The internet isn’t what it was 15 years ago
It’s a new year and we’re supposed to be full of optimism and joy in January so I feel a little bad starting the year with a post like this. We’re going through what I hope is just a bit of a bad patch. In the last week, we’ve seen some horrific, heartbreaking images coming from Los Angeles and a lot of bizarre decisions affecting things like net neutrality have been made and of course, there's been more MAGA madness. Closer to home, I’ve also just read that Matthew Somerville has been asked by Transport for Londonto take down the live train and bus maps that he’s had on traintimes.org.uk for years**! For those who don’t know, Matthew’s site has provided accessible access to the uk train network timetable for as long as I can remember. It’s a fantastic resource. It's a miserable decision but when you use someone else’s api/data you take a risk for sure, however what upset me was this paragraph in his post explaining the maps takedown.
the internet isn’t what it was 15 years ago, and I can’t be bothered dealing with large organisations removing any semblance of joy from it. I’m sure they won’t care, but I am just too tired.
I’m lucky enough to remember a fun, scrappy internet before big companies and Nazi's moved in where in many ways communities and dancing hamsters came before money, or at least they seemed to, but rose tinted specs and youthful naivety are funny things. I used to actively participate in many groups ranging from digital accessibility, community, design, art and development that are no more. Everything about the web now feels stressful, like it is about followers, view counts, monetisation and ownership. It's all a bit ick. It’s also so much more complicated - you need a framework or tool for everything, everything needs to look like a magazine and, well, in many ways utility has taken a back seat to scrolling through endless, vacuous and now unchecked content. Don’t get me wrong there’s still many pockets of great stuff happening but it feels like we've lost something great. While in many ways we’re entering a new and somewhat scary time for the web (and world), I do think that this is all the natural progression of entropy but it’s also ok to mourn what you had. Perhaps if we knew where we would be in 2025 we would have appreciated what we had more.Perhaps now that many of us are battle wisened (cough) elders of the web, it is the time for us to come together, to weaponise our objections rather than muttering into our lattes and provide the alternatives to take back the web we want. Or and perhaps more realistically, we'll just moan about it on Bluesky.