers from the hoary grip of the recording industry, symbolized the Net's challenge to hierarchical business and institutional structures -- until it showed the true power of corporatists. For years, the hackers believed nobody could stop them. After the Napster battles, it was clear that lobbyists and lawmakers, especially conjunction with wealthy corporatists, could. Briefly, Napster was the heart of the Net, and the Napster era -- now over -- one of it's most pivotal periods. Perhaps inevitably, this wasn't a fight the good guys ever really had a shot at winning, although they were slow to see it. While free music is still widely available online - free software types and music and movie traders are all over the place - the Net, it's now clear, will not remain a free frontier except in certain isolated and idiosyncratic corners.
The free software movement, in fact, was the apogee of the Net's most recent political period, the legacy to the hacker idea of liberating information, especially its sudden radical promise and challenge to proprietary institutions and information. For the hackers, the idea of an Open Net was their shining hour. Then the software turned communications inward, mostly permitting shoppers, chatters and people of like mind to talk to one another and shut out the clutter and the spam, including different points of view. At first, it was just religious fanatics and pious Boomers who embraced the idea of blocking and filtering. Then even hackers adopted it as a means of filtering out all that noise and an enormous volume of unwanted messiahs. The Net, designed to be the most open medium ever, became an increasingly closed nation of blockades, guardhouses and moderation and ratings systems. What the corporatists didn't sanitize, the hackers themselves chopped up.
An idea very close to the heart of the Net -- an open medium -- died, probably for good.
Where's the heart of the Net now?
The odd truth is that there probably isn't one.
The Net has become an economic and utilitarian rather than social, political or idealistic network. It has grown beyond almost anybody's earliest imaginings to become a thoroughly mainstream and very American communications medium., thoroughly corporatized and Disnified. Its grown too diffuse to have a center. Half of the nation is now online, says the U.S. Department of Commerce, nearly 90 percent of all kids.
AOL, a peculiar notion of the Net, is dominant -- with more than 25 million subscribers, it's probably the biggest single entity on the Net, at least in the U.S., and the largest host of utilitarian virtual communities. MSN is fast closing the gap. Who imagined just how prescient Steve Case really was, or how determined Bill Gates was? The middle-class wants to use the Net for pragmatic purposes -- shopping, entertainment, personal communications, and yes, sex. And they don't mind giving up privacy and freedom from corporate and government monitoring to do it.
This isn't meant to be a lament, not entirely. The Net was intended as an individualistic medium; it was inevitable that it would grow beyond a single focal point. Individualists still use it to chatter around the clock via mailing lists, blogs, vanity sites and IRC. But mostly, they appear to be speaking to ever smaller increments, like one another, rather to the larger world. The notion of the Net as a new kind of common ground is nearly over.
It isn't yet possible to know if this is a good or bad thing. The flowering of individual ideas is astounding; it's also a cacophony and something of a trap. Few of them escape their immediate surroundings. The fragmentation, hostility and narcissism are equally jarring. The Net may never recover from the waves of hostile adolescents and intellectual programming crackers, like the DoS vandals -- often bitter enemies of free speech -- who thundered online in the 90s, nor from the corporatists who shaped and co-opted telecommunications policy, copyright and intellectual property law. The Net is perennially interesting, and in many ways its story is just beginning to unfold, but in a far subtler way. This culture is being transformed by its own success.
stop comparing the net to an organism, there is only so far you can take that analogy. It's just a medium of communication, there is no need to asign an epicenter to it and it porbably isn't even possible
You mean it isn't Slashdot?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Can we ALSO please stop comparing the Net to orgasm. Seriously. Everybody seems to have this hard-on for the Net and the technological utopia it will bring us. Teslatug is right. It's MEDIUM OF COMMUNICATION. It's not Christ. It's a tool for accomplishing a variety of tasks. What we do with it in the next 50 years will be a big deal. But anyway you slice it, the Net is a means to an ends.
Why bother.
I live in Brazil, where AOL tried to enter the market but loses constantly to national ISPs. We here have many free ISPs and also some who charges money but offers a lot of content.
I believe the future of the Net will still be created by us: engineers, developers, programmers, system and network administrators. We are the Internet power. Our communities and associations with scientific and open spirits are the only way to mantain and establish open standards and open source softwares who can keep the Net and all its infrastructure alive. Without us the corporatists are nothing more than crying babies and the machines will simply stop!
Thank you all.
Jose Paulo Papo, from Brazil
"Learning, learning, learning - that is the secret of jewish survival" -- Ahad A'Ham
Please.
This fits just nicely into the category of stories that have been posted recently. First, His Royal Hypocrit RMS, a lot of bullshit about licenses and now this rant.
