Orphans of Netscape
-------------------

Mid last year, Sandra at idiomdrottning.org wrote a fantastic
post, entitled "Talking about my generation"[1].  I only read it
much more recently.  It resonated with me, I mulled it over a while,
connected some ideas in it with what had previously been totally
unrelated stuff in my mind, and it ended up doing a surprising
amount of work in shifting my perspective on the modern internet
and helping to lift me out of an aversive headspace, a bad tech
funk, which I was deeply stuck in for most of 2022.  This post is
an attempt to share some of the thinking behind that experience,
which might well be totally idiosyncratic and non-repeatable for
people who aren't me, but oh well.  If you think this post is mostly
nonsense and you hate it, that's fine, but please do blame me and
not Sandra because I am going waaaay beyond her starting point.

The original post is succinct and poignant and you should really just
read it, but I'd prefer this post to be stand-alone intelligible,
so I'll attempt a brief summary: Sandra points out that there is a
general tendency for people from a specific age group to perceive
the current tech landscape as rotten much more strongly than either
those who are younger than them - who grew up with this landscape,
so that its ugly defects are just an invisible background - or those
who are older than them - who never deeply engaged with the internet
before this landscape's lowered barriers let them in.  Those of
us in between those two groups are in the minority in feeling a
genuine sense of loss when comparing the present to the recent past.

In passing, I should clarify that I've long been wary, even
dismissive, of the notion of "generations", all this "baby boomers",
"gen x/y/z", "millennial" stuff.  Obviously it's not completely
devoid of value, but I've always felt like a lot of it was cheap
stereotyping, painting with extremely broad strokes, ignoring
fuzzy boundaries and ignoring that some societal changes happen
at different times in different parts of the world.  Often it
just seems to be deployed as an easy way to dismiss and "other"
certain people based on their age when it's convenient to do so.
There used to be a fantastic post somewhere in Gopherspace (I have
it in my head that it's no longer up, but possibly that's wrong,
and I've forgotten where on Earth it is/was - please email me if
you know what I'm talking about!) which espoused the idea that
generations were mostly nonsense but occasionally there really
were genuine nodal points in history (I'm borrowing that term from
Gibson's Bridge triology, it's not the term the forgotten Gopher
author used), like WWII, which separated people born on either
side of them, and if I remember rightly this post proposed that the
creation of the internet was one of those points.  I like Sandra's
generational analysis despite my usual misgivings because (i) it
explicitly acknowledges "exceptions in all directions", and (ii)
it fits neatly into the nodal point model, rather than the usual
weird clockwork cycle of "lol, kids these days".  Maybe I also like
it because I feel like it actually describes me accurately, whereas
in standard generational discourse I'm supposedly a millennial,
which is not a label I self-identify as at all, which carries a
load of stereotypes that I don't believe describe me accurately,
and which seems like a hopelessly ill-formed category precisely
because it uses round numbers on an arbitrary calendar to lump
together folks who grew up on either side of exactly the nodal
point that Sandra identifies.

[UPDATE 2023-01-20]: The fantastic Gopherspace post referenced above
has been found[7]!  Thanks very much to the author, SDF user undo,
for reaching out to me.

Anyway, onwards.  This next paragraph is going to seem like a
diversion, but bear with me.

Way back in the year 2000, a group of entrepreneurial space
enthusiasts formed a private corporation with the intent of
purchasing the ageing and ailing Mir space station off the Russian
government and turning it into a platform for space tourism and other
commercial activities in space.  Obviously this didn't work out.
Years later, in 2008, a documentary was made about this failed
endeavour.  I haven't seen the documentary, so I don't know if it's
any good and this post is not an endorsement of it.  I've only read
that it exists on Wikipedia.  I read about it on Wikipedia for the
first time not very long after it was released, maybe 2009 or 2010,
back in a time when Netflix was (in Australia, at least, then a land
of expensive and unreliable internet connections which inevitably
came with paltry monthly data caps) a company which snail-mailed
you DVDs in pre-paid return envelopes (which sounds hilarious today
but had genuine advantages: they couldn't ram recommendations down
your throat, and if you borrowed a whole season of a TV show at once
they couldn't drop that show while you were half-way through it).
I would have had to chase down an obscure torrent to watch the
documentary then, and so I didn't bother.  Apparently it's on Amazon
Prime Video these days.  Anyway, the reason I'm talking about this
mysterious might-not-even-be-good documentary at all is that,
despite never having seen it, its *name* has stuck with me ever
since I first read it, for more than a decade afterwards.

