-
PCs
-
The Web
-
Linux and Open Source
-
Big Players: Lotus, Apple, Microsoft, Netscape, W3C
In the late 1990s, at the tail end of the PC revolution, personal computers had become a mainstay of middle class households and, thanks to the efforts of companies like AOL, many of those personal computers were connected to the internet through dialup modems. A generation of applications arose that were aimed at home users operating peer to peer nodes to share files and computing capacity. These applications were called peer to peer because they allowed any computer to connect with other computers on the network [todo: research background of the term]. They allowed millions of PCs around the world to function as a network of peers, exchanging information among themselves without relying on any central server. The most well-known of these peer to peer applications was Napster, which allowed anyone to share the contents of their hard drive with the rest of the internet, and to explore the files shared by anyone else on the network. This introduced new patterns of social interaction, where you could encounter people, anyone anywhere in the world, by means of the information they exposed from their PCs. Though Napster usage wasn’t limited to sharing mp3 files [todo: check this] the dominant usage of Napster focused on the exchange of music. People published personal catalogs of recordings and regularly explored each others’ catalogs.
All of this happened on a network where the average connection speed was [todo: get connectivity speeds from late 90s] and most computers had barely [todo: get median hard drive & RAM capacity from late 90s] MB of storage and XX MB of RAM. It took ?? minutes to download an average mp3. Downloading a feature-length film took ?? hours, if you even had enough capacity to store it (1 GB of storage cost roughly $??)
Observation: The confusion, stigma, poster-child lawsuits, cultural battles and new legislation that arose in response to Napster’s perceived threat to copyright prevented mainstream culture from experiencing and observing the healthy patterns arising from peer to peer interactions. Points of friction that arose on those networks were harbingers of threats that we would experience on a massive scale 15-20 years later. Within a few years an early form of civics began to emerge on these peer to peer networks -- social structures specifically aimed at ensuring the quality of content on the web, making it safer to participate in this social web, and removing bad actors from the system.
Peer to peer networks like Napster inherently require hyper-awareness of where you get information from. In that era, it took time to download an mp3. Nobody wanted to wait for that download to complete, only to discover that the source file was corrupt, incorrectly named or, worse, loaded with viruses and other malware. Natural reputation systems developed, where people concocted various forms of social signals, virtue signaling, and barriers to entry that allowed participants in the network to operate with relative assurances of quality and safety. Myriad groups established quality guidelines, membership requirements, enforcement procedures, etc. These governance structures were an early form of civics for the social web. The peer to peer nature fo these networks forced early adopters to grapple with issues of quality control, trusted sources, and controlling malicious actors.
When the DMCA triggered the peer to peer winter, it drove web-based social activity into centralized, cloud-based platforms where people spent a decade operating under the blissfully ignorant assumption that the platform operators would solve these problems for them. As the number of internet users grew from tens of millions to billions those muscles atrophied, leaving the population exposed and ill-equipped to handle the crisis of authority that crashed into the popular consciousness in 2016.
By driving peer to peer technologies out of the mainstream and triggering the peer to peer winter, we denied ourselves an opportunity to grapple with those
Applications like SETI@home allowed anyone to contribute to massive grid computing efforts. [another example] but t