In Praise Of The Internet

Posted on November 30, 2007
Filed Under Web 2.0 |

I just caught up with Scott Rosenberg’s feed, and stopped to read his piece on Mitch Kapor, early pioneer of the Internet and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as a long-time software developer (Lotus 1-2-3).

Kapor has been giving talks recently at Berkeley, and his second lecture, Disruptive Innovations I Have Known and Loved - Part 2: The Internet and the World Wide Web, was a retrospective of the early days of scepticism, contrasted with what the Web has become.

Early enthusiasts of the Web, people with good instincts, those who could feel the compelling imperative seeded in the Internet, all had trouble conveying the importance of the Web to those who could only see the primitive present, and not the future contained within it.

Rosenberg recalls:

…much as I rooted for the Internet-style future as a healthier one for our culture, it was awfully hard to see how anyone was likely to make money via such a system. Kapor said he looked at the open network’s advantage in generating innovation and encouraging participation and concluded, “I think this is the one that’s going to win.” He was right.

This has meaning for the present, says Rosenberg:

It’s incredibly useful to keep that era in mind today, I think, because it provides not just a heartening saga of the triumph of free expression and open participation, but also a clear case in which those ideals were more practical, too.

The Internet’s victory over the services we now derisively dismiss as “walled gardens” was an instance, within recent memory, when the idealists weren’t hopelessly outgunned by the cynics — when, in fact, the idealists turned out to be the realists, and the cynics took a bath. - Kapor’s early bet on the Net

Amen. All of this matters, and is supportive to contemplate, because this present, which may already surpass the future many saw back then, is clearly still the very beginning. Sometimes I find this astonishing.

Comments

Leave a Reply