ADAM TINWORTH

From innocent idealism to pragmatic fixes

Two decades of internet culture

Like many people of the Internet Generation – those of us who became seriously involved online in the mid to late ’90s – I was caught up in the wave of idealistic euphoria that surrounded the first communities to come together on the web. It’s easy to see why we saw the cyber world through rose-tinted mirror shades. We were a self-selecting group of tech-savvy nerds who were able to enjoy connecting with people just like us, sometimes for the very first time.

We were able to build communities around the things we cared about and make discussion of them part of our daily routine for the very first time.

The internet was clearly making our lives better. Connections and relationships were bringing us together in a way that made geography irrelevant. If we brought this to the whole world, surely everything would get better.

Oh, dear.

We were, perhaps, the first victims of digital bubbles. We were trapped in our own little sphere of self-selecting early adopters. We hadn’t yet realised how homogenous that group was, or how different things would become when all the rest of humanity followed us into cyberspace.

To be young and a part of a passionate, idealistic crowd is a great feeling. Everyone should experience it – for a while at least. But we also need to grow up at some point and realise that the world might be more complicated than our evangelism allowed. We’re far from the first generation to be disillusioned, either; two decades before the internet, people dreamed that music would bring the world together.

Mark Hamill, the actor who played Luke Skywalker in theStar Wars movies, has given us another taste of that. He recently described how he realised that Luke’s journey in the most recent movie,The Last Jedi, reflects his own journey from idealism to disillusionment:

“It is tragic. I’m not a method actor, but one of the techniques a method actor will use is to try and use real-life experiences to relate to whatever fictional scenario he’s involved in. The only thing I could think of, given the screenplay that I read, was that I was of the Beatles generation – ‘All You Need Is Love’, ‘peace and love’.

I thought at that time, when I was a teenager: ‘By the time we get in power, there will be no more war, there will be no racial discrimination, and pot will be legal.’ So I’m one for three. When you think about it, [my generation is] a failure. The world is unquestionably worse now than it was then.” [1]

Those of us who followed a couple of decades later found their idealism not in protest songs and hippie idealism, but in the utopian worlds we were creating for ourselves in the nascent internet. And there is a link between the two sets of dreamers. Many of those who built the early internet were products of the hippie generation.

Idealism is a wonderful thing. But it needs to be tinged with caution. Throughout our exploration of the dichotomy ofDIGITAL SUCKS andDIGITAL FIX over the last couple of years, the phrase I keep coming back to is “hope for the best, plan for the worst”. My generation of internet folks were so busy doing the first that we forgot about the latter. And so a new generation of internet people moved in, more driven by money and cynicism, but dreadful to ape the language of the early dreamers. They’re “connecting the world” and “making the world’s information accessible”, but they fail to