Netizen
how the 1993 communal internet shaped me
I can relate to the original meaning of this old term that means to be good citizen of the internet.
Wikipedia says a “netizen” is someone who actively contributes to the development of the internet, not for personal gain or profit, but to make the internet a better place.
I’ve been online since 1993. In 1993, the only way to connect a Mac to the internet (unless you were at a university) was to buy a big paper book on TCP/IP networking, to get the floppy disk inside the back cover that had the MacTCP drivers with SLIP and PPP, so you could connect a dial-up modem to your computer.
Imagine what kind of nerds go to that trouble. That’s who was on the internet in 1993.
It was an amazingly helpful place. We used the web, Usenet, FTP, and email mailing lists to share what we knew. All of this was plain text. Images didn’t really come until a year later.
I was running a recording studio at the time, and I couldn’t get my hardware to sync, so I posted my problem in a Usenet forum, and the next day a man from Trinidad taught me how to fix it.
In return, I shared what I had learned about how to copyright your songs, trademark your band name, and get gigs at universities. The U.S. copyright and trademark office was years away from putting their forms online, so I bought a flatbed scanner and scanned their paper forms, sharing them on my website. Wired magazine and many forums pointed to my website as a helpful resource for musicians, since it was the only place online to get these forms and instructions.
There was no advertising, and no talk of money. I met someone who said he wanted to make money online, and I tried to explain to him that that’s not what the internet is about. It’s a free helpful place where everyone contributes and benefits from others’ contributions.
I wasn’t naïve. I’m not trying to sound pure-of-heart. It really was the culture and vibe at that time.
Slowly the culture around me changed, so now it seems I need to explain my strange behavior — why I don’t monetize everything like everyone else. I’m just a product of my place and time. 1993 shaped how I think of the internet, and I’m keepin’ on in that original spirit.
Like picking up trash where you walk, even if the rest of the world is full of litter. You keep doing what you can to make things better.
Now my netizen contribution is to…
answer emails from about 10,000 people per year
run NowNowNow.com, and
keep sharing everything I can on my site.
Original at https://sive.rs/netizen
Fellow survivor of the MacTCP floppy disk era here.
Getting a Mac online in 1993 felt like performing surgery on yourself with instructions written by someone who genuinely hated you. And if the modem handshake sounds finally stopped and it actually worked? You felt like you cracked nuclear codes.
Here’s what that initiation ritual created though: you had to WANT to be there. Which meant only people who wanted to contribute showed up.
The internet didn’t get commercialized. It got colonized. The original operating system was contribution without transaction. Now giving freely isn’t the culture. It’s a countercultural act that most people have to actively resist.
You don’t resist it. You just keep doing what 1993 taught you.
What would change if more people online still thought like netizens?
Man, MacTCP drivers with SLIP and PPP?
I haven’t heard those acronyms in a long time!
And yes, the internet was definitely more friendly and more innocent that today. It was definitely the start of a new medium and we were at the gestational stage.
Hope you’re doing well in New Zealand!