> hahaha seriously. this is the internet they want to go back to.
Well there were obviously good and bad things about it.
Some people think there's a way to be inclusive unlike the way it was once very exclusive while still embracing the general ethos of the original Internet - which was people connected directly via the infrastructure rather than through third party corporations.
We can have an inclusive internet - digital democracy, as it was once called - without walled gardens.
Can we though? That comment demonstrates very clearly that it wasn't as democratic as people are remembering.
You had a chance to make an inclusive internet, and you made an encyclopedia that was blind to the largest most significant art & cultural movement in generations. What are you going to do differently this time?
I find "we didn't, therefore we can't" a kind of defeatist and unrealistic reaction. The internet has been shaped and reshaped a few times, in a lot of ways for the better, I don't see why it couldn't continue to be refined.
I'm not taking that position, quite. But I'm not seeing much contrition for it being that way the first time around, or sophisticated evaluation of why it was, or a plan for how to improve it in the future. Without those I think the hope that it'll improve in these ways is simply naive.
What I'm arguing is that we're taking 2 steps forward and 1 step back rather than a linear path of improvement. In this case one of the steps backward being the walled gardens, steps forward including the democratization of the internet as a whole.
I enjoyed the tweet above as a glimpse into the past, but it's far too cherry-picked for you to use it as an indictment of the early internet. The article for 'Gangsta Rap' (May '01) predates 'Country Music' (Oct '01), 'English Language' (Nov '01) and 'Mayonnaise' (Jul '02), but you wouldn't think very highly of me if I used that to make an opposite claim.
I don't think the 'Hip Hop Music' (Apr '03) cherry-pick even holds up on its own. The creation edit says it's being taken from an already-existing page called 'Hip hop', whose history I'm unable to find.
Well there were obviously good and bad things about it.
Some people think there's a way to be inclusive unlike the way it was once very exclusive while still embracing the general ethos of the original Internet - which was people connected directly via the infrastructure rather than through third party corporations.
We can have an inclusive internet - digital democracy, as it was once called - without walled gardens.