It's called "Orphans of Apollo".

Quoting the Wikipedia article[2]:

> The film’s title refers to those people who came of age during
the early years of the Space Age and expected to see progress
continue at the rate seen in those heady early days, only to be
disappointed — orphaned — by events of the last few decades. If
they were going to have the kind of bold future they once envisioned,
they would have to build it themselves.

Does that first part sound familiar?

The utopian visions of the future which were in the air in the Space
Age, according to which by the time the current century rolled
around we'd be living in a world of space hotels and moon bases
and Mars colonies and asteroid belt mining operations, seduced an
entire generation of otherwise very intelligent and technically savvy
people, despite having retrospectively very obvious and very serious
economic problems, political problems, and motivational problems of
why the "man in the street" was supposed to actually really deeply
want to live in a rotating tin can in the first place.  How did
this happen?  Partially because I think idealistic young people
are just very susceptible to narratives of trailblazing, pioneering
spirit at exciting frontiers, but also partially because for a good
chunk of those people's formative years, absolutely incredible real
world progress was actually happening right before their very eyes
at breakneck pace, progress which seemed for all the world like the
plausible first steps in a path leading exactly to those utopian
science fiction futures these people had also grown up reading and
dreaming about.  The world went from Sputnik in 1957 to man on the
moon in 1969, just 12 years later.  For some folks those 12 years
started when they were too young to really understand anything about
economics or politics, and covered about the entirety of their high
school and university education.  It's no surprise these people were
able to suspend their disbelief about a glorious future in space.

During the 90s, lots of us received exactly the same Space Age
narrative of trailblazing, pioneering spirit at an exciting frontier,
but this time the frontier wasn't outer space, it was cyberspace.
That word didn't sound quite so cringey yet.  In 1996 cyberspace
even got its own declaration of independence[3]!  Computer geeks
were building a whole new world, and the governments and the huge
corporations that people were so fed up with in the real world were
on the fast track to obsolescence (never mind that the richest and
most powerful people in the world had very little interest in being
rendered obsolete).  Sure, lots of people didn't understand what
was going on at all, but that was strictly a temporary problem.
The next generation of "digital natives" would grow up "computer
literate" from day one.  By the time they were adults, we'd be
on IPv6 and the internet would be strictly peer-to-peer, with no
artificial dichotomy between clients and servers.  We wouldn't need
gate-keeping, rent-collecting middlemen!  Anybody on Earth could
go and buy a little server box from Radioshack and plug it into
their modem, just like everybody used to plug fax and answering
machines into their phones, and then they could use free software
to talk instantly and directly to anybody else on Earth, at costs
too cheap to meter, and thanks to strong crypto ("crypto" was a
*good* word until just a few years ago) they could do it without
fear of eavesdropping or censorship.  Repressive regimes would fall,
unable to exercise control over access to information.  Even nation
states would eventually become obsolete!  Humanity would become one
big happy, unified "global village" in a "postgeographic" future,
with totally democratised access to information and media.

