I will never forget the first time I encountered the internet. It was 1994 and I was working at my very first computer programming job at a small sales-lead management company near Minneapolis. I had written a DOS program called EDT that used a modem to dial up to various magazine publishers and download their sales leads over the phone. One day my manager, Michelle, entered my cubicle and handed me a piece of paper and said, “I am not sure how this works, but this publisher says that they want to provide their files over something called the internet. Can EDT do that? I signed us up for an internet service account, these are the instructions to get started with our username and password.”
It was the first time I had ever heard the word “internet”. I took a look at the printed instructions. They were from a dial-up ISP called Skypoint. There was a phone number and instructions to connect with a z-modem terminal program. EDT supported z-modem so I dialed up and connected to the internet for the very first time using the very first piece of software that I wrote at my very first job as a computer programmer. Once I was in their text-based menu system, I managed to follow the directions to download something called Trumpet WinSock, which added support for something called TCP/IP to my Windows 3.1 machine, and I was also able to get a piece of software called Mosaic 0.89, which was a browser for something called the World Wide Web.
It took me the better part of the afternoon, but pretty soon I was able to access the sales leads via something called FTP, I loaded my first web page at skypoint.net and my life was never quite the same. I signed up for a personal Skypoint account almost immediately.
The internet of that era consisted primarily of email, listservs, FTP sites, Gopher servers, a fledgling and quite small Web that was almost entirely text-based, Usenet, IRC chat, and dial-up telnet access for when you just wanted to efficiently access information instead of fiddling around with graphics. The dial-up speed was insanely slow, my modem was only able to connect at 9600 kbps, about one sixth of what we would now think of as “dial-up speed”. Windows 95 didn’t exist yet and when it launched it didn’t even include internet access because Bill Gates wasn’t yet sure it was going to be a thing worth doing.
The internet I met in 1994 bore very little resemblance to the internet of 2019. It was global but personal, open yet idiosyncratic, difficult to navigate but immensely rewarding. I would come into the office early just to spend an hour or two exploring. It felt like the beginning of a massive revolution, a cultural shift, that would change everything for the better. I fell in love and for the subsequent 25 years I have stayed online and worked and lived on the cutting edge of internet and computer technology. I have owned many computers, built many websites and web applications, met countless people, and rarely gone more than a day or two without a visit to that virtual electronic universe.
About 10 years ago the internet underwent a profound change with the move to mobile broadband, the centralization of e-commerce, the rise of social media, and the eventual dominance of the online world by the Big Tech companies: Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and (to a much lesser extent) Microsoft and the wild, weird, somewhat chaotic world of the internet I first fell in love with started to be replaced by the corporate internet we all interact with today and I’m here to say that when that happened, we collectively lost something, and I miss it.
I no longer love the internet. In fact, I kind of hate it.
I grew up in a world that had three television channels on VHF and one or two low-watt local stations that were sometimes watchable on UHF. If you wanted to watch TV, you watched whatever happened to be on those channels. Even when I bought my family’s first VCR with my paper route money, I still had to read the TV listings in the newspaper, circle shows I might want to see, and program the VCR to record them if I didn’t want to miss them. Media types, music, movies, TV shows, books, they were all very different from each other, not simply different types of bit streams and if you wanted to hear an album or read a book or watch a movie, it was not as simple as firing up Spotify or Netflix. It was incredibly inconvenient and required a lot of planning and intentionality. Back when I first encountered the internet I was thrilled by the possibilities it promised to create exactly this world we now have. The ability to read all the books, watch all the movies, hear all the music, it seemed like such a great idea, and it really was, but now that we are here, I find that it is not without a price and the price is impact. It turns out that when everything is convenient and available, nothing seems all that terribly valuable or interesting and distraction becomes a serious concern, as does complacency.
Everything, from the works of Marcel Proust to a cat chasing a laser pointer, melts into a sort of stew of sameness. People seem less interesting when you just see what they post on Instagram. To paraphrase a bard from the 1980’s, it feels like there’s 57 channels and nothing’s on. When I go online today, instead of a sense of wonder and curiosity, I feel a vague disgust and boredom, and this makes me sad. Everybody performing for each other, myself included, every click and site visit tracked for SEO and marketing purposes, ultra-intrusive ads, and an endless stream of trivia. This is not the internet I fell in love with.
