This dismissive attitude pervaded a meeting I had with the top leaders of ABC in 1989. I was there to make a presentation to the corner-office crowd about this “Internet Stuff.” To their credit, the executives of ABC realized something was happening. ABC was one of the top three mightiest television networks in the world; the internet at that time was a mere mosquito in comparison. But people living on the internet (like me) were saying it could disrupt their business. Still, nothing I could tell them would convince them that the internet was not marginal, not just typing, and, most emphatically, not just teenage boys. But all the sharing, all the free stuff seemed too impossible to business executives. Stephen Weiswasser, a senior VP at ABC, delivered the ultimate put-down: “The Internet will be the CB radio of the ’90s,” he told me, a charge he later repeated to the press. Weiswasser summed up ABC’s argument for ignoring the new medium: “You aren’t going to turn passive consumers into active trollers on the internet.”
I was shown the door. But I offered one tip before I left. “Look,” I said. “I happen to know that the address abc.com has not been registered. Go down to your basement, find your most technical computer geek, and have him register abc.com immediately. Don’t even think about it. It will be a good thing to do.” They thanked me vacantly. I checked a week later. The domain was still unregistered.
While it is easy to smile at the sleepwalkers in TV land, they were not the only ones who had trouble imagining an alternative to couch potatoes. Wired magazine did too. I was a co–founding editor of Wired, and when I recently reexamined issues of Wired from the early 1990s (issues that I’d proudly edited), I was surprised to see them touting a future of high production-value content—5,000 always-on channels and virtual reality, with a sprinkling of bits of the Library of Congress. In fact, Wired offered a vision nearly identical to that of internet wannabes in the broadcast, publishing, software, and movie industries, like ABC. In this official future, the web was basically TV that worked. With a few clicks you could choose any of 5,000 channels of relevant material to browse, study, or watch, instead of the TV era’s five channels. You could jack into any channel you wanted from “all sports all the time” to the saltwater aquarium channel. The only uncertainty was, who would program it all? Wired looked forward to a constellation of new media upstarts like Nintendo and Yahoo! creating the content, not old-media dinosaurs like ABC.
Problem was, content was expensive to produce, and 5,000 channels of it would be 5,000 times as costly. No company was rich enough, no industry large enough to carry off such an enterprise. The great telecom companies, which were supposed to wire up the digital revolution, were paralyzed by the uncertainties of funding the net. In June 1994, David Quinn of British Telecom admitted to a conference of software publishers, “I’m not sure how you’d make money out of the internet.” The immense sums of money supposedly required to fill the net with content sent many technocritics into a tizzy. They were deeply concerned that cyberspace would become cyburbia—privately owned and operated.
The fear of commercialization was strongest among hard-core programmers who were actually building the web: the coders, Unix weenies, and selfless volunteer IT folk who kept the ad hoc network running. The techy administrators thought of their work as noble, a gift to humanity. They saw the internet as an open commons, not to be undone by greed or commercialization. It’s hard to believe now, but until 1991 commercial enterprise on the internet was strictly prohibited as an unacceptable use. There was no selling, no ads. In the eyes of the National Science Foundation (which ran the internet backbone), the internet was funded for research, not commerce. In what seems remarkable naiveté now, the rules favored public institutions and forbade “extensive use for private or personal business.” In the mid-1980s I was involved in shaping the WELL, an early text-only online system. We struggled to connect our private WELL network to the emerging internet because we were thwarted, in part, by the NSF’s “acceptable use” policy. The WELL couldn’t prove its users would not conduct commercial business on the internet, so we were not allowed to connect. We were all really blind to what was becoming.
This anticommercial attitude prevailed even in the offices of Wired. In 1994, during the first design meetings for Wired’s embryonic website, HotWired, our programmers were upset that the innovation we were cooking up—the first ever click-through ad banner—subverted the great social potential of this new territory. They felt the web was hardly out of diapers, and already they were being asked to blight it with billboards and commercials. But prohibiting the flow of money within this emerging parallel civilization was crazy. Money in cyberspace was inevitable.
That was a small misperception compared with the bigger story we all missed.
Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the web’s core idea—hyperlinked pages—way back in 1945, but the first person to try to build out the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson, who envisioned his own scheme in 1965. However, Nelson had little success connecting digital bits on a useful scale, and his efforts were known only to an isolated group of disciples.
At the suggestion of a computer-savvy friend, I got in touch with Nelson in 1984, a decade before the first websites. We met in a dark dockside bar in Sausalito, California. He was renting a houseboat nearby and had the air of someone with time on his hands. Folded notes erupted from his pockets and long strips of paper slipped from overstuffed notebooks. Wearing a ballpoint pen on a string around his neck, he told me—way too earnestly for a bar at four o’clock in the afternoon—about his scheme for organizing all the knowledge of humanity. Salvation lay in cutting up three-by-five cards, of which he had plenty.
Although Nelson was polite, charming, and smooth, I was too slow for his fast talk. But I got an aha! from his marvelous notion of hypertext. He was certain that every document in the world should be a footnote to some other document, and computers could make the links between them visible and permanent. This was a new idea at the time. But that was just the beginning. Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, in what he called the “docuverse.” He spoke of “transclusion” and “intertwingularity” as he described the grand utopian benefits of his embedded structure. It was going to save the world from stupidity!
I believed him. Despite his quirks, it was clear to me that a hyperlinked world was inevitable—someday. But as I look back now, after 30 years of living online, what surprises me about the genesis of the web is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush’s vision, and even Nelson’s docuverse, and especially my own expectations. We all missed the big story. Neither old ABC nor startup Yahoo! created the content for 5,000 web channels. Instead billions of users created the content for all the other users. There weren’t 5,000 channels but 500 million channels, all customer generated. The disruption ABC could not imagine was that this “internet stuff” enabled the formerly dismissed passive consumers to become active creators. The revolution launched by the web was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of “sharing” enabled by hyperlinks are now creating a new type of thinking—part human and part machine—found nowhere else on the planet or in history. The web has unleashed a new becoming.