Maybe not everybody believed or wanted every part of this vision,
but this was genuinely the kind of talk which was very seriously
thrown around in very smart circles in those days.  It all sounds
loopy and naive today, but it seemed oh-so-plausible at the time.
Why wouldn't it?  We too witnessed absolutely incredible real world
progress which seemed like the plausible first steps!  Consider the
12 year period of time from 1993, when the first release of Mosaic
was made (widely considered the first thing that could pass for
a user friendly web browser), up until 2005.  In that same window
of time, just as brief as that from Sputnik to Apollo 11, we went
from most people not having internet access at home to most people
having slow and temporary dialup connections to many people having
high speed and permanent cable or DSL connections.  We linked
all the disparate lands of the Earth together electronically with
monumental and eye-wateringly expensive underwater infrastructure
projects (a process that Neal Stephenson documented in 1996 in an
unreasonably compelling and characteristically ultra-long essay
for Wired called "Mother Earth, Mother Board"[4], which conveys well
the sense of scale and gravitas of the internetification of our
planet).  Napster used that infrastructure to shake the hell out
of the music industry and gave the man in the street a concrete
demonstration of the fact that old laws didn't matter much when
breaking them was so cheap and so easy and so popular that it just
wasn't practical to do much about it.  Efforts by the US government
to restrict the use and export of crypto by non-military users were
repeatedly foiled by the efforts of idealistic internet activists
like the EFF.  The US government sued Microsoft for antitrust,
and won.  Starting with the boon of Netscape's donated source code,
team FOSS fought and won in the browser wars with such a sense of
revolutionary zeal that the official mozilla.org branding of the
time looked like something right out of the Great Leap Forward,
big red five-pointed stars and all.  Mozilla/Firebird/Firefox
crushed Internet Explorer, and Open Office looked on course to crush
Microsoft Office.  Those were straight up David vs Goliath victories!
Wikipedia came along.  The blogosphere and RSS/Atom came along.
Ubuntu came along and promised to finally make Linux accessible
to the mortal user.  They didn't have final working hardware yet,
but the idea of the One Laptop Per Child project was announced,
and the idea was electrifying enough!  Children in the developing
world would grow up computer literate, too!  All this, and there
were no iPhones or Android phones, the very idea of a computing
platform whose manufacturer acted as a gatekeeper for the software
you could install on it being simply unimaginably dystopian.
There was no Twitter.  Facebook just barely existed, but nobody
outside of the US college scene had heard of it or was allowed
to use it.  YouTube just barely existed, but true geeks ignored
it because we didn't like / couldn't easily use something called
"Flash" (later we crushed that, too).  What a time to be alive!

Of course we all know how the *next* 12 years went.  The "computer
literacy" idea sure didn't pan out.  When was the last time you even
heard that phrase before reading this post?  As Ploum recently put
it so clearly, the very notion of "learning to use a computer" has
been killed[5].  The next generation didn't naturally grow up with a
deep and intuitive understanding of computing.  Instead, genuinely
bright young people studying astrophysics at top-tier universities
don't even understand that filesystems exist[6].  Every last bit of
the common foundation that underlies all computing devices has been
abstracted over so that there's nothing left you can learn from
using device A to solve problem X which can be usefully transferred
to using device B to solve problem Y.  Basic UI stuff that used
to ubiquitous stopped working reliably - have you tried using the
mouse cursor to select text in a website lately?  Often it just
doesn't work.  Personal computing got applianceified, consumption
got prioritised over production, video and audio got prioritised over
text, the internet became more centralised and more commercialised,
and some parts of the end result honestly resemble nothing so much
as all the worst parts of the previous century's broadcast media
turned up to eleven.  The internet gave us an amplified version of
exactly what it was supposed to save us from!  How could anybody
not feel a sense of loss?

Or at least, that's one perspective on the whole thing.  Most of
the young people who can't find their files are approximately as
upset about the modern internet as most people my age were that
didn't get the chance to spend their school holidays playing zero
gravity football, which is to say it doesn't even cross their mind.
My 90-odd year old grandfather, who last time I saw him was sitting
in his caravan using an iPad to watch a YouTube video of an American
guy with a metal detector hunting for Civil War relics, is also
not upset that computers and the internet finally developed into
something that normal people could use for normal purposes before
he shuffled off this mortal coil; that they finally attained the
status of mature and civilised technology, like the automobile and
other convenient devices that only trained experts have to bother
knowing anything about the insides of.  Those of us who are deeply,
achingly upset about the whole thing are definitely the odd ones out.

I humbly propose the title "orphans of Netscape" for us odd ones out.
Sure, there are other "orphans of X" candidates you might prefer,
maybe something less web-centric.  I might like them too.  But this
is the first one that popped into my head and it's stuck there,
and I like it because of the connection between Netscape and
Mozilla, who used to be David but now have given up even trying,
and that betrayal is a tangible part of the sense of loss for me.
So, I'm an orphan of Netscape in my head going forward.  If you're
reading this now on Gemini or Gopher then chances are good that
you are also an orphan of Netscape, because we are super duper
over-represented in the smolnet.

