Above: In 1995, the Mercury website was quite flash, and I recall seeing the 1996 Sable on there, as a transparent GIF, and being impressed. Unfortunately, that predates the Internet Archive, so there’s no record of that incarnation of the site. This press photo will have to do to remind me of that moment almost 30 years ago.
If we are without limits, then we flock to the places that make us happy. And once upon a time, the web was that place: largely unencumbered by politics and fraudsters, many of us who were here early saw it as an opportunity to feel connected to the rest of humankind, a chance to learn from each other, and a place where we could share our knowledge. To do things where we might otherwise have been limited. This was a level playing field where we might get noticed because of merit, not because of how much money we had.
Websites were fun to explore. There were crap ones then, too, so this isn’t tainted by rose-coloured glasses. But, for the most part, you’d find the good ones and revisit them, and, before there were decent search engines, it was a bit more of a gamble. However, humans have a way of finding the good stuff. And that good stuff made us happy, fulfilled, educated, thoughtful; but as I remember it, they were largely positive emotions. You didn’t start fuming or feel a pull to respond to some idiot because they wrote something preposterous on a forum with which you disagreed, because there weren’t many common fora. You’d live and let live. Time was precious, so you moved on.
You’d think time was less precious today given how much of it we give to social media—or, even worse, corporate social media, where we enrich the very people that most of us proclaim we hate or disapprove of. I don’t need to talk about where we are: we all know this. We live it. We see it around us online, and we see the consequences of it, be it the parliamentary protests in New Zealand or the recent riots fuelled by Lone Skum’s OnlyKlans and the racist minions who reside there.
Those early websites were good because those of us who made them invested our time and effort into coding them, or developing a means by which we could enter the written word easily and get them out to the world. Today, that investment is hardly necessary for social media, but then, we don’t hold those sites in high esteem.
And here’s my point: in an age of the enshittification of Big Tech (and not-so-big membership-driven sites), wouldn’t we value the things that look like someone had put greater effort into? Is it time, therefore, for print to become the medium of authority or leisure again, because of the effort invested by someone to get it produced?
Printing has changed, too—on-demand is far cheaper today than it ever has been—but there’s still effort in getting the words, subediting and editing them, laying them out, sourcing images, and organizing the printing. It’s not fleeting. It’s an investment not dissimilar to the first websites’. If the web is no longer a credible place—thanks to bots, LLMs, and idiocy it isn’t—then wouldn’t we go to a medium that looked nice with credible information? While there are bot-written books, humans still write the overwhelming majority of them, and those are the ones that surface. The web isn’t a meritocratic medium; it’s where big money prevails now. Print might still be pricey, but it’s looking like a more realistic medium where the good stuff appears and the bad stuff is buried. Our words might not travel at the speed of light or whatever connection you have; but they might be more considered, shared with good motives, and accepted with open minds.
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