How Web1 became the metaverse | Sarah Wolinsky | TEDxBrentwoodCollegeSchool
I’ve always believed in the importance of establishing the Providence of the things that we assume appeared out of thin air when teaching or learning something new nothing comes from nowhere like who invented the quadratic formula Renee deart I think therefore I solve quadratic equations or which came first s cosine or tangent likely sign a mistranslation of a Sanskrit Treatise from the for Century CE how kind then that the modern classroom has the sum total of human knowledge right at my fingertips and a quick search engine dive into the life of hipparchus or madhava provides an answer to a fleeting question and a quick reprieve for board students who are always just a thumb swipe away from double-checking under their desks that Tik Tok hasn’t disappeared in the last five minutes but that too came from somewhere we weren’t born with Facebook accounts or phones in our hands but when exactly does something change from being sociological a part of our Lives to historical a part of our past there’s an answer to that actually as historians we generally consider something to be historical in nature when it’s over 20 years old in this year alone everything from the spaceship Colombia to SARS to vaping and flash mobs and binge watching and Myspace and forchan will pass from sociological to historical phenomena no longer a fleeting curiosity as as if anyone in The Last 5 Years could have said so social media is now a genuine chapter of Humanity’s history or at least a footnote and if corporations like meta or X are to be believed then the metaverse is the title of the next episode The metaverse this persistent online virtual world marketed to us as one part Ready Player one one part World of Warcraft all parts the thing we have to go and do right now often called Web three which begs the question if the metaverse is web three then what on Earth happened to web one and web two it’s an odd question to answer in retrospect because I was there I don’t know if it’s just a truism about life in general or a stereotype of the millennial generation but it really struck me when I hit adulthood that life is continuous there’s no sharp break between your childhood and your adulthood just these slow gradual changes over time that have you looking back one day saying huh nobody owns a VHS player anymore and the Nintendo Wii is considered a retro console and the tagachi is being sold to me through Nostalgia and Pokemon X just turned 10 years old and you’d think at this point in my teaching career I’d be okay with the fact that not everyone knows what I know but I turn as I do in these moments to a concept established by the webcomic xkcd called the lucky 10,000 let’s agree that we’re all born knowing nothing but also accept that there are things that quote unquote everyone knows like what the web was in that case there must be on statistical average about 10,000 people learning that fact every day and how lucky are you to get to sit in a stuffy theater on a Saturday morning and learn that the nebulous cloud in the metal rectangle in your pocket has a history of its own the internet was born as far as its Father Tim burner’s Lee is concerned in or around Christmas Day 1990 Sir Isaac Newton’s birthday the Berlin Wall had just finished falling and out of the ashes of the old world a new one was born the first web browser was coded and the first web page was published the personal computer as a household item at the time was not super out of the ordinary and people who could afford it could hook their computers up to a phone line and dial in literally to the worldwide web this was web One tech saavi folks professionals who could afford it logging on to the internet for an hour or so a day so long as no one picked up the phone reaching out to each other in a new professional medium I must have been around three or four years old when I was moved out of the nursery into my old grownup or my own grown-up bedroom the nursery had a phone line and the most outlets in the house so I was literally displaced by the Internet it’s a bizarre cultural Touchstone that I recall every night in my childhood falling asleep to the sound of a dialup modem connecting it’s this high pitched screeching sound that really can’t be replicated or explained but for many people is remembered with a sense of fondness for a time that’s Long Gone But as time is want to do people got older and as things are want to do stuff got cheaper the internet became more reliable easier to install and access as the television and automobile before it it went from an expensive curiosity to a household necessity the children of professionals discovered the internet not as a professional space I was 8 years old but rather as a hangout a hobby a place to go and crucially we discovered that the internet was a place without any adult supervision a place to go and do weird things and share weird stuff because there were no rules there were no laws and no one was watching us and no one could tell us no this was web 1.5 a Lial space in the early to mid 2000s you’d come home from school and log on to the internet to go and write on a bulletin board about your thoughts on the most recent episode of Dragon Ball Z and then go and re-watch an episode of Potter Puppet Pals and then email your friend a gift of a dancing baby because we were told it was a meme and you’re supposed to share memes and I don’t know what a meme is but sure because of limitations of speed and access at the time the medium of choice was the image text the web comic handmade flash animations the weirdo the weirder it was the better and it was so weird and at the time we joked with one another that if web one was us talking to one another on the internet and web 1.5 was us sharing with each other on the internet then whatever came next would be when we started talking to the internet and then after that when the internet started talking back at us but what even would that be but the future always arrives quietly you don’t realize it’s Dawn until the sun is already over the horizon in the mid to late 2000s it became a thing to start a web diary a web blog or a Blog for short hosted on a website like Weebly or MSN spaces or Myspace to share the mundanities of your day-to-day life with friends and family and anyone who stumbled across your page what was originally buil to us as a social networking service in blogging soon began to dominate the internet we called it the social medium of the internet or later social media web 2 and this person-to-person discourse really started to dominate online spaces and then in June of my first year of University I got pressured into making a Facebook account because it was this cool thing that all the young people was doing and I had to get in now I had