The open web as gift economy

Beautiful essay -> https://tracydurnell.com/2025/01/27/the-open-web-as-gift-economy-part-4/

I got online in 1997, when I was in middle school. My earliest experiences online centered on connection and creation.

I’d heard that the school libraries had this thing called the Internet — on my lunch break, I loaded up a chat room and met someone from England. Growing up, my best friend had moved to Montana, and we became pen-pals because long-distance calls were too expensive. Talking to that stranger in England, I knew viscerally that the internet was made for connection: a shy pre-teen girl in California could meet someone across the world… for free.

A summer school computer class taught me how to make a basic website — a horrendously ugly page about Monet with yellow type on a repeating water lily background 😂 Dial-up internet was too slow to explore around much, so when we got internet service at my house, making my own Geocities site took most of my time online. From the first, making things and sharing them was part of my online experience. To me, it is normal and natural to have my own website where I post things.

Today, the internet has been colonized by corporations. The network itself is under attack. Many people spend the majority of their time online using silos that block outbound links to the indie web. Google’s voracious greed is undercutting the value of participating in the open web by transforming the labor of writers into generated “answers” rather than connecting readers with websites.

But I have worked to stay part of that original open web, a place we co-create, a gift economy centered on participation. We all pitch in, and we think together. In The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer explains how gifting changes our perspective: “To name the world as gift is to feel your membership in the web of reciprocity.”

I had *very* similar formative experiences on the Internet. When I was only 10, in 1995, I remember standing in front of a friend of my parents’ computer in Baguio City, Philippines and loading up the Knoxville News-Sentinel to learn about the Georgia Bulldogs football score *that same day*. It blew my mind.

I remember the magic of becoming online friends with a Finn, an Emirati, a Brazilian, a Korean, and a Canadian – all because we loved to play Flight Simulator. I remember sending & receiving emails across the world with my family & friends.

And hacking together my own websites…only to find out that other people actually read it…just like I read their sites to figure out my problems. I remember reading Wikipedia, noticing that my hometown (at the time) had no information…so I wrote the whole thing (as a 14 year old).

I love how the author distills the ethos of my cohort. We weren’t perfect…and are likely insufferably earnest for everyone who joined later. But – I do appreciate the fact that the “old web” is not gone. This is not some “make the Internet great again” populist wish for a mythical past. It’s bigger and better than ever (especially the tools, good lord, Geocities was janky). The only thing missing is for more people to invest & for more people to explore.