As #JohnHodgman 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

2/

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 #TheWELL 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/

3/

Now that I'm 52, I've learned to recognize this dynamic, from the #EternalSeptember:

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 over what would happen when the net got a normie-friendly GUI:

https://www.dejavu.org/1993win.htm

And yeah, I've done it too, explaining "Why I won’t buy an #iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either)":

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

4/

But there's a key difference between my own warnings about the #enshittification that new "user friendly" technologies would engender and all those other AARP members' complaints: they were wrong, and I was right.

As @tveastman reminded us, the internet really *was* better, back before it became "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text of the other four":

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

5/

The underlying pathology of that enshittification wasn't the UI, or whether it involved an app store. As the #Luddites knew, the important thing about a technology isn't what it *does*, but who it does it *for* and who it does it *to*:

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

The problem wasn't which technology we used. There is nothing inherent about touchscreens that makes them into prisons that trap users, rather than walled gardens that protect them.

6/

It wasn't the wrong tech, it wasn't the wrong people: it was the wrong *rules*. After all, the Apple ][+ went on sale the year #RonaldReagan hit the campaign trail. Consumer tech was the first industry born after #antitrust was dismantled, and it created the modern monopoly playbook: buying and merging with competitors. The resulting unity of purpose and anticompetitive profit margins allowed tech to capture its regulators and secure favorable court and legislative outcomes.

8/

The simultaneous drawdown of antitrust enforcement and growth of tech meant that tech's long-standing cycle of renewal was ended. Tech companies that owed their existence to their ability to reverse-engineer incumbent companies' products and make #interoperable replacements and add-ons were able to ban anyone else from doing unto them as they did unto the giants that came before them:

https://doctorow.medium.com/let-the-platforms-burn-6fb3e6c0d980

9/

The pirates became admirals, and set about creating a "#FelonyContemptOfBusinessModel":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/03/painful-burning-dribble/#law-of-intended-consequences

They changed the rules to ensure that they could "disrupt" anyone they chose, but could themselves mobilize the full might of the US government to prevent anyone from disrupting *them*:

https://locusmag.com/2019/01/cory-doctorow-disruption-for-thee-but-not-for-me/

10/

The old, good internet was the net we made while tech was still realizing the new anticompetitive powers it had at its disposal, and it disappeared because every administration, R and D, from Reagan to Trump, yanked more Jenga blocks out of the antitrust tower.

In other words: the old, good internet was always doomed, because it was being frantically built in an contracting zone of #FreedomToTinker, where technologies could be operated by and for the people who used them.

11/

Today, the #Biden administration has ushered in a new era of antitrust renewal, planting the seeds of a #disenshittification movement that will tame corporate power rather than nurturing it:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

In other words, we are living in the first days of a better nation.

In other words, rather than restoring the old, good internet, we should build a *#NewGoodInternet*.

12/