A 13-slide tour from BBS dial-tones to algorithmic feeds. Best viewed in 800x600 with a Pentium II and a fresh bowl of Bagel Bites.
Modems screaming. Long-distance bills. The first publics of the network.
AOL opens Usenet to its subscribers. The annual freshman flood becomes permanent. The old culture dissolves into the new mass.
The web as DIY zine. Neighborhoods (Heartland, SunsetStrip, Area51) instead of feeds.
Handles, avatars, sigs. You were what you posted about.
Personal publishing at scale. RSS readers. Comments still meant something.
Friends-locked posts, mood icons, fandom communities, the first pseudo-social graph.
Free hosting, easy templates. Personal columnism for everyone.
Open-source backbone. Themes & plugins build a publishing ecosystem.
Dawkins coins the term in The Selfish Gene (1976) — a unit of cultural transmission. The internet hands it a delivery system.
Two opposite answers to the same question: what happens when nobody (or everybody) knows your name?
The "social graph" replaces the open web. Your friends are now an API.
Audience-building becomes a career path. Bedroom > broadcast tower.
Niche authority. Affiliate links. The first "personal brand."
Vlogs, tutorials, gameplay. Adsense funds parasocial empires.
Algorithm picks you. Format dictates form: vertical, 15s, hooks.
Common thread: attention compounds like capital. The platform owns the rails.
Algorithmic feeds optimize for time-on-site. Outrage, novelty, identity threat outperform.
Pink bars = served first. Repeat × 1B users.
The same rails carry rumors, reporting, and recruitment — at the same speed.
Falsehoods travel faster than corrections; the retweet beats the retraction.
Algorithms cluster like with like; cross-cutting exposure decays.
Confidence in shared facts erodes. Every story has a parallel story.
The medium isn't neutral. The interface chooses what is loud.
A pluralism of smaller rooms — and a flood of synthetic content.
Discords, Slacks, group chats, Substacks. Membership over reach.
Mastodon, Bluesky, ActivityPub. Federation as a hedge against single-platform capture.
Text, image, video at zero marginal cost. New filters needed: made by whom, for whom?
The pendulum: from many small sites → few huge platforms → many small sites again, plus an ocean of machines.
Sign the guestbook on your way out.