One of things I really loved about the early net was how open and free it felt. Before the internet was even the internet, Al Gore was talking about the possibility of an “information superhighway” connecting educators and researchers with one another as well as one another’s work. We never thought in terms of destinations. It was more about the journey, the search, and the connections.
The “places” online, if you could even call them that, were just repositories of files. One of the first times I was on the net, I was looking for some song lyrics. I did some Gopher searches (simple, command-line stuff) and ended up downloading the files I needed from a server in Tel Aviv. There was no sense of place. I didn’t go there.
The same was true for IRC and USENET, the early chat and bulletin board services online. Even though we were pinging messages back and forth to one another in close to real time, we were all just passing through. The text-only interface helped convey a sense of impermanence — of having created these little temporary autonomous zones in the ether, composed entirely of the people who happened to show up.
There was something that felt itinerant about all this activity. It reminded me of what it was like to be in the theater (my original life and career), where you gather with a troupe for a few months, become co-workers, family, even lovers, and then disperse to everyone’s next projects. We all learned how to recognize one another as part of a great, big, migratory meta-community, capable of forming deep bonds over a single weekend performance and then never seeing each other again.
The early, text-only internet reminded me of Judaism, with its restriction on “graven images” and even of the early Israelites, who were essentially Bedouin, always on the move. I wrote a piece for The Australian in around 1993, naming us “digital nomads” and suggesting we might be “the new Jews.” Something about maintaining a text-only tradition, engaging on a network in provisional ways, and enjoying a culture based on the sharing of data and the exchange of ideas seemed to retrieve the best things about the Jewish tradition. What might a society built on these principles bring us that the later, more sedentary civilization of agriculture, land ownership, and domination could not?
This is why I was so disappointed by the World Wide Web. Its flat, image-based interface, along with the pointing and clicking, felt fundamentally different to me. Literacy was no longer a prerequisite for participation. Participation wasn’t even a prerequisite for participation if you know what I mean. Interactivity came to mean pointing and clicking on stuff in a website rather than sharing one’s thoughts and ideas through language or even just sharing one’s files. Yes, the World Wide Web was something traditional media companies could understand — it looked more like television. But it was at the expense of something else.
The introduction of the homepage was important and convenient but also potentially disastrous. Initially, homepages were just a server’s way of indicating what files were there — an easy way of doing what we used to do with text-based searches. So that server in Tel Aviv with all the song lyrics could put up one big page with all the song titles, and I could click on one to call up another page with those lyrics. It made everything easier to see and access. Then, people started putting additional notes and documentation on those webpages — so instead of just a list of songs, there was information about the institution or person who had collected them. And maybe some links to other places that had lyrics files.
Then, beautifully, people started building their own homepages, sharing their achievements, favorite recipes, pictures of their dogs, and Beanie Babies collections. People had their own places online to maintain, receive guests, and call “home.” The creativity that poured out of people onto the web over the next five or 10 years was fantastic. But it also changed something about the net forever.
Just as sedentary living gave rise to terrific civilizational advances, it also domesticated human beings, separated us from nature, gave us territory to defend, and erased our memory of migrating with the seasons. Instead of working with nature and moving around to find the best food or water, we settled in one place and made the land produce what we wanted. As many scholars have noted, this is also likely when we shifted from matriarchal or partnership societies to more male-dominated ones.
Likewise, the net’s emphasis on place and permanence gave rise to all those metrics of the attention economy, such as eyeball hours, click counts, stickiness, and intellectual property. A land grab of domain names served as an appropriate activity for this new “digital frontier” metaphor of settlements and business plans. Instead of surfing the net, we were staking our claims.
The web doesn’t have to go away. It’s not all bad. It brought billions online who may never have felt safe or secure in the untethered, ethereal realm we used to call the internet. And it has created ways for countless writers, artists, and scholars to present themselves and their work in a context they develop quite independently. But it’s not the only way to play out here.
As I look at the activities to which young people, in particular, are gravitating—from TikTok to all those new audio room apps—I am seeing more comfort for the temporary, itinerant, placelessness of old-school networking. This is likely a healthy trend, particularly in a world where many of the places people have been counting on are likely to change. The holiest first five books of the Bible for Jews — the Torah—end before the Israelites reach Canaan. The story leaves them out in the desert having escaped from Egypt but not yet having set up shop in the “promised land.” I always took this as a hint for how life really works. We can build foundations and pretend we own a place, but none of that possession is durable.
Online and off, we are forever nomads.