1991, Constance: pistud2, letter by dean, VM/CMS mainframe with punchcard

Al Gore, Clinton administration: commercialization meant that Internet access became commodity (in both senses of the word; publicly available & commercial)


fast forward 1994:  web is about (or less) what Darknets and OSS social networks are today, Usenet, FTP, IRC, finger: controlled by administrators, running your own server without some major organization was practically impossible (startup operating systems Linux and BSD, high degree of technical expertise, server not something you could realistically run from your home - BBS were much better for that).

AOL, Compuserve, Yahoo, Netscape: Internet giants of that day. Perfect prototypes of today's Internet giants: AOL offered the same services (social network + chat/messaging) as Facebook, Yahoo the same service as Google (search, mail), Netscape Navigator had the same position that Chrome as today and working with the same concept of using this as a lock-in for services. In many cases, it's even the same people: Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, became a venture capitalist who co-financed Twitter's startup and has major stakes in Facebook.

Ironically, increasing commercialization did not lead to increasing lock-down from a user's perspective, but possibilities actually expanded (creating web content and having e-mail addresses independently from the policies and restrictions of one ISP, creating one's own discussion groups, eventually also running one's own servers cheaply.) So aside from busting the myths of the participatory 1990s Internet, why were these possibilities either not used, or used in tragically stupid ways (from Instagram influencers and social media beauty/lifestyle psycho terror to alt-right trolling)? 

Problem of Hegelian narratives in the 1990s: Fukuyama, belief in reign of rationality, end of history. Internet was part of a narrative of academically educated liberalism/Gelehrtenrepublik trickling down to larger society and transforming it (Rheingold). 

Must be seen as part of a bigger picture of the neoliberal 1990s where infrastructures were privatized on a large scale: electricity, water, energy, telecoms. (Without telecom privatization, 1990s Internet likely wouldn't have happened; in 1980s Germany, people still had their homes raided by police SWAT teams for running modems; see CCC logo). This neoliberal politics happened everywhere, no matter the nominal ideology of ruling parties, and particularly under the liberal-left and socialdemocratic governments in the U.S. (Clinton/Gore), UK (Blair), Germany (Schröder), Netherlands (Kok). 

http, html: design/architectural issues that in hindsight make development foreseeable
hypertext: not 


Can you have the web that (never) was? - Yes, simply by using Tor hidden services, or Freenet, or Diaspora, or Mastodon, instead of the mainstream Web. Same or better user experience as the early 1990s DIY web (including slowness, low tech etc.), same lunatic fringe libertarian content, same experience that these networks are mostly about themselves and that it is difficult to find interesting stuff to read in them.

Today, about as many people do care as people do care now about the darkwebs and OSS federated social media. It's some nerdy niche.