MacLife has published a must-read article by Carrie Marshall: “What if the Internet didn’t exist?”
Credit for the Internet as we know it goes to ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). The US Department of Defense network developed it in the 1960s and it went public in 1969. MacLife notes that it established the “decentralized structure that makes the Internet robust and resilient, and developed technologies including TCP/IP, the protocol that enables computers and devices all over the world to communicate with one another.”
There was a second key network, NSFNET, which launched in 1986. It too was a US government program — created and operated by the National Science Foundation — and it enabled academic researchers to connect to supercomputers. To begin with it connected 200,000 computers; by 1993, it had more than 2 million.
But what if these things never happened?
On one hand, MacLife notes that theaters are packed every weekend, music comes on CD or via radio stations, podcasts are still called radio shows, and you can afford to see your favorite artists play live. There’s a busy Blockbuster in every town, and both libraries and bookshops are bustling. Nobody knows what influencer, clickbait, or “AI slop” means, or what a skibidi toilet might be. We’d be partying like it’s 1999.
On the other hand, MacLife notes that if it weren’t for the internet, we’d probably still be paying through the nose for phone calls, for the products we buy in the shops, for flights and train tickets, and vacations, and cable TV, and cars and computers. And many of us would be lonelier, sadder, or just plain bored.
Carrie concludes with this astute observation: So perhaps the problem isn’t the internet. Perhaps the problem is what big parts of the internet have become.
What if we could take this timeline and do a Missy Elliott to it: put this thing down, flip it, and reverse it? What if we could go back not to destroy the internet, but to — oh yes — Think Different?”
Read her article for even more thoughts.
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