Internet Nostalgia

Welcome to part 11 of our Internet Nostalgia series, which looks back at phenomena that captured the internet’s imagination and attention for a fleeting moment and then vanished as everyone moved on to something else. This series looks back at those olden times and what they told us about the internet and ourselves. If you have a suggested topic, email me at williamfleitch@yahoo.com. Last week, we looked at the Ice Bucket Challenge. This week: Boaty McBoatface.

Date: March 2016.

The story: The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is a perfectly normal, rather boring U.K. organization that funds scientific endeavors and…

The day after my wife delivered our first baby, a photographer knocked on the door of our hospital room and offered to take pictures. We were sleep-deprived, dazed from the realization that everything we once considered “normal” had just been smashed with a sledgehammer, and emotionally speaking, we were puddles of liquid. Of course, we let her in.

Later on, when I looked over the terms of service on the photographer’s company-issued iPad, I noticed that one of the default checked boxes authorized it to use the photos in online marketing materials. Without hesitating, I unchecked it and told the…

Last year, we marked the web’s birthday just one day after the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 crisis a pandemic. In the 12 months since, the web — like so many of us — has been tested like never before. Today, as the web turns 32, it has proven to be a lifeline that allows us to adapt and carry on.

Now, as we repair and rebuild, we have an opportunity to reimagine our world and create something better. The web’s power to catalyze change can and must help shape the world we want.

Across the globe, young people…

Over the years, Mia Lipsit has innovated a number of tech workarounds to avoid buying a smartphone: She’s hacked her Kindle Fire to download Google Play (so she can use the Whole Foods app), listens to podcasts on an old iPod, and stays in touch with friends using a flip phone.

But in October, the fiftysomething New York City resident realized her days of smartphone-free living are coming to an end. That’s when Verizon customer service informed her that, beginning January 1, her simple cellphone would be rendered useless by the sunsetting of 3G.

“It’s the end of an era,”…

2020 was a big year for the internet. As Covid-19 spread worldwide and many countries descended into monthslong lockdowns, much of daily life moved online. Racial justice, mass surveillance, and America’s contentious elections took center stage, too — both online and off. Each year, the Mozilla Foundation takes the internet’s vital signs and publishes a report on its health. This year, it’s not looking good.

If you feel like you were online all the time in 2020, you’re not alone. According to the Foundation, use of the Firefox browser (a proxy for overall internet use) increased almost 15% overnight as…

When Amazon Web Services decided to stop hosting the alt-right social network Parler last week following the insurrection at the Capitol, it looked like the site was doomed to go offline.

Migrating an app successfully between cloud providers, and ensuring it works on the other side as expected, is hard enough. But moving the vast amounts of data associated with a social network (likely hundreds of terabytes of information) would be agonizingly slow, taking far longer than the 24-hour warning Amazon gave Parler.

Unfortunately for Parler, virtually every other vendor was ditching them as well. With cloud providers rejecting them…

It’s hard to imagine the internet without Wikipedia. Just like the air we breathe, the definitive digital encyclopedia is the default resource for everything and everyone — from Google’s search bar to undergrad students embarking on research papers. It has more than 6 million entries in English, it is visited hundreds of millions of times per day, and it reflects whatever the world has on its mind: Trending pages this week include Tanya Roberts (R.I.P.), the Netflix drama Bridgerton, and, oh yes, the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

It was also never meant to exist — at least…

Ben Gardiner was a larger-than-life mainstay of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood in the 1980s. He had wavy white hair, big eyebrows, and a bushy beard that took Santa Claus to task. He rarely left the house without his signature pair of coveralls. His voice boomed; when he entered a room, “he was a presence,” his friend Paul Boneberg told OneZero.

Gardiner joined just about every gay organization in the city, organizing mailing lists, hosting meetings, and leading marches. He seemed to work full-time as an activist, piecing together an income through freelance side projects. …