Computer Says Maybe

How did the internet become three companies in a trenchcoat? It wasn’t always that way! It used to be fun, and weird, and full of opportunity. To set the scene for the series, we spoke to a stalwart advocate of decentratilsation, Mike Masnick.

This is part one of Nodestar, a three-part series on decentralisation: how the internet started as a wild west of decentralised exploration, got centralised into the hands of a small number of companies, and how the pendulum has begun it’s swing in the other direction.

In this episode Mike Masnick gives us a history of the early internet — starting with what was called the Eternal September, when millions of AOL users flooded the scene, creating a messy, unpredictable, exciting ecosystem of open protocols and terrible UIs.