So says Wired, owned by the same company that owns Reddit.
The open Internet was built by grad students and weirdo engineers, in a process involving frequent conflict. HTTP beat Gopher in part because Gopher was owned by a university that wanted to charge money for it. The Internet interprets bullshit that some nerd doesn’t like as system damage and routes around it, eventually.
Also: Today’s major tech companies succeeded (in part) by being tolerant enough to harness the engineering efforts of queer, trans, furry, fanfic-writing, burner, psychonaut geeks. IBM didn’t let you wear cat ears to the office, but Google did. Google is now worth 10x as much money as IBM.
HTTP beat Gopher in part because Gopher was owned by a university that wanted to charge money for it.
I was not aware of any of this… I’ll have to read up on it as it sounds fascinating. So many people are unaware of how things came to be.
Gopher is like very simple and cool. Something similar to Telnet but it’s own thing. It’s free nowadays btw but ofc nobody uses it.
Gopher and telnet are not the same sort of thing.
Gopher is like the Web. Telnet is like SSH.
Gopher lets you fetch documents and directories off of remote servers that can link to each other. Telnet lets you connect to a remote server as if you had a terminal on that computer.
tl;dr - The author is either deluded (or paid to misinform the public) and thinks that the data stealing corporate internet is “open and collaborative”.
The era of speculative investment in centralizing communication was not “the open web”, but rather an interruption of the open web.
Relevant blog post, from 2014: how web2.0 killed the internet
The author is active on the fediverse and building an alternative social infrustrcture called “small web”: @aral@mastodon.ar.al
I have a sneaking suspicion that the same economic changes are also (partially) behind the changing ways companies like Red Hat, Elastic, and MongoDB approach open source projects. It’s not the whole story, but I suspect it plays a significant part.
If that’s the case, then this is bigger than just “oh no twitter and reddit”.
Ok thanks
but information will always want to be free
