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Comment by Baeocystin | Hacker News Reader

Nah man. That kind of pervasive optimism truly was part of the zeitgeist. Adults felt it as well.

Unfortunately, that worldview died with 9/11.

I kinda miss when the internet was a small part of my life and felt big, instead of being a big part of my life and feeling small.

As a 90s teenager myself your comments struck a chord. Very well articulated.

Thanks.

I don't know how much the internet changed or I changed. Finding some niche forums on Prodigy (so not even the internet) and talking to a small group of people felt a lot different than just going to reddit and finding a forum for whatever random thing I'm looking up.

> Unfortunately, that worldview died with 9/11.

Did it? I personally feel the pervasive optimism lived on in the zeitgeist until about 2015 or 2016. And to be clear, I'm not saying that Trump being elected is what ended it; rather, I believe it was the hyper-polarization (already being talked about by then) of that election that really quashed it.

Everyone's different but I think I felt like the increasing polish and commercialization of the web killed it slowly. And that makes sense to an extent, as there was money to be made people would invest more (and have entire teams) in making ad-optimised content instead of just having one person cranking out homestarrunner or thebestpageintheuniverse or what have you.

Also, the closing of open systems. This whole idea of "whatsapp me or slack me or discord me" - that's ridiculous! It's _obvious_ that I should be able to use whatever client I like to talk to people, just like I did with gaim and AIM and MSN messenger and ICQ etc. etc. Now we're perilously close to the point where websites will just block you if you're not logged in (conveniently via Google using their browser, of course! Firefox users can get lost.) I can even get the need for it as AI makes bots increasingly good, but it sucks.

We still have https://search.marginalia.nu/ at least.

Edit: Also re: open systems - we went from default-open with desktop computers to default-closed on phones. Now you and your work exist at the pleasure of and for the purpose of enriching Apple and Google. Android SHOULD be something you can run and do with as you please, but of course you can't if you want to be able to do things like use your banking app.

Years before 2015 “the internet” for most people had been replaced by “social media” and its was pretty well understood that big tech companies now had a means and motivation to monetize our most toxic traits.

The optimism about the internet’s influence peaked when things were highly decentralized with personal websites, mailing lists, web rings, etc. it was hard to imagine an entity big enough that could manipulate “all of the internet”.

Eventually centralizing forces like google/yahoo/myspace made things much more usable, for a while, until their hacker-ethos were overtaken by an MBA-ethos.

I’m not sure that positivity died with 9/11, but I can look back and recall a large number of people struggling after the 2008 crisis, and whole economies never entirely recovering, and so optimism had taken some hard knocks well before 2015/2016.

Remember how one of the early episodes of Portlandia around 2012 waxed nostalgic about the 1990s as a sunnier time?

The dream of the 90's is alive in Portland....

For me and my cohort (I'm in my early 50s now), yes, absolutely. Again, from my point of view, things got even worse post 2008, with the rise of mobile and social media. The tech world specifically evolved in directions dramatically opposed to the pro-human mood of the 90's towards a much more predatory stance.

Interesting, based on the replies here, maybe it's a somewhat generational thing. I was born in 89, so I remember 9/11 when it happened and the wars that followed, but it wasn't something that I put that much thought into. Similarly, I was barely out of high school and into college in 2008. My main concern was playing video games with my friends and trying to come up with excuses to skip my Minnesota History class.

I'm sure generational differences are a big part of it. I was already in the workforce by the mid 90's, and honestly, it was such an optimistic time, for everyone. Lots of hope for the future. I wish I could share what it was like. It was a remarkable, special time, and even though we thought we knew it, we didn't really appreciate what the actual special aspects were until long after the fact.

>that worldview died with 9/11

I don't think it did. The utopian optimism of tech changing the world for the better epitomized much of the 2000s and 2010s. Neither did the author of the featured article, which is referring to the current day as the death of tech utopianism, even though I don't think they argued this point well, considering that they simply pointed towards a selection of high profile examples of right wing members in tech as evidence of the demise of utopian optimism overall.

Funny, I thought it continued a while and died with social media.

Social media was a very strong nail in the coffin, no argument there. But the 90's optimism absolutely died that day.

90s scifi had some penetrating foresight tho... I feel like we're inching closer to Neuromancer's universe as the war festers on in Ukraine, Japan keeps on roboticizing and somehow a mixture of corporate and populist right wing captures the electorates worldwide.

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