It feels like 2004 again

At the start of this year, I wrote The Internet Is About To Get Weird Again, which began by calling back to the Internet of 2000. In thinking more about it, though, we more closely resemble the Internet of a few years later, where the crash of the dot-com bubble and the stock market had the same effect that the popping of the crypto bubble did: the casuals who were just trying to make a quick buck are much less likely to jump in the pool.

Anil Dash, It feels like 2004 again

The way I’ve been thinking about it is: There’s everything to play for. We understand what can go wrong. We understand many of the needs, although we should always go out and learn more. But for the first time in a long time, the internet isn’t calcified: there isn’t a sense that the platforms people use are set. Anyone can come along and build something new, and it’s absolutely possible for it to catch on.

Ben Werdmuller in response

Perhaps it’s naively optimistic, but maybe this time …

I’ve been feeling this too , and wanted to do something about it, so we created Next .

A new conference was founded on this optimism coupled with realism–a realism born of 2 decades of disappointment and disillusionment, as this thing, the Web, which gave so many people a sense of hope and promise was slowly enclosed, walled off, siloed, strangled.

The Web, A literal gift to the world , and the fountain of unimaginable wealth for the likes of Google and Apple, Meta, Amazon… (imagine computing without the Web–you’d be buy-in a loading songs onto your iPod at the record store, Meta, Google, Amazon, none would even exist. Netflix would be mailing CDs.)

But maybe now, while the sense of optimism and hope that animated much of the early web, and the folks who built it, in large was and small are still a living memory, and the blunt lessons of what happens to naive hope alone have been learned, we can do this thing differently this time. Rewild the internet , make it weird again .

So if you share that optimism, a sense of hope that perhaps the Web can be better, why not come join us–in person or online? There’ll be plenty of practical actionable stuff I promise, from smart interesting people.

So on November 29th, invest a day in your future , and the future of the Web.