Did the Internet's Pioneers Know What They Were Building?
Vint Cerf's answer to whether the pioneers knew what they were unleashing is the most honest one on record: "we didn't," he says, and it's also not honest to claim they had no idea what they'd done. This episode traces how that ambiguity played out — from TCP/IP's deliberate indifference to what it carried, to the counterculture compost that produced the WELL, to a global internet cafe boom that peaked at over 200,000 licensed cafes in China alone. Then the hard part: one camp argues platformization killed internet culture outright, another finds 88% of young people insisting subcultures…
The skinny
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