Tears in the Rain

The slow death of web 1.0

I can remember the first time I ever saw the ‘internet’, it was around my brother-in-law’s house, up in his bedroom. He pointed over at his computer on his desk, the monitor the size of an air conditioning unit, but with a screen size as big as a paperback novel, the guts of the thing, its brain, churning away under his desk as silently as a two-stroke outboard engine. “That’s the internet,” he said, pointing at what looked like a black screen, which it was, as colour screens were not a thing. I looked closer, and saw on the black screen some text, which I guess must have been someone writing something somewhere, but probably not something interesting, and probably just about the internet. “Oh,” I said, not realising how it would rock our world.

The next time, in another bedroom, someone else, another geek, showed me another screen, this one a little bigger, as it was a few years later. I don’t think browsers had been invented yet, but I remember him telling me, “this is where you can get porn”, which did pique my interest, for a second, but no more, as porn was still really analogue back then, in top-shelf magazines of VHS cassettes. What use was computer porn? Little did I know that little feature would be like pouring a trillion gallons of high-octane fuel on an ember (I once read that 70% of all internet traffic was porn-related, and now I expect the other 30% is shopping).

The browser gave idiots access to the internet, like how a bumper car pedal allows a child to drive. I guess I got my first internet connection in the late 90s, long before I owned a phone, and it was an amazing time (I was right about porn though, and it still needed high-speed broadband to really work, otherwise you’d be sat waiting an hour for some scan to download a line of pixels a minute). Before the internet and email, when I started writing for magazines, you’d put your doc on a floppy disk and post it to your editor, or print it out and fax it. How crazy is that?

This was web 1.0, and it was an amazing time, as all of a sudden, the thing was awash with enthusiastic people just writing, writing, writing. Climbing information went from something you gleaned from a limited number of books and magazines (I can still feel the thrill of coming across old copies of the US mag Climbing), as well as old magazines, like Mountain. Now, you suddenly had websites where all sorts of information could be shared, trip reports, gear reviews, technical information, beta, and lots of chat. It was truly a mind-expanding time in human history, before web 2.0, when it all just became about selling (selling stuff, or selling yourself, mostly your soul), oh, and high-speed internet, which made porn addicts of most men (a woman friend of mine once said that “men either have no porn mags, or a wardrobe full”, but the web allowed everyone to have a porn stash the size of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark).

I was part of this web 1.0, with my website psychovertical.com, in which I placed all the writing I’d done so far, mostly for magazines. At one point, it was getting tens of thousands of visitors a day, as there were probably fewer than ten such websites online like that, but not being able to commercialise it, what did it matter to me?

Yes, web 2.0 fucked it all up, it was a crime what happened, and it killed the internet (in my opinion), as it just commodified everything, meaning, if it couldn’t be sold, or used to make money, it was worthless. Really, the web of today, that gleaming, but empty, mall, was built over the top of the old internet, that greatest library of things ever built.

Thirty years later, I’ve started to notice something that’s sad about the internet. Not long ago, when you were researching something really niche and nerdy and obscure, let’s take the Japanese ‘Or’ sculling oar, you’d find several old forum posts, down in the sub basement of that long-buried library, that would link to websites, that had been pilled up in dusty cardboard boxes and forgotten, but which would review – often in day glow, pre-CSS, HTML – a master’s degree level of knowledge and detail, something so deep with understanding, that no publisher would ever have reproduced it for print. It was a treasure, knowledge to pass onto the ages, but a treasure of nothing more than bits on a server.

And so, what I find more and more, is I find some link, or go back to some page that I knew was full of great information, be that on climbing or something else, and I find it’s just gone, a dead link, all that knowledge and work and care, just gone “lost in time, like tears in rain”.

If you have a dead link, at least you can attempt to bring it back from the dead via the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org), but without that link, it’s not even a memory.

What’s saddest of all about these links, is being thirty years old, most of the authors, who frankly came from an age where sharing was a duty, not a play, a grift, or a closing, are probably long dead, and the direct debits for hosting or domain names have simply run out, as will mine one day, everything you’ve ever posted, each comment, video, podcast, essay, all to be wiped one day.

I suppose, before the internet, you had magazines, and these were also equally impermanent, unless kept pristine in Mylar. Some magazines are treasured, but not many, and most are either landfill food or are soon to be served.

Books are a little better, but not much, and although they might live a hundred years, most will turn to dust, most much sooner than that, as they become outdated and irrelevant, especially to future generations who would view reading a book in the same way as we’d view using a copper to wash our clothes.

Maybe the death of words and knowledge, its loss, is really no different from the death of everything all around us, that it’s best not to dwell on it, or mourn, but just to enjoy it while you can, that nothing is permanent or everlasting, not the pyramids of Giza, the sun at the centre of our galaxy, or the universe itself.

All you can do is save what you can