Is the Internet Heading for a “Punk” Revolution?

"Wikipedia is building its content on other people's first-gen research and investigative work. It publicly links to the source, but then back-door says to Google's search ranking system: 'Consider this source page to have no relevance or value'. It's been doing that for nearly a decade and a half."

Some dodgy-looking late 'eighties punk. Wouldn't be surprised if he ended up writing blogs with names like Popzazzle and Planet Botch. Nice semi-acoustic tho.

We're being digitally lobotomised. Force-fed. Used. The Internet has reached a truly sorry state, in which we're all told what to say, what to think, and what to like. We're imprisoned in an increasingly elitist system of content-delivery, which is calculatedly status-driven, and far more heavily based on real-life status than most of us realise. And outside of the fevered surveillance quest, online tech has innovated no genuinely new concepts since the 2000s. The Internet has become a stupefying Colossus of cultural stagnation.

Just over 45 years ago, the British music scene had fallen into a similar pit of mind-numbing misery. The music business thought its idle, elitist gravy train was safe. It was wrong.

The British punk movement of 1976 demolished the slobbish elitism of the mid 'seventies music scene, and turned a fat, platitudinous gravy train into a ground zero of fresh ideas and novelty, almost overnight. So is history about to repeat itself? Are we about to see the Internet's equivalent of punk sweep aside the repetitive boredom of Web 2.0, giving a voice to disenfranchised creative genius? And if so, how will it happen?

How The Internet Destroyed Your Attention Span

"It explicitly trained us not to click links. Not to investigate. Not to stray from the short-form consumption mechanism we have in front of us."

Photo by Tine Ivanič on Unsplash (image modified)

It's hardly news these days, but our attention spans have been in drastic decline, and there are stats to prove it. Masses of them. The Internet PLC tells us we're looking at more stuff, for less time per item, and certainly on social media, it's pretty easy to see that's true.

But is this a problem with us, as people? I mean, did human evolution suddenly, around the start of the 2010s, enter some bizarre phase of plummeting natural attention capacity? Or was there something that the Internet PLC did to rewire our brains?

A 100% Uncontaminated 1998 Internet Browsing Experience

CD-ROMs can't be edited, and when it comes to looking back into history, that is their most commendable property...

If you’ve ever wondered why there was such an explosion in Internet use forward from the Christmas of 1998, the artefact I’m talking about is this post serves as a perfect illustration. It’s called Internet on a CD, and it was the home PC vendor Packard Bell’s bid to turn each computer sale into a recurring revenue stream.

Internet on a CD was given away to purchasers of new Packard Bell PCs in the run up to Christmas 1998. I got mine with a Club 30 model. The concept of the CD was to collect a representative cross section of websites, put their pages onto local media, and reassign their internal links so that clicking them served the new page from the CD rather than from the Web. Essentially just give consumers the feel of using the Internet. Get them hooked. Add to that a front end comprising Packard Bell’s own introductory and tutorial material, and you had something along the lines of…

Browsing the Web With a MEGA Low Resource 1998 PC in the 2020s

Does your ancient Windows 98 or Windows ME PC fancy an outing round the World Wide Web? Go on... Give it a day out. For old time's sake...

Online with Windows 98 in 2020.

If you thought it was impossible to browse the Internet with a 300MHz CPU and 128MB of RAM, you are wrong. At least, you are as I write this post in August 2020. That’s exactly what I’ve just been doing on a late 1990s PC. Let’s not kid ourselves – with those resources, browsing is not lightning fast, but it’s faster than dial-up, and it’s really useful to have any PC connected to the World Wide Web – however ancient it may be.

The experience is possible thanks to the updating of a very old browser, which makes it compatible with contemporary Transport Layer Security – normally abbreviated to TLS. Using the browser feels a bit like surfing the Web back in the early 2000s, except you can access sites that didn’t exist back then – like Twitter, for example. More on that in a moment.