The History of the Internet
The Internet Isn't One Thing — And It Never Was
The internet you use today is already the third or fourth version of itself, and the next one may not look like the internet at all.
The Idea
Most people think of the internet as a single, stable invention — something that arrived, matured, and now simply exists. But the internet has always been a moving target, rebuilt beneath our feet without us noticing. The ARPANET of the 1970s was a closed academic network for resilient military communication. The web of the 1990s — Tim Berners-Lee's linked documents — was layered on top of it, almost by accident, and transformed it from a tool for researchers into a publishing medium for everyone. Then social platforms rewired it again, turning a decentralised web of pages into a handful of centralised feeds. Each transition felt inevitable in hindsight and unimaginable just beforehand. What comes next is contested — genuinely so, not just as marketing debate. Three forces are pulling in different directions. Decentralisation advocates want to rebuild the web on protocols rather than platforms, stripping power from a few corporations and returning it to individuals. AI integration is doing the opposite, collapsing the diversity of the web into single-answer interfaces — you ask, a model responds, the messy plurality of sources disappears. And spatial computing, from augmented reality glasses to persistent digital layers over physical space, threatens to dissolve the screen-based metaphor entirely. These aren't competing products. They're competing visions of what human communication and knowledge-sharing should look like.
In the World
In 2023, a small but significant thing happened to the social web: Mastodon's user count surged past ten million following turmoil at Twitter, and for the first time, millions of ordinary people found themselves confronting a question most had never thought about — which server should I join? It sounds trivial, but it was genuinely disorienting. The entire mental model of a social network as a single place with a single owner suddenly had to be renegotiated. People had to choose a community to belong to, not just a product to sign up for. Most found it confusing. Some found it liberating. The episode was a live demonstration of what decentralisation actually costs and offers. The underlying protocol, ActivityPub, is the same logic Berners-Lee used with the web — anyone can run a server, anyone can connect, no single company controls the whole. But the web succeeded partly because clicking a link never required you to think about infrastructure. Mastodon made infrastructure visible again, and most users weren't ready for that. The lesson wasn't that decentralisation failed — it's that each version of the internet demands a new kind of literacy, and we're usually behind. The next internet will ask things of us we haven't practised yet.
Why It Matters
It's easy to treat the internet as background — infrastructure as neutral as tap water. But every architectural choice baked into a network shapes what's possible on it: who can speak, who can be heard, who profits, who disappears. The shift from open protocols to platform monopolies didn't happen by accident; it happened because convenience reliably beats control, and because most of us never saw it as a choice at all. Understanding that the internet has a history — that it has been redesigned before, and badly, and brilliantly — changes how you read what's coming. When a company announces a new kind of online experience, you can ask: who controls the infrastructure? When AI starts answering your questions directly, you can notice what gets lost when the source disappears. When someone promises decentralisation, you can wonder who will bear the cost of the complexity. None of this requires technical knowledge. It requires recognising that the internet is a designed thing, shaped by choices, and the next version is being designed right now — with or without your attention.
A Question to Ponder
If the internet you use today was shaped by decisions made in the 1990s that nobody voted on, what decisions being made right now will define the version your children inherit — and who is actually making them?
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