LOVE/HATE
The Blockchain Is a Reminder of the Internet’s Failure
The same utopian promises that bloomed during the Internet’s early days are back. Be afraid.
I remember the day I fell in love with the Internet as well as I remember the birth of my children. The summer of 1993; I was a reporter at the alt-weekly San Francisco Bay Guardian and my editor assigned me a story about an anime convention in Oakland, California. I asked the organizer of the conference where I could find some otaku (fanboys) to interview. “They all hang out on the Internet,” he said.
I didn’t have Internet access, but I had a modem and a CompuServe account that I used to exchange emails with my uncle. An hour spent lurking in a CompuServe anime forum sparked a life-changing epiphany. The online world, I realized instantly, was a fantastic reporting tool. I learned more about anime in that hour than I could have in a week spent tracking down interview subjects via landlines. I knew right away that I had to break out of the CompuServe walled garden and start homesteading the wild Internet.
From that day forward, my Rolodex might as well have been carved on cuneiform tablets. Within a week, I had figured out how to use my wife’s University of California, Berkeley student account to telnet and…