There is nothing like a golden era of the net. You just remember a period of relative peace, stability and comfort in which you accidentally stumbled on the internet and decided to spend some time with it. The internet is exciting NOW, and you are living in the present. Stop whining about the good old days.
Don't overemphasize. Check your reality.
no sig error.
If there's a heart of the Net, it's Google.
Without Google, the Internet wouldn't be nearly as useful for me.
If you cut through the hype and punditry that Mr. Katz is so fond of, and you just look at traffic patterns (i.e., top search engine queries, Usenet posts, credit card transactions, etc.), a plausible case can be made that pornography is the "heart of the net".
Of course, even Jon acknowledges the fallacy of looking for a "heart" in a decentralized system with this sentence in his opening paragraph:
I submit that the "net" has no heart. Instead, it has millions of sweaty crotches.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
this article reminds me of exactly why i stopped reading wired several years ago: it's sensationalist fluff.
a) the "gurus of wired" never did anything but write pie-in-the-sky articles about the "new economy", as if infotech somehow freed the human race from manufacturing, farming, etc (a decidedly first-world conceit). if it wasn't that specious line of reasoning, then it was silly futurist articles about how technology was going to either make everyone into a superhuman cyborg or alternately turn the planet into a william gibson novel gone wrong. i give wired props for graphic design, but not much else. read it in an airport when you're bored, but if you want science news, read a science journal.
b) all of this eulogizing is a bit premature. the hacker period is not over. people are still hacking away, in fact, i'd bet that the number of people writing free software is larger now than in your idealized hacker period. it's just not big sexy news anymore. shut up and let people work.
c) before you get all misty-eyed (too late, i know), the "heart of the NET" was the u.s. military. i'm much happier with the heart of the net being porn sites than some kind of post-apocalyptic military communications network. that seems like progress to me. if some gung-ho motherfuckers get our world blown-up, the last thing i want them to be able to do is get together and talk about it afterwords.
Ok,
Now that I have your attention, I would like to point out a fact that a lot of people seem to miss:
Jon is good for slashdot. He makes you think. Yes, a lot of his articles are high on the fluff-meter, but he means well AND, it's his opinion. You are allowed to voice yours, he is allowed to voice his. Many people here despise him, and yet they keep on posting replies to his messages. That's exactly what is wanted here. He gives a view point, you say BS, jump on it, and add your $.02. Then, your opinion is considered, people post to that, and so on. It's called communication, and it rocks. If you really don't like his articles, go to your preferences page and stop seeing them.
One last thing...Jon is human like the rest of us, please keep those posts that call him stupid, an asshole, etc., to a minimum. How would you like it if a bunch of people got together and PUBLICLY posted how much of a moron you are?
Let the flames/trolls begin.
Sent from your iPad.
Google works on the idea that information that is the most useful will be linked to more, essentially, it identifies clusters of information dense websites and ranks them. There was some other research, involving graph theory (actually, Google tech does too... Google really is a feat of theoretical and practical value), that talk about power law relationships. Here's an article (1 in a series of 2) in American Scientist. The bibliography has some references that might be useful to anyone truly interested in the topological nature of the internet.
Humorless sig goes here.
Whether you love him or hate him, Jon really brings out a few salient talking points in this article. I might even venture out and say that I agree with him on most of his points. However, "me too" does not a good Slashdot comment make, so let me expound a little on why the gloom and doom of the corporatization of the Internet isn't all that bad.
First of all, the corporatization of the Internet has helped to push higher speeds and ubiquity. These two factors alone, while meant to benefit the middle class users, have only helped to lower the cost of entry to future nerds, geeks, hackers and coders.
I'm 25 now, but as a kid growing up in the late 80s, getting any kind of net access was a struggle and a hopeless quest. Enter BBSes and the like. Most of us probably cut our teeth on the BBS. Then enter Freenets (like Cleveland Freenet) and the like. Back then the network was considered blazingly fast at 14.4K. However, my view of what the Internet was and could be was completely blown away upon my visit to the campus of Case Western Reserve in Late 1993. What I saw there was a completely fiber network and the web.
Wow. *that* was cool.
Fast forward to now. Most of the kids coming into college have already experienced the Internet much as I was only able to do once reaching the university. The young hackers in their larval stage come in with a store of knowledge that I could only dream about. I am convinced that we now have more hackers and more technological enthusiasts than we ever have had before. While this may seem like an obvious and trite observation, we need to consider this when also taking into account the fact that the "commodity" usage of the Internet has gone up as well.
