The Internet Used to be Smaller and Nicer. Let’s Get It Back.

It was not hard to see myself as one of these cypherpunks, someone who cared about the privacy of everyone that wanted to use the internet. Someone who worried that corporations, if left unchecked, would turn us into digital serfs, just as authors Neal Stephenson and William Gibson had described.

This was the ethos of the internet when I began to log on in the mid-90s, with a 28.8k dial-up modem and a terminal window. (For context, you can get a modem that’s more than 20,000 times faster for less than $100 today.) I quickly found people who shared my values, who had formed organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, the Creative Commons. I was young, but like all of them, I believed this new way to gather was too valuable to be left for commercial exploitation. We had to do what we could to preserve open standards and ensure the internet remained as public as possible.

Of course, we mostly spent our time geeking out about the things we loved: science fiction, art, design. By the time I was starting to share my thoughts, this mostly happened on LiveJournal and proto-social-media platform Myspace. But the way I saw it, as a 20-something with a rigid sense of propriety, LiveJournal was for people who wrote fan fiction and Myspace was for high-schoolers. It’s embarrassing to think this now, but I thought I was better than that. Maybe I was insecure that I wasn’t. Either way, if I was going to find a community where I fit in, I would have to build it myself.

The thing is, I didn’t really know how to do that. Building a website at this time was complicated and time consuming. Everything had to be built using programming languages that were still relatively new. And even if you did manage to cobble something together, you sort of just had to hope it didn’t look terrible, since no one really existed to help you with design. I am still in awe of the cheap turnkey packages available today to turn any idea into a full-blown website in just a couple of hours. My first website (wilwheaton.net) took months to build, and frankly, looked terrible. Updating it was often harder—I’ve lost more work than I care to admit to a network timeout or Netscape crash.

The first solution I tried that made things easier was Blogger, a content management system that enabled me to post my thoughts immediately to the front page of my site. I appreciated how easy the tool was to use but was irked by its closed-source attitude. If I was going to be a writer, I wanted to own my words. I was lucky to discover Greymatter, which I viewed simply as an open-source version of Blogger. Both functioned similarly, but I could install Greymatter to my own server and retain control of everything I was writing. I quickly switched over.

It turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made. I could finally stop being a stumbling software engineer and become a writer. I started seeing success, and the heavy traffic to my site began to reveal weak points in the code. With no idea how to fix the problem, I reached out to Noah Grey, who designed Greymatter. Almost immediately, he asked me for more information. I gave him my server logs, and before I knew it, he had fixed the problem. He made his software better, but he also made it better for me because I asked him for his help.

Can you imagine emailing

Mark Zuckerberg

any time you had a problem with

Facebook

? Now imagine him immediately fixing it.

Noah, I learned, identified as much as a cypherpunk as I did. He could have made a lot of money selling Greymatter to a company like Google, as Blogger did in 2003. But Noah believed that contributing code to the public commons was more important than a paycheck. He made his Greymatter free to use, and encouraged people to modify it however they saw fit.

And boy did they. When I spoke to some software developers I know about writing this essay, nearly all of them told me how they had taken some part of Noah’s software and used it to build their own CMS, to power backends for all kinds of websites, or to develop something entirely their own. In fact, Noah’s attitude was relatively common at this time. People celebrated this kind of collaboration, the ability to build off each other’s work. We might have thought ourselves cypherpunks, but nothing we were doing was particularly radical.

Noah stopped maintaining Greymatter in 2002. As the internet changed, we uninstalled it in favor of database-driven software like WordPress. But Noah’s work lives on through an entire generation of writers and developers who have careers because we used the tools he gave us for free to find our voices and share our ideas. We all owe him a debt of gratitude that is long overdue.

About that debt. Noah is autistic, and lives on disability. In late April, Noah posted to his

Twitter

account that his home, where he lives with his sister (who is his caregiver), was days away from foreclosure. As a last resort, he created a GoFundMe to raise a little under $40,000, so they could stay in their home.

After my friend Cory Doctorow texted me about the situation, I went directly to the millions of people who now follow my social-media accounts and blog and told them about Noah. Other OG bloggers and Internet graybeards also came together and boosted the signal. By the end of the day, we’d raised enough money to keep him and his sister in their home. By the end of the week, it was over $100K.

So, the story has a happy ending. But it is also, I think, a call to action. The internet imagined by people like Noah Grey is still possible, if we are willing to stand up to corporations that try to exert outrageous copyright restrictions on bloggers, governments that surveil our activity, and the trolls that use our insecurities to try to bully us out of the public sphere. After all, without normal people, the internet is just servers screaming at each other. Who would want to rule over that?

—Wil Wheaton is an actor and writer living in Los Angeles. His new book “Still Just a Geek: An Annotated Memoir” (William Morrow) was published this April.

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Squarespace’s

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