Share HN: My thoughts today about the internet

The internet used to be fun, because the people who programmed for it loved it, and respected it. It provided a playground for the imagination, if not in the literal sense of the painterly <area> tag, then in being inspired by our possibilities to enrich our culture, our individual self-expressivity, and to develop understanding and love through knowledge and experience sharing. But we, all of us, not just the masses and not just (converted) hackers and not just suits, but the average as a unit, turned away from the beautiful internet, to something very bland, much less diverse, but indeed more moldable to certain things. You could say the old internet was a rich man’s play toy, it’s beauty and funness (to me for one) allowed only because it was so privileged. There were few people on it and those people could afford good hardware. But the history of the internet for the last 20 years, has been an ever-intensifying desire to scale, further and in more directions. To become ACCESSIBLE to a wider audience (while increasingly ignoring the people on its fringes), while, yes, also making everyone it’s customer. And so maybe we should come to grips with the fact we shouldn’t mourn our old internet, because the truth is this painterly vision was not designed, or ready, or our schools not prepared enough, or our cpus not performant enough, or our wealth not distributed enough, for the internet to be libre for all. And those of us that still have some kind of poetic aspirations for the way we connect with each other, should put that energy into sharing with the world.

EDIT: what does the internet mean to you?