This is a story about the Internet. You’ve heard of it. Maybe you’re sick of hearing about it. Well, get over it. The Net needs you, zine people. You may be the only group on the planet that can prevent the entire experiment from falling completely into the hands of Ted Rogers and the sterilizing forces of the mainstream.
There have been zines on the Net for as long as there have been zines. Used to be they were text-only creations, bearing themselves with the minimalist dignity of the ASCII character set. The earliest e-zines, written back in the days when only computer geeks used computers, were mostly about hacking and science fiction, and tended to pile up on basement BBSs or in odd corners of university computer systems under plain brown file names. Now that everybody and their grandmother has a SLIP account you can find e-zines on damn near anything, and most of the action has moved to the World Wide Web.
The Web was thrown together by some physicists in Switzerland who thought it would be a cool thing to be able to link scientific papers together across the Internet through a universal electronic standard. This is the kind of thing Swiss physicists think is cool. They went public with their standard in January 1992. There were no groovy graphics, no sound clips, no Quicktime movies. Just text with links. Nobody was all that impressed, not even other physicists.
In 1993, a couple of people in Illinois thought it would be a cool thing to lay a graphical point-and-click interface over top of that standard protocol. They whipped up a piece of software called Mosaic to do this, and suddenly people began to take notice. The great Web-rush began.
We are currently in Year Three of the great Web-rush, a year which has seen some disturbing developments. Because technology like the Web is very easy to use it has attracted commercial interests, advertisers and the mainstream media like a turd attracts flies. Trouble is, they don’t have a clue what they want to do or how to go about it. Consider these recent and foreboding omens:
One. Those same people from Illinois relocate to Silicon Valley, crank out a new and improved version of their program called Netscape, take their company public on August 9, 1995 and become instant millionaires without ever actually selling anything. Techno-happy speculators drunk on buzz and the smell of tomorrow’s Microsoft don’t want to know what the Web is for, they just want to get what they can out of it.
Two. The makers of Canada’s premiere newsmagazine, Maclean’s, decide to produce an on-line edition. So do they put it on the Net, where roughly 3 million Canadians could find it cheaply and easily? No. They put it on CompuServe, an American commercial net work which charges about $6.00 an hour for access and has about 100,000 Canadian subscribers. Why? Easier to control and monitor, that’s why. Hard figures to show the advertisers and to hell with the readers.
They have come in force to these electronic shores, well-financed and not particularly interested in what was going on before they arrived. They are millennial colonialists, here to make money. Their first task, as they see it, is to convert the natives t o the religion of consumerism, stamp out their strange pagan practices of free speech and free thought, and make the wilderness safe for commerce.
They tell us the old times are gone, that it shall not be as it was before. They tell us playtime is over, that we must tame the Net in the name of serious business. An article on the future of HTML in September issue of The Computer Paper predicted with a certain amount of glee that the quirky amateur Web site will soon be gone and forgotten as millions of users rush to “professionally” designed sites stuffed with the latest gee-whiz tricks. They say it is time to bring the Net into the mainstream.
Don’t let them get away with it! The worst thing that could possibly happen would be for people to forget that the Net used to be a place where ideas were more important than presentation, to get so comfortable with the idea of an ad on every Web page that an ad-free page seems like a dangerous and untrustworthy anomaly, to be duped into thinking they need a $30,000 Web “solution” when all they want to do is make their voices heard.
The Web needs you, O makers and readers of ‘zines. It needs you to preserve the do-it-yourself anarchy that made the Internet what it is today. Putting a zine on the Web is cheap and easy. It’ll take you about a week to learn. It’ll cost you about 30 cents a day to maintain. On the Web, one guy in his basement has access to the same audience as Time and Wired. Take advantage of this. Do something daring. Startle people. Show some panache. God knows the Globe and Mail Web site isn’t showing any. Publish those rants of indeterminant length and number and oddity. There’s over 30 million people in here. Somebody will read them. If you drop me the URL at [email protected], I’ll read them.
This is a call to arms. It’s time to take your struggle against the bland, grey armies of the mainstream media to a new battlefield, before we all forget that the battlefield ever existed.
Anarchy & Patrimony on the Net