my own blog at the time hosted on a website called live Journal when I was in high school I joined a fan forum for this anime called one piece that was hosted by the company dumming it at the time but when that company lost the license and folded the website went dark so we packed up and moved on to a different form we hosted our elves and when we couldn’t afford that we packed up and moved on again to a website called live Journal where your account would give you a Blog but also allow you to join Community spaces kind of as you were there was this profound shift when you went from a bulletin board to a social networking site all of the sudden you could no longer reinvent yourself you no longer got to reinvent yourself every time you went somewhere new yourself became persistent online the first and last rule of the internet used to be never use your real name but now that was the internet and for me the real change came when live Journal was bought and seemingly purged overnight one day the company decided they didn’t want to host it anymore and then it was gone and such a thing was pretty common place in late web web 1.5 early web 2 uh hosts would fail to pay their monthly hosting fee or decide that they had lost interest in it there were no monetization options in the early internet not a lot of ads and creating an account was free because they didn’t know how to take your credit card social networking Services weren’t valuable enough to save when they went under must have been around 2010 when live Journal disappeared and the choice of where to go next was either Tumblr or Twitter and you know how these things go but then something again seems to have shifted particularly in the last five years web 2 has given way to web 2.5 algorithmically dominated AI gener at corporate in nature the monetization has arrived think of the carefully constructed YouTube thumbnail think of drop shipped fast fashion think of arguments between strangers in an Instagram ad for powdered greens I’ve heard web 2.5 described as junked slowly filling up with AI generated sludge for the purposes of directing our attention towards an ad or to purchase a product and I’m not sure I like the direction it’s gone think of that 30 or 40 title on a a teu ad for a cheap product that’s meant to search engine optimize your attention onto that product think of how everything these days seem to be called content think about how Facebook used to be a great place for connecting with friends and family and organizing events and these days just seems to be a bunch of clickbait links to websites filled with ads stolen from Reddit that to me is web 2.5 and out of this bizarre cultural landscape we’re told that web 3 is ready we’re going to cut our physical tether and move on to the metaverse but the metaverse seems to be stalling at the gates every attempt to make it is just second life but worse a bad video game where the avatars don’t have any feet and it doesn’t matter how many tens of billions of dollars they throw at it there just doesn’t seem to be a lot of interest I think what happened is we all kind of picked up particularly after what happened in March of 2020 when we moved our schools onto Zoom that the internet as it is right now is just not a great place to live see the problem to me is that the internet can’t be forced to move in a certain direction we think of it as Tech and we imagine its change as technological change driven by innovators and engineers and that’s true in a sense but the internet is a social space it’s a social sphere and probably the greatest social experiment of all time and the thing about people in social situations is that we’re contrary by Nature if you tell us to do something there’s the instinct to resist if you create Authority there’s the instinct to rebel and if you tell me to buy a plot of land in the metaverse I will buy a cabin in the woods don’t sell me the internet I am already there now I am only one person and I am not even the most dialed in I’m just a high school math teacher I can stand up here in front of you and tell you that web 3 won’t be the metaverse and in 10 years I might look like an absolute fool but I can’t predict the future anymore than I can sell it to you nor can I buy back the past the internet of my childhood as strange and wonderful a place as it was is gone it was deleted and it is never coming back but as a history Professor once explained to me if we know our past we can understand our present and if we understand the present we can decide where we’re going the internet didn’t always look like this and it doesn’t have to look like like this for the vast majority of its life it was determined by its end users people like you or I putting stuff out there because we could because quite frankly right now the Internet isn’t really a hobby it’s not really a hangout sometimes I feel like it isn’t even all that fun and if the internet right now isn’t that fun maybe it’s time to ask ourselves what could we make of it instead thank you
Much buzz has been generated, both positive and negative, around Web3 – the metaverse – often marketed as one part World of Warcraft, one part Ready Player One, all parts minted on the blockchain in finite quantities and available for purchase for a limited time only. But if there is a third of something, there must be a first and second; what, exactly, were Web1 and Web2, and where did they go? What were the hallmarks of the early internet, and what drove it to become the thing we know and love (?) today? All things have a history, and charting that narrative is a vital part in understanding its impact on our lives and its future. And how lucky are you, to get to sit in a theatre or in front of a livestream on a Saturday morning and learn that the nebulous cloud in the metal rectangle in your pocket has a history of its own? As is perhaps stereotypical or at least emblematic of her generation, Sarah meandered about in her young adulthood, searching for the meaning of life or at least a job that could pay rent in Toronto; she picked up a teaching degree with a specialization in outdoor and experiential education and then pivoted into a Masters of History where she worked with some of the first historians of the internet, focusing on Japanese-American transculturation in online fandom spaces in the late 90s and early 2000s. The obvious next step in all of this was, of course, to move to the West Coast to teach high school math and houseparent 80 teenage boys, who were not quite as dazzled as she had hoped by her encyclopedic knowledge of Barbie animated films. If she had taken a slightly different path in 2003, she may have ended up a professional DOTA player, a fact which troubles her greatly. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
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