I’ve recently decided to try to do something about this but I have yet to find what I feel has been lost. In the last couple of years I have made several major changes to my computer habits. I replaced my iPhone with an Android phone, shut all the notifications off, and started using a web browser that blocks all trackers. I have implemented rules for myself for social media usage, limited how often and to what extent I engage in Twitter, Instagram, and the dreaded Facebook. I’ve even gone so far as to rehabilitate a few old computers that don’t have WIFI or modern web browsers so I can use computers to do things like writing and music production without the temptation to lose hours of my life to memes and viral videos, news and gossip, and the rest of the modern digital stream of endless distraction. I’ve blacklisted some websites to remind myself to keep away from them and all of this just seems to make me feel a little more resentful.
I don’t like feeling like I have to be on defense every time I go online. I don’t like the default assumption that I should always be available to respond to tweets, texts, IMs, or even phone calls. It’s not like I want to be some sort of Luddite, not at all. I love the speed and power of modern computers and I love having access to the world’s media on-call, and I probably have more technology in my backpack on a daily basis than most normal people have in their homes, but I’m really struggling to enjoy what we have collectively created. What was once special is now common, and what was once empowering now feels like a sink for time, attention, and energy with very little reward. Where once computers made me feel more creative, they now feel more like they are trying to seduce me into mindless consumption and the amount of work required to regulate the intrusiveness of the technology is tiring and disheartening.
I think there is a philosophical difference in the way computers were designed, envisioned, and used during the initial phase of personal computing and the role they play in modern life and, personally, I’ve found that the earlier ethos fits my personality better than the current one.
Take Apple, for example. When the original Macintosh computer was being designed, the vision Steve Jobs had was “a bicycle for the mind.” Maybe not the most obvious metaphor, sure, but I always liked it. A computer was a tool that allowed the user the power to create things and do things that would otherwise have been beyond their reach in the way that a bicycle would expand the power of our personal mobility, but unlike a car, would not replace it. In high school I used to go to Kinko’s to use the desktop publishing Macs to create and print inserts and labels for tapes to distribute music recorded by my brother and I, which we then sold at school. Later, when video editing became possible thanks to the early iMacs with Firewire/DV cameras, I made short films and even wrote a few screenplays with the hope of shooting a low budget feature. Digital audio workstation software allowed Rhett and I to record albums of much higher sound quality and complexity than would have ever been possible with earlier tape machines. New machines gave us higher quality graphics, faster and easier manipulation of video and audio and images, and more storage and connectivity to cameras and audio equipment. The early internet gave us a platform to promote our work to random strangers all over the world. For years Apple seemed to be focused on making better and better tools for creativity, until they decided the real money was in apps and phones and watches and titanium credit cards. Where once they focused on empowering the user to create, the current focus of Apple is creating a sticky consumer experience, and they are very good at it, but the difference in the product is striking.
It is actually hard to get anything useful done on a computer that is constantly pushing notifications and updates at you, that has embedded social media sharing in all the programs, that has limited ports for connecting to other devices, or limited storage that encourages using their Cloud, or “consumer” grade applications that are so dumbed down that your biggest creative decisions are which filters to apply or which canned beats to loop.
This train of thought has caused me to start considering alternatives and I’ve found a couple and surprised even myself. I started thinking about, of all things, knives. I have a pocket knife that I use for one thing or another almost every day. It’s a single blade with a wooden handle. Nothing fancy. I used to carry a Swiss Army knife with a bunch of tools built in. A corkscrew, a screwdriver, a toothpick, a pair of scissors, but 99% of the time I discovered that I didn’t need a crappy version of all of those tools, I just needed a good version of a small knife, so I switched. I chose specialization over versatility. I thought about what that philosophy would mean for writing. If a modern computer is the ultimate digital Swiss Army knife, what would a single purpose writing computer need? The answer was: not very much. A clear screen, a great keyboard, the ability to save text in a format that could be edited and potentially printed or published with modern tools, and most importantly, no distractions. I found something called the Freewrite, a Kickstarter launched device with an e-ink screen, WIFI, and a kick-ass mechanical keyboard but it was rather expensive. As I was contemplating it I realized I already had experience with a computer that was phenomenal for writing and little else, and it was inexpensive to boot. I remembered that I had once owned a 1991 Apple Macintosh Powerbook 170, a chunky, black and white, extremely primitive laptop, and that I had written tens of thousands of words with it before “upgrading”. A few months later and I’ve reacquired and refurbished a few old Powerbooks, all predating the turn of the century, and it has worked. I’ve taken to writing again and it’s fantastic. Trains of thought stay on their tracks, distractions disappear, and writing is fun again. I’m writing this on a 1997 Powerbook 3400c using a copy of Word that is so old that the built-in dictionary doesn’t know the word “internet”.
