Imagine going back 25 years in a time machine to meet the you of 1989. The you that was watching the Berlin Wall fall, the you that saw Jim and Tammy Baker come back to TV, the you that was probably peripherally aware of something called the Friday The 13th Virus. Now imagine telling this past version of yourself about the World Wide Web.
What could you say? That it’s pervasive, now, like oxygen? It’s a constantly changing medium, a system that reinvents itself every second as the energy of a million minds is focused, laser-like, on one meme after the other? Will you tell that old you about how you don’t go to stores anymore but expect everything – from diapers to food – to be brought to you with the click of a button? Do you tell that you about the demise of the book, of the death of the postal service, of the implosion of the record industry, the shuttering of the great newspapers?
What do you tell that you, the innocent you of green screens and .plan files? Do you talk about an idea that birthed an invisible empire, about the way a NeXT computer began serving up simple documents to scientists and then exploded? about the way a young man in Finland built an operating system that is the backbone of a modern railroad, silver lines of code replacing the steel and spikes of the first connector? Or do you talk about the dates you’ve been on with people you met on the Internet, about the fun you’ve had, about the things you’ve learned, about the things you carry now that act as a literal lifeline to the life of the mind? Do you tell that you that things aren’t better now, but are far different? Do you tell that you about how quaint it is to see movies feature paper files stacked a mile high on some drudge’s desk? Do you talk about how you worry that somehow all of this is making you sick? Or giving you cancer? Or alienating you?
But we don’t have a time machine and the you of 1989 couldn’t have known where we’d end up. No one had a clue. Some prescient writers saw the barest hints of what it would mean to be connected. “Cyberspace,” wrote William Gibson in 1984. “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system.” But even Gibson sold the ubiquity of Cyberspace short. His characters had to move in meatspace far too often. Today’s technothriller involves a someone with security clearance sticking a USB stick into a port and blowing up the NSA.
It’s the birthday of the web, the protocol that burns down dictators, agitates the downtrodden, and pacifies the well-fed. It’s where we get our pleasure, where we experience pain by proxy, where outrage bubbles like a mad stew. It’s the home to horrors, beauty, and endless scrap. It is the trash heap of the human mind, a vast field of knowledge that wastes our days and enriches our lives.
What will you tell the you of 2039? What will that version of you tell you about their day online? Of one thing you can be sure: the web will be a constant. You may not recognize it, but one of the greatest inventions of the modern age won’t go away.
To celebrate the web’s birthday we asked some of our Internet friends to talk about their first experiences online. Depending on their age, they told us about everything – from telnet to AOL disks.
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