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You have reached the end of the internet (2006)

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Re: You have reached the end of the internet (2006)

#51

Post by Sophira »

opengrass wrote: post #8

This is up since at least February 2006.

I'm pretty sure the page itself has existed before then, just at a different location. For example, here's a page from 2000 that's in the Internet Archive that looks kind of similar: https://web.archive.org/web/20000115232652/http://www.shibum...

Re: You have reached the end of the internet (2006)

#52

Post by garyrob »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #30
mapontosevenths wrote: post #4

It was fun while it lasted. For me the high point was Fark or maybe Homestar and the low point was obviosuly Facebook... or maybe the end of Democracy.

Interesting how internet boosters in the late 90s/early 2000s told us the internet would revitalize democracy by making it so anyone could publish. I'm not aware of a single cynic who successfully predicted how things actually ended up turning out. Nor have I seen much of an attempt to revisit those early predictions.

> I'm not aware of a single cynic who successfully predicted how things actually ended up turning out.

Let's change that here and now! :)

I was one of the optimists in the very early 2000s when I attended a talk by Columbia professor Eli Noam. In 2002, he wrote an article in the Financial Times called "Why the internet is bad for democracy" which essentially predicted the world is we know it.

I immediately saw that he was right, at least with regard to the fact that it COULD turn out as it has, in fact, turned out. He fundamentally changed my view, way back then. In 2005 a version was published in a more academic context: “Why the Internet is bad for democracy.” Communications of the ACM 48(10): 57–58 (2005).

Here's the FT version: https://www.citicolumbia.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Why-...

Re: You have reached the end of the internet (2006)

#53

Post by mapontosevenths »

garyrob wrote: post #52
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting how internet boosters in the late 90s/early 2000s told us the internet would revitalize democracy by making it so anyone could publish. I'm not aware of a single cynic who successfully predicted how things actually ended up turning out. Nor have I seen much of an attempt to revisit those early predictions.

> I'm not aware of a single cynic who successfully predicted how things actually ended up turning out. Let's change that here and now! :) I was one of the optimists in the very early 2000s when I attended a talk by Columbia professor Eli Noam. In 2002, he wrote an article in the Financial Times called "Why the internet is bad for democracy" which essentially predicted the world is we know it. I immediately saw that h…

That was startlingly accurate! Thanks for sharing.

Any idea if he's published anything recently? A quick Google seems to show a textbook a few years back and then not much recently.

Re: You have reached the end of the internet (2006)

#55

Post by nativeit »

qingcharles wrote: post #19

Me finishing browsing the final page of the WWW in 1993. "Well, that was fun. Back to IRC."

I remember when “browsing the WWW” literally involved scrolling through a categorized list of pages via a portal in Netscape. At the time, the only place I knew to get online was a single PC in the library at UNC Charlotte, where my mother worked. There was a sign next to it explaining what the World Wide Web was. I taught myself to play the guitar using ASCII tabs on the OnLine Guitar Archive.

Re: You have reached the end of the internet (2006)

#56

Post by 1970-01-01 »

theblazehen wrote: post #38
YokoZar wrote: post #6

The Internet is a mere 23 PiB according to the graphic. These days you can fit that on just a few racks.

Can even get it in a single rack if you use SSDs

A few ounces is all we need!

https://www.wired.com/story/weight-of-the-internet/

Re: You have reached the end of the internet (2006)

#57

Post by saghm »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #4

It was fun while it lasted. For me the high point was Fark or maybe Homestar and the low point was obviosuly Facebook... or maybe the end of Democracy.

A new Strongbad email was published within the last month, to the surprise of probably everyone left who remembers Homestar Runner. The fun stuff is still out there; it's just not the only stuff there (and never was), and there's probably a lot more of that non-fun stuff too.

Re: You have reached the end of the internet (2006)

#58

Post by saghm »

verisimi wrote: post #37
mapontosevenths wrote: post #4

It was fun while it lasted. For me the high point was Fark or maybe Homestar and the low point was obviosuly Facebook... or maybe the end of Democracy.

Do you realise we have never had 'democracy' - we have 'representative democracy', a totally different thing. Thousands, perhaps millions of people, vote once every 4-5 years for one person to represent them on thousands of governmental decisions. That person is under no constraints to do what they said to gain your vote either - they can do the exact opposite with no repercussion. Voting as we have it, is a highly a…

At least in the US, each person has a lot more than one representative they vote for, with multiple levels of government with different intended scopes. As much as that doesn't completely eliminate the problems you describe, I'd argue that that focus on only the first election listed in the ballot at the expense of the others is one of the (many) causes of how we ended in the state we are today. It's a lot easier for someone to be elected to represent you while ignoring your interests if you don't even know or care about the fact that they're running. If people cared more about local elections (and even federal elections other than for president), there would be at least some increase in pressure for legislative bodies to respond to the will of the people. Without that, the issue isn't even that they're going the opposite of what the people who voted for them want, but the the number of people who voted for them (or even for the candidates they're running against) aren't anywhere close to representative proportion of the population. We don't really know if representative democracy would approximate actual democracy because the people they're representing aren't the full population, but the small segment of politically active ones.
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