There's something wrong with the internet.
The web was a formative part of my youth. As a child I found it wondrous and baffling. As a teenager I found it thrilling, and it helped me to feel less alone by connecting me with other weird dorks my age. As an adult, it seemed to morph into something I no longer recognised and I no longer felt at home there.
This is to be expected. This is the way things go. Since the dawn of time, middle-aged killjoys have been complaining that things were better when they were young, when in reality things were just different. Kids these days are obsessed with their TikToks and skincare addictions? Well we had Salad Fingers and rotten.com, and we turned out alright. But it's getting harder to ignore the problems with the web when tech giants have so bluntly demonstrated that they can and will exploit its vulnerabilities to consolidate power, even at the expense of democracy itself. Like it or not, the web has become a central pillar of our society, and understanding its history is essential to understanding how it impacts the world right now. Also, it just isn't fun anymore.
I've started work researching a video series about the web. I want to know how things wound up the way they are, and how they might be different.
Episode 1: Hypertext
This will cover the history of hypertext, the philosophy behind it, and how the web wound up being the global behemoth that it is when so many previous hypertext systems were just research projects and niche consumer products.
Outline
- Symbiosis - How idealistic researchers came up with a way to elevate the consciousness of man using computers.
- Covering: The Memex, HES, NLS, FRESS, Xanadu, and ZOG.
- Productivity - How high-minded research projects became practical consumer products, with limited success.
- Covering: KMS, NoteCards, Guide, MaxThink, Intermedia, and HyperCard, as well as the start of the Hypertext Conferences.
- Brave New World (Wide Web) - How a programmer at CERN was tasked with fixing a documentation issue, and revolutionized global communications in the process.
- Covering: The Birth Of The Web
- We Privatised The Ministry Of Truth And Service Is Worse Than Ever - How the modern internet is a product of the decisions made in the past, and how those things could be different.
- Covering: The Dotage Of The Web
Not 100% committed to some of those chapter headings.
Research so far has consisted of reading books about the history of the web and the internet, reading the papers, manifestos, and autobiographies of web pioneers, and trying to locate available software where it exists or video of historical software where the software itself is lost. The end goal is to paint a picture of what they envisioned hypertext to be, and how that vision has gone astray. It may simply be the case that the vision was poorly founded, and was never going to happen, but at least it should be possible to come away with an idea of the ways in which the web falls short.
I'm not anticipating that many people would want to watch such a video, but I think it would be good for a general overview of the topic to be available for the people that do, and the research process can help me to solidify my own understanding of the modern web.