Netizenship/Origins

This chapter revises Internet 50th Anniversary/Brief History of the Anon Subculture. The matter that is dealt with by that article but is not covered in this chapter pretty much summarizes the 2ch Chronicle and the 4chan Chronicle.
If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.--Abraham Lincoln

Where we're to think we're from (Conventional Narrative)

Forget everything you've learned from here. Put out of your mind everything you've discovered about the history of the Internet. Suspend your disbelief, and especially your ridicule, as you may need to excise a considerable bit of your real-life history knowledge and basic experience with people to truly digest this account. (Remember to store it somewhere you can get back to at the end, though; this paragraph is but a Rhetorical Device and is not to be taken literally.) Welcome to the corporate world of the Conventional Narrative, where justifying our rule is everything!

Our story begins in 1969, where some dudes working for the US Military invented something called ARPANET. Two decades later (nothing having happened in the meantime), Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet, which has a relationship with the World Wide Web we can't quite explain and isn't really important for users like you, anyway. When we created Windows 95, that gave people like you access to this beautiful, magical thing! We even invented MSN just so you could talk to ordinary people like you!

But bad people took advantage of all these wonderful gifts. They don't like the reasonable regulations we put on your use of the things we own. That's because the bad people want to hurt you and the regulations are there to protect you from them. So after all the work we put in, the "dot-com bubble" burst and we couldn't benefit you any longer. That was so sad because our entire purpose is to serve you!

Well we bode our time for a bit, until we came up with a wonderful new invention called the smartphone! So you could use our Internet anytime and anyplace you wanted! Better yet, we would have access to all sorts of cool information about you so we would always know what you need and want and do what we could to meet those needs and wants! But the bad people were jealous. They were jealous because we were coming up with even newer ways to serve you, and we didn't care about such old rubbish things as "free speech" or "privacy"! Now that's not fair!

The bad people were evil! And the worst of them came from 4chan and were called "Anonymous"! They attacked everything good and everyone who we were happy for because they were good! But, not to worry, we destroyed them! And we made even newer, shinier, and better goodies like Facebook and Twitter, which use fancy things called "algorithms" to predict what you want so you'll always see something you like! We want you to play with us every day and every night! Because we love you and Anonymous hates you!

Now the bad people are around again. They fight everybody who is good. And you know we treat good people well just like they deserve. So please, don't listen to them mumble about "liberty". They just want to harm you! We need to control radicalization and hate speech. Never mind the dirty rags they call "rights". That's just words written by some old farts on some old piece of paper and it won't get in the way of us stopping the bad people from harming you! So you just have to agree to these terms of use which say we can kick you off for any reason. Now, you know that would never affect you. It's for the bad people. Pinky-swear? Promise? Deal?

Inadequacies of this narrative

end laugh track

Okay, admit it. You laughed at least once, didn't you? The only difference between this and innumerable news articles on the same subject is this explicitly lays out what the beneficiaries of this narrative want you to feel after you're done reading, whereas the news articles simply try to nudge your brain into feeling the way they want. With the former approach, the intended effect on the reader can be drawn out into the open where it can be easily exploded.

You won't be laughing, though, once you learn that there are people who believe this myth. And why blame them for it? It's clear - you are good, but there are bad guys, thankfully there's a good guy protecting you. You don't have to do much - just do something easy for your protector and the bad guys will go. And, like all good stories, you've got a destiny and everything standing between you and it will be vanquished by your protector.

Why is this a problem? Well, every opinion needs an argument, consisting of reasoning and evidence. You can have all the reasoning in the world, but if the evidence is based on this narrative, it won't support the argument. Our mission - freedom of expression, privacy, preservation of history, and assurance that the last three things will continue permanently - quite simply cannot be sustained if it is preceded by evidence drawn by this narrative.

Periodization of Internet history

Historical analysis is easy compared to the gathering and reporting of historical facts. The difficult thing is getting others to adopt your analysis of history. Nevertheless here is my attempt at periodization of Internet history:

The 50-year history of the internet can be divided into four eras, each of which slightly exceeds a decade. A revolutionary period lasting about 5 years, give or take a year, ends one period and starts the next. They are:

1. Prehistory. This period includes everything up to 1981, the invention of the Hayes Smartmodem. It includes the technical and spiritual precursors of the Internet, as well as ARPANET itself, for back then it was solely a tool. There was no social or recreational use of ARPANET whatsoever. The social revolution began in 1980 with the launching of USENET, and ended in 1984 with the Hayes Smartmodem becoming the universal modem, thereby allowing BBSes to operate, beginning the:
2. Pioneer Age. This period lasted from 1981 to 1993, Eternal September. It featured the genesis of the Internet identity and culture. The Internet entered this age as...nothing. It left this age with its own inhabitants, with their own aspirations, communities, and interests. The popular revolution began in 1990 with the creation of the World Wide Web, and ended in 1995 with the US government's opening of NSFnet, making the Internet fair game for all. This began the
3. Community Age. This period lasted from 1993 to 2007, the invention of the first smartphone. Most people's memories of the Internet will only reach back to this age. This age marked the beginning of many Internet-specific forms of media and conversation such as forums and blogs. The convenience revolution began in 2006, with the opening of Facebook to the public, and ended in 2009, with its availability on smartphones, marking the
4. Corporate Age. The current age. The chief feature of this age is the proliferation of mobile phones. A few large technology companies dominated the Internet, marginalizing ideas and communities that first emerged in the Pioneer and Community Ages.

Prehistory

Precursors of the Internet

To truly begin painting the background for an Internet history one could conceivably start with the invention of writing, if not speech. But we shall constrain our preliminary investigations to the information revolution that preceded ours, namely, printing. The first societies to achieve majority literacy were probably in the early modern era. With the new art, what had previously to be laboriously copied by a scribe could be mass-produced by a printing press. This allowed for the success of the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation was not the first attempt to split from the Catholic Church. But Luther's was more successful because Lutheran ideas could be spread through printed books, unlike those of previous schisms.

Not to be outdone, the Catholics responded with the Counter-Reformation. After German peasants attempted to organize a Radical Reformation, the German princes, both Lutheran and Catholic, realized they had let the genie out of the bottle, and rushed to tightly regulate printing through an early precursor of copyright. With the Peace of Augsburg, and especially the Peace of Westphalia, the Lutherans themselves became the state church in many north German states not to mention Scandinavia. The first modern information revolution had ended with the victory of the powers that be.

The first widespread "telecommunications" were the telegraph, the telephone, and the radiotelegraph. Earlier systems of signalling using colored flags and such traveled, of course, at the speed of light, but were constrained by physical limitations at the sender, at the receiver, and between the two. These systems put the "tele" in "telecommunications" and allowed communication over long distances. It is not correct to say the companies won the fight to control them. This implies there even was one. There was none, not even the opportunity for one.

The same story unfolded largely in relation to radio and television. Except in the United States, where corporations dominated, governments operated broadcasting systems. The large capital investments needed made it impractical, if not impossible, for private individuals to run a radio or TV station in any way.