Today’s links Podcasting “Enshitternet”: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Podcasting “Enshitternet” (permalink) This week on my podcast, I read “Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet,” my recent Medium column about building a better internet: https://doctorow.medium.com/enshitternet-c1d4252e5c6b As John Hodgman is fond of reminding us, “nostalgia is a toxic impulse.” It is easy for an old net.hand like me to fall into the trap of shaking his fist at the cloud. Having been on the other side of that dynamic, I can tell you it’s no fun. When I got on BBSes in the early 1980s, there was an omnipresent chorus of grumps insisting that the move from honest acoustic couplers to decadent modems was the end of the Golden Age of telecommunications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler When I got on Usenet shortly thereafter, the Unix Greybeard set never passed up an opportunity to tell us newcomers that the Fidonet-Usenet bridge allowed the barbarian hordes to overwhelm their Athenian marketplace of ideas: https://technicshistory.com/2020/06/25/the-era-of-fragmentation-part-4-the-anarchists/ When I joined The WELL in the late 1980s, I was repeatedly assured that the good times were over, and that we would never see their like again: https://www.well.com/ Now that I’m 52, I’ve learned to recognize this dynamic, from the Eternal September: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September to the moral panic over menuing systems replacing CLIs: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-gatekeepers-fortresses to the culture wars…Pluralistic: Podcasting "Enshitternet" (22 August 2023)