How Did We Get Here?

These are my notes for my talk at Wuthering Bytes 2023 in Hebden Bridge, on August 25.  It builds on a lot of earlier stuff, most significantly a talk I gave at OpenTech in.. checks notes.. 2013.

You can read the OpenTech version here:

The State of the Intersection: my #opentech talk

They were, in hindsight, days of innocence and optimism https://www.opentech.org.uk/2013/

Bill Thompson

Song

And you may find yourself living on a protocol stack

And you may find yourself on neglected subnet

And you may find yourself designing the screen of a new social tool

And you may find yourself on a functional web, with no context collapse

And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

Watching the packets go by, let the voltage hold me down

Watching the packets flow by, data routed back to source

Thanks to the BGP, after the TTL’s gone

Once in a lifetime, packets flowing round and round

And you may ask yourself, “How do I code this?”

And you may ask yourself, “Where is that new style sheet?”

And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful net

And you may tell yourself, “This is not my beautiful web”

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