This post isn't just about the name, though.  It's about the fact
there is a very simple outsider's perspective which explains why
we're the odd ones out in the internet story, and it applies equally
well to both of the orphans of Netscape and Apollo.  It goes like
this.  From time to time, certain small groups of tech-savvy people
happen to grow up in the same place and at the same time as certain
powerful new technologies.  Because of this unique background,
these people - and these people alone - are able to very clearly
perceive visions of the future which are both glorious and 100%
technically feasible, the technical feasibility being something
that they feel in their bones by virtue of direct experience, or
at least direct observation.  Those people therefore mistake these
visions for being not just compelling but actually being inevitable,
for being the obviously, undeniably natural and pre-destined state
of the world, for being exactly what everybody else would want
too, if only they understood things properly!  But these futures
aren't inevitable, they're actually mostly wishful thinking and
they simply don't come to pass.  Space cadets and net cadets alike
come crashing down to Earth, hard, and some get lifelong scars,
not on their bodies, but in their souls.  The Earthbound majority
who never took off in the first place simply don't understand what
all the fuss is about.  Life goes on.

This is a bitter pill to swallow, no doubt.  I expect that lots of
people won't like this account of how they became orphaned.  I get
that it sounds a lot like defeatism and surrender, like it dismisses
everything we hold dear as childish fantasy.  It sounds like "Grow
up, quit dreaming, get a haircut and buy an Alexa!".  Maybe I'm
kidding myself and I really have just given up and surrendered,
but right now that's not how this new view of things feels to me.
I think that the pill is not merely bitter, but in fact bittersweet.
I'm from the younger end of Netscape orphan age range, and I have
pretty well exactly half my expected life still ahead of me.  I don't
want to spend half my life miserable and/or angry, fighting losing
battles, desperately trying to turn back time, all the while cursing
my "normie" friends and family and colleagues as idiot lemmings,
eventually ending up even more burnt out and bitter and alienated
than I already am.  The orphans of Netscape perspective doesn't
emphasise how miserable my future is going to be (I'm getting
enough of that as it is from climate change and the Neo Cold War,
both of which matter a great deal more than the internet, which by
the way failed to prevent either of them).  Instead it emphasises
that I had the good fortune and privilege to live through a unique
and short-lived moment in history, and got to experience the heady
early days of mass internet adoption when anything still seemed
possible, and that was great.  Sort of a "better to have loved and
lost" take on the whole thing.  Maybe also an "acceptance stage of
grief" thing.  A sense of closure, and freedom to move on.

None of which is to say that the sense of loss we feel isn't valid.
I'm not denying that things really were better.  I still wish things
were different.  What we had wasn't an illusion.  But it *was* an
illusion that things would stay that way forever, or get even *more*
that way, and that most people wanted that, that most people cared
about it anywhere near as much as we did and would actively resist
change.  We really had our heads in the clouds big time there,
no less than the 1960s space cadets did.  When we conceptualise
ourselves as having been robbed of the glorious digital future that
we deserved, we are actually making ourselves into victims of our
own imagination.  It hurts less, I think, I hope, when you realise
that was an illusion.  It makes the present a bit less of a cosmic
catastrophe when you don't look at it like you just crawled out of
the wreckage of an express train to paradise which got derailed at
the last minute by a small number of moustache-twirling villains.

Our sense of loss is likely more acute than those of the orphans
of Apollo.  They grew up just watching other people fly to the
moon, whereas we got to be active participants in better internet.
But there's another way in which the orphans of Netscape are much,
much luckier than the orphans of Apollo.  Hand-me-down space stations
are rare and expensive, and you can't even fit a dozen people in
one of them.  DIY colonisation of outer space by a minority group
still clinging to their dreams is out of the question.  But DIY
colonisation of cyberspace is cheap and low risk and there's room
for everyone who wants to join.  The real internet isn't gone.
It's been marginalised and sidelined and it's likely going to
stay that way forever now, but nobody can completely take it away
from us as long as the TCP/IP bedrock is still there.  The small
internet movement is exactly this kind of DIY cyberspace colony,
which explains perfectly why so many of us are from the orphan of
Netscape generation.