In other words, sure, the vast majority of Internet users use it in a utilitarian way. However, now, more than ever, there are users who are using it as a tool to expand their own knowledge and to explore new frontiers of technology. I almost look upon this as romantic, in a weird sort of way, in the way that New York is romantic. I draw the analogy by thinking of both the city and the Internet as being unimaginably dense with people, ideas, culture and thought. However, just underneath the surface, if you look close enough, you'll find your niche, you'll find the "underground".
Granted, most people don't give a shit about the underground. But who cares? It's still there and we can still use. We can still build and we can still expand it. The Internet doesn't exist to fill one purpose or to have one center. The Internet exists to be whatever we want it to be. Again, at the risk of sounding trite, we are slowly and quietly moving towards the concept of cyberspace discussed in early and seminal cyberpunk literature. Think back to the writings of Gibson and Sterling.
So, in closing, in response to the questioned lack of center and the concept that most Internet users are simply Internet consumers, I simply respond, "So what". All we can hope is that right minded individuals will find their calling and explore what makes this whole thing tick. We can hope that they will find out about Open Source software and becoming contributing members to the global computing community. It's not a utopian goal by far, but it is the way things have been and continue to be moving. In every group of people who are content with the status quo and accepting the medium for what it is, there are those individuals like ourselves who are willing to take the next step to make the medium do what we want. There's nothing wrong with that. Let the Internet continue to grow!
Starts with a sweeping generalization based on nothing but a vague idea of Katz's ("It seemed the Net always had a heart... like the Tin Man.")
Asks histrionic, theoretical questions by the end of the first paragraph ("Is this culture dying out? Is the world about to change forever? Is Technology X dead? Will Flash Gordon escape from the Pit of the Morlocks?")
Insists on using phrases like "cyber", "cyber-geeks", and "Wired magazine guru", when even Dateline NBC's Jane Pauley finds them too unhip to say anymore.
Features the Bleeding Obvious lead sentence. ("The Net has evolved, and radically. Bears are shitting in the woods, and in great numbers. Despite the machinations of cyber-geek hack information guerillas everywhere, the Pope is still Catholic.")
Sports CmdrTaco style proofreading ("Briefly, Napster was the heart of the Net, and the Napster era -- now over -- one of it's [sic] most pivotal periods.")
Maintains four-color, Jack Kirby philosophy of good vs. evil (Napster good, corporations bad; Napster frees us from the "hoary grip" of the record companies, much like the Fantastic Four escaping from the clutches of Mole Man.)
Uses lots and lots of passive voice
Wraps up with a nattering, waffling conclusion ("It isn't yet possible to know if this is a good or bad thing. The flowering of individual ideas is astounding; it's also a cacophony and something of a trap. Have you ever looked at your thumb? I mean really looked at it? Do you think bees dream?")
And let me say again: what a load of horseshit. As someone who's been involved with the net long before Katz heard the word 'modem' (much less understood it), I can say unequivocally that there has never been a 'heart' as Katz defines it. In fact, the goddamned system was developed so that there could *be* no heart, technically speaking, and that same spec dominated all net-related interactions since the system began to take shape.
The press, in it's infinite stupidity, has many times in the past tried to characterize 'the Net' (with that capital 'N') as being defined by thing X, where thing X is the flashiest and simplest bauble that the press could find *and* understand. Note the last is especially critical, as the press is comprised of people possessing especially low IQs (we call them 'reporters') so they tend to gloss over or discard 95% of what they run into simply because they lack the brain cells to appropriately process the information. The other 5% they usually get wrong.
What the press refuses to accept is that the internet has no center, no locus, either technically, socially, intellectually, or in any other way you can think of. It never has, even back in the bad old days when it belonged to college students who made a hobby, and sometimes a career, of hacking the system while the 'academics' took credit for their innovations.
What Katz talks about has nothing to do with the net and instead has everything to do with the media perception of the net. This media perception has *always* been horribly wrong, in both its assumptions and its conclusions. Here, the assumption being that there is a heart (there isn't) and that this press-inspired delusion has been dominated at various times by groups that never truly existed or never wielded any real power.
What this piece boils down to is yet another whining, self-masturbatory exhibition of baseless assumptions and lies presented as facts. Virtually every line of Katz's article contains something patently false or ludicrous, tripe that only a reporter or a technophobic Boomer could buy into. In fact, the article is so full of shit that my original plan - to refute the statements individually - would haven taken several times the space of the article itself.
Perhaps Jon should give up writing on something he so very clearly knows nothing about. It's getting bloody tired, especially on a site that supposedly caters to the more technically-inclined. Jon clearly couldn't find his ass with both hands, so why is he posting articles on a technology which defies his ability to understand it? Enough is enough, already - hire someone who has at least a glimmering of a clue.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?