The internet of today can appear as a monolith, with a culture dominated by platforms owned by big tech giants. In this asynchronous digital scavenger hunt we will tour cybercultural history from the late 1980s through the modern era as a means to understand that the contemporary internet was in no way predetermined. It grew out of a particular set of values and goals that were prioritized over others, and it is in those others that we will be spending our time. From the dreams of the past we can see new ways forward for ourselves, to build better networks and stronger communities. Scavengers will be asked to find artifacts, artworks, images, and pieces of text curated from past online communities. Participants who complete the hunt will be awarded with an extra special secret prize.
If this work is a success I would like to keep it online and expand it. This might be ambitious but I'm hoping to build a community and a discussion group about the future of the internet (maybe through a discord group or a platform like Learning Gardens) and I would if people who engaged with the piece would be interested in helping start and foster that community. Before the pandemic I had been planning on starting a kind of in person salon on the future of the internet, and have had to put that idea on hold because of the various life disturbances the pandemic created for me. This is my online version of that idea.
How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session?:If no one wants to complete the scavenger hunt I will be a bit sad, but if many people complete it it is no issue, as it's asynchronous with the instructions all hosted on an interactive website and I'll be on call for hints or issues if need be.
What is the goal and/or outcome of your session?:My goal is to both create a new way of engaging with a body of research on past cybercultures that I built in grad school and create a narrative experience that shows how past net cultures envisioned a different future for the internet than the one that came to be. I'm not so interested in showcasing the techno-optimists of the 80s and 90s, whose naïveté helped pave the way for the current internet, but instead on the artists, activists, and communities that were actively working to build an internet that wasn't based on a profit based information extraction model. I also want to explore and push back against a technopessimistic idea I've been hearing lately that the internet was doomed from the outside by the paranoid logic of command and control that led to its creation as ARPANET.
Alden Rivendale Jones is a New York City based artist, researcher, and programmer. Recent work themes include human to algorithm interactions, utopic infrastructures, and imagined alternative futures.