Did the internet feel different in the 90s?

As an accident of fate and timing, I missed the golden era of MySpace.

My older siblings, however, did not.

I remember catching (or begging for) glimpses of their profiles, or those of their friends, and my memories of them are that each felt slightly differnt. There was music and kitschy wallpaper. There was personality.

This stands in stark contrast to Facebook, which felt more like the sterile white surfaces of your local chain coffee shop than the well worn sofa's of a true community space. Not alltogether unpleasant but corporatized.

I don't normally reminisce on Facebook or MySpace, but I recently had the opportunity to participate in the first few sessions of SheFi (major thank you Cielo for sponsoring this participation!) and it got me thinking on concept of community on the internet.

The blockchain is aptly described as a Dark Forest, popularized by the book of the same name by Liu Cixin. A highly adversarial environment-- if a smart contract can be exploited, the certainity of that happening is a matter of when, not if-- survival is dependent on remaining undetected.

This is, of course, a terrible environment to be a beginner in. What's more, a trustless environment is the exact opposite of what is needed for a community to thrive, where identification of the individual is essential.

Communities like SheFi help bridge this gap-- creating onboarding tools and spaces where individuals new to or active in the space can come together.

I haven't drawn any conclusions from these thoughts, but I'm ruminating on the following:

- Does crypto make it easier for us to bring personality back to the internet or harder? NFTs were fun because they were sourveniers from the different corners of the internet you went spulunking in. They were also largely over-hyped but they helped fuel a type of community, I wonder what will come next.

- Software engineering has always had the reputation of being a democratized field. Despite being a largely self-taught engineer, I only partially agree with this. There's obvious privilege required in being able to onboard oneself to any topic including time and resources that are both a luxury. Add on top of that an inherently adversarial development environment... I think projects like SheFi are essential to bringing any real kind of diversity into the space/ making onboarding actually accessible.

- Crypto projects feel like they have personality in a way that a lot of other corproate projects dont. Maybe this is clever VCs trying to make us feel fuzzy inside.

- We're now in the era of generalized AI. I often hear people contrast the cities of Europe-- built to a human scale-- with New York, which was largely built during and after the industrial age. Maybe the internet will eventually have these two very different feeling spheres as well-- those built before generalized AI and those built after. The peak of crypto will largely be built during the "after" portion of this.