thinking about old and new

Anyone can still go to info.cern.ch and browse the first website ever made, including Tim Berners-Lee’s original World Wide Web project page. It was built by Berners-Lee, who created the internet as we know it and yes, is still alive. And no, not a billionaire, somehow. Kinda shocking and a bit sad, I think. He is a lesson for those of us who mistakenly think we will become wealthy by creating things that are broadly valuable and open source. Linus would agree. I know internet plumbing came before web pages, but everyone says “internet” when they mean the web so idk. What feels like magic to me is that Tim’s page still works in a modern browser, sitting there like a note passed across time, a literal time machine.

Back then, in the 90s, Tim’s page would have looked vastly different because browsers, computers, and screens were not the same as they are today. Still, the core feeling survives, namely a page, a few links, an invitation to wander, and none of that twitchy modern need to trap a viewer inside a dopamine induced sales funnel or scatter about hideous seizure inducing advertisements everywhere. Put another way, the early web feels like rooms connected by doors and dots with deeps and boops, while the modern internet often feels like hallways that keep moving while someone quietly measures your steps usually without your knowledge via cookies and other more insidious methods.

time machine

I had my agent create a tiny retro CERN terminal time machine as an experiment to see if the way the internet used to work would inspire me in new ways. The agent completed the task in less than 10-minutes. Its resulting site succeeded in inspiring me to write this and another blog post, both because of the speed and fidelity with which it was created by essentially bayesian inference and because of the clear difference between what was possible even with something as simple as an interface, from then to now. What do you think? Type help, click around, change phosphor colors, and pretend, for a minute, that the internet and what we now call “browsing,” still meant something as simple as asking a computer for a document and getting one in return, ahhh determinism, how refreshing. Contrasted with what we have today, e.g., tasking an agent with a one sentence prompt to recreate an emulator of a computer from the 90s, end-to-end, followed by getting a faithful representation less than 10-minutes later that can be instantly deployed and shared through a blog post now with an attestation because otherwise it would be almost impossible for most people to tell human from machine intelligence, and you’ll realize just how far, we, as a society, have come.

future future future

People’s attitudes have also changed about the internet and its purpose from the 80-90s to now. It’s a means of escape, a way of life, and a benchmark to gauge success against compared to a way to share information, communicate accross the globe, and create pixel-by-pixel games like Utopia. What will the future be like? Will it be better, or perhaps worse, or simply so different that it’s not worth speculating about because, similar to how crazy a screen you can touch was for Blackberry, or a remote that can control things wirelessly before TVs were a thing, it is probably impossible to even visualize all the possibilities unless you are The Jetsons, as my dad and others of his generation like to say; at least it is for me. I suspect the future future future internet decades or even centuries from now will be stranger than anyone can predict. And maybe not even an internet in the way we currently think of it. I hope those who use it, and their society of that time, remember humans inherently need to connect and talk with each other in person too. The internet can be fun and it does not need to be extractive. And, hopefully, we don’t become those people from WALL-E or some uploaded consciousness like in Transcendence.