This computer can connect to a network. I can download and install old applications on it, but, it can’t surf the modern web. It has a full-size keyboard with desktop-style keys unlike a modern MacBook with it’s low-profile chiclet style keys. The screen is clear and crisp, more than enough for text. There are no push notifications and there hasn’t been a software update available since Bill Clinton was the president. As a tool for focusing, in a contemplative manner, on forming thoughts into sentences and paragraphs, it’s nearly perfect, but it is not social, and it’s multimedia capabilities are laughable.
After I write this, I will transfer the file to my modern laptop, run it through spellcheck and do some editing and proofreading and then I will post it on my blog. It is almost a dead certainty that I wouldn’t have written anything this long if I was working on my modern machine. I just don’t have that kind of self-control.
This experience of using a single-purpose computer to do a focused task has been a sort of revelation. I have found that my writing productivity has jumped so spectacularly with the switch to this older style machine that it caused me to consider taking a similar approach to two other areas of interest: audio production and video editing.
When it comes to audio production, going back to an old computer seems to me like an absurd idea. When I want to record music I just want to focus on the performance. A vocal part, a drum track, a bass line. I don’t want to fuss with storage limits or old technology. So, I considered what I would need. First, I wanted the ability to record at least eight tracks of audio simultaneously with very high sound quality. Second, I wanted to be able to easily transfer a recording to a computer for editing, mixing, and mastering. Third, I wanted to be limited to audio recording, again with no distractions. This lead me to purchase the first dedicated recording machine I’ve owned in over 20 years, a 32-track all-in-one digital studio, which was a few hundred bucks, not much more than what I paid for a cassette four-track in the 90’s. I have had a couple of sessions with it and again, it has been an extremely rewarding experience. It’s been many years since I’ve been able to just plug in and hit record. I usually spend 45 minutes getting things set up, I get prompted to install updates to my recording software, and I lose my momentum and the session fizzles out. With a dedicated machine, I have none of that. Unless it breaks, I can just turn it on and work.
After I finish tracking a song, I just take the memory card out, connect it to my computer, transfer the files and edit and mix. My god I’ve missed working like that.
I don’t think I’ll ever go back to the Swiss Army knife.
Video editing will be a bit more of a challenge, but I have a plan for that as well. Shooting video is the easy part. I have a digital SLR Nikon camera as well as a few other HD camera options sitting around. They aren’t 4K, but, that’s OK. I will use a relatively modern computer for editing video, it would be silly not to, but I don’t intend to work on my mobile, connected, laptop. No, I am taking a desktop machine, an older Mac, and setting it up with an extra monitor, a copy of Final Cut Pro, and no internet connection unless I choose to plug it in. When I want to cut something together, I will shoot the footage, load it up on that machine, and edit it, away from the digital noise. When it’s ready I will export it and share it with the world. That’s the only thing I will use that computer for and as long as it can do that task well enough for my needs, that’s all it will do.
What I’m sacrificing in convenience, I’m making up for in focus. That’s the deal, and it’s a fair trade.
The modern internet is soul killing. Modern computers are so infested with it that they make focused creativity challenging, but it’s a solvable problem and I look forward to a year of enjoying computers and their role in creativity again, even if it means I spend less time online. The old internet is gone anyhow, the new one is boring and intrusive, I might as well get back to riding bicycles.
One more thing…
I started this whole post talking about the demise of the old, weird, internet and the rise of corporate consumer computing, but I’ve only discussed solutions for restoring my sanity in creative domains. What about the actual internet? Well, they may be less popular than they once were, but many of the old ways of doing things online still technically exist and new ways are being invented. Blogs are still out there, even if Medium has hijacked them. People are still out there, even if Facebook has turned them all into an endless feed of reality programming. There is a fledgling movement to reclaim the internet, make it personal again, there is a website called Indie Web that I have recently discovered that is encouraging the development of ways to share things online without Amazon, Facebook, or Google, and I plan to get mindful on that front as well. In the next few months I hope to start running my own web server again, on my home connection, with my own domain, and take control of my online presence, data, and profile. It’s not enough to not be tracked while shopping Amazon for vegan jerky, I want to host and control my own words, images, music, and videos. It will take some work, but that’s nothing new. It was a lot of work to establish NuclearGopher.com and distribute music 20 years ago and very little has been done to make being independent of mega-corporations easier in the last decade, but it’s work worth doing and work that I know how to do. I hate the internet as I’m currently experiencing it, but I haven’t given up on the idea of being connected to the wide, weird, world, no matter what the monetizers and influencers want me to do. I’m looking forward to making this interesting again, I hope others do the same.