How Did the Internet Get So Bad?

In the mid-1990s, as part of a carpet-bombing campaign to market the still nascent World Wide Web to potential consumers, America Online offered free dial-up Internet trials and mailed CDs containing software to several million Americans. Reportedly, half the CDs in the world at one point were branded with the AOL logo. For several weeks in 1998, the company apparently used the entirety of the earth’s CD manufacturing power.

The ad blitz was an astonishing, almost unbelievable feat of logistics, and it set the stage for the Internet as we know it today—that is, as one of history’s most expensive, extractive, and manipulative advertising apparatuses, dominated by a shrinking handful of giant platforms. The story is one of the countless pieces of Internet history breezily covered in Joanne McNeil’s new book, Lurking: How a Person Became a User, a conversational and idiosyncratic account of the past 30 years of online life that reminds us that the Internet didn’t have to become what it is today.

Lurking is written from a layperson’s perspective—that of the everyday surfers, posters, and especially the eponymous lurkers who have been witness to the Internet’s development over time, even if they haven’t participated in guiding it. What interests McNeil is the shifting experiences of daily online life for these users, not the developers, engineers, and CEOs whose hagiographies have until recently dominated the landscape of trade tech writing. In this way, her book is structured as a kind of people’s history of the Internet, a bottom-up chronicle of online expression and digital environments that prioritizes the textures and cultures of the Internet’s demos. It’s a project rooted in a sense of optimism about the power of the user against the sort of massive corporate might on display in AOL’s campaign. “Infrastructure is power, but it is not the law,” McNeil writes, “which means there is still an opportunity for users—as individuals and collectives, and working with government bodies—to hold platforms accountable.”