This change in perspective also helps me to keep the small internet,
well, in perspective.  Let's not kid ourselves.  We aren't building
the future here.  We are not launching a revolution.  We are not
rescuing hordes of people from the forces of evil.  We are building a
weird and wonderful combination of retirement village, sanatorium,
group therapy practice, rural retreat, museum, art gallery,
fleamarket, classroom, and a whole bunch of other things.  That's
not supposed to be dismissive, or deprecating, or trivialising.
There are some important institutions in that list!  But most
people spend most of their time outside of them.  That's fine.
That's good and that's healthy!  Understanding our actual place
in the big picture frees us up from having to worry too much about
hard problems.  Nothing we build has to be able to scale, technically
or financially, up to the entire planet.  Thank God!  If we make bad
design decisions they will not burden untold numbers of future users
for decades to come.  Somebody else already made those bad decisions,
it's why we're here playing around on the sidelines!  The scope for
further damage of that scale is minimal.  I'm not trying to provide
excuses for building a slapdash smolnet.  We can and should still
maintain a sense of pride and of craftsmanship about the whole thing.
I'm just trying to give permission - mostly to myself - to *not*
feel the weight of the digital world on our shoulders every day,
for the smolnet to be an important part of our lives but not the
only part or the most important part.  I'm sure most people don't
need to be told this, but I somehow lost sight of it.

I want to clarify that I'm not saying that the small internet in
any way "belongs" to those people in a certain narrow band of ages,
or that it cannot be understood by people outside of that band,
or that we don't want them here.  None of that is true!  I was born
well after the last moon landing, and I have no lived experience of
the space age.  I grew up during a time when manned spaceflight was
notable mostly for shuttles blowing up and killing people and Mir
constantly breaking down and/or catching fire (but somehow never
killing anybody).  That didn't stop me from reading books about the
space race, books written during it, or after it by people who had
taken part in it, and I absolutely got the excitement and the sense
of wonder and the grandiose scale of the vision, all that stuff was
transmitted faithfully across the generation gap.  There's no reason
that young people who had "Okay, Google" amongst their first words
can't also understand our experience and perspective, at least a bit.
We should do our best to facilitate and encourage and welcome this.
The number of people who really truly feel the sense of loss in
their bones like we do is only ever going to decrease with time,
but the ideas and the values and the stories and some of the tools
can and should live on.  The small internet is always going to be
small, and most people are never going to really get the appeal,
but that doesn't mean that it is futile or without value.

Finally, I acknowledge that it's kind of a very weird time to write
this post.  On the one hand, Musk's shambolic tenure as CEO of
Twitter has some people more optimistic than I've ever seen anybody
about the impending deaths of the first generation of social media
platforms, and with them the arrival of a golden opportunity to
roll back some of the damage.  On the other hand, NASA's Artemis
1 mission eventually went off without a hitch and now it really
seems possible that I will actually get to witness humans walking on
the moon in my own lifetime.  Maybe in another 12 years time this
post will look like pessimistic nonsense and both sets of orphans
will have simply proven to have been decades ahead of their time.
I kind of doubt it, but who knows?

## Responses

Here are links to some resonses to this post which have surfaced in Geminispace or Gopherspace:

* Sunset's 2023-01-13 gemlog post "The Internet of Money" [8]
* jns' 2023-01-13 phlog post "Dreams are essential" [9]
* screwtape's 2023-01-23 phlog post "Young Feynman Repaired Radios" [10]

[1] gemini://idiomdrottning.org/generations
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphans_of_Apollo
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Declaration_of_the_Independence_of_Cyberspace
[4] https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
[5] gemini://ploum.net/2022-12-03-reinventing-how-we-use-computers.gmi
[6] https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
[7] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/undo/archive/t001
[8] gemini://arcanesciences.com/gemlog/23-01-13/
[9] gopher://gopher.linkerror.com:70/0/phlog/2023/20230113
[10] gopher://beastie.sdf.org:7991/0phlogs/j.feynman.txt

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