the way we were

 Kottke just (re)posted WWW: The Way We Were (just noticed the acronym pun there) talking about how the show "Halt and Catch Fire" had a Don Draper-esque speech about the nascent potential of the earliest Web, and how it could be just anything.

There was a beautiful and egalitarian time shortly after that - even if you didn't want to pay to host your own website on the "Information Superhighway", "Geocities" was a free or cheap option to hang your shingle and put your stuff at a fixed URL.

But then - as the 2016 article mourns - FB came in and offered trivial sharing your stuff with friends and family, and then Twitter and Instagram rolled in to give you a shot at that ephemeral immortality of "going viral" with bon mots and images, respectively. And suddenly becoming a part of the endless stream made more sense than building your own little island

I know I'm biased. My twenty years of blogging (at my site kirk.is ) has given me an incredibly rich archive, even if its value is mostly just for me. (I can generally retrieve any half-remembered quote, anecdote, personal photo or meme) And the technology of my "side hustle" of Porchfest websites carries more in common with those early-web days - before UI work exploded into an impossibly wide and dense forest of libraries and frameworks.

So much was lost. Geeks used to think a good URL could be forever - and while the Wayback Machine is still fighting that war against entropy, I think the stream is this endless deluge encouraging all but the most stalwart to let stuff just get swept away. And maybe I'm foolish to be hoping for earthly immortality and not embracing the transience of all things. Still, I think we could do better.