Wanted to repost this article from Anil Dash in Rolling Stone here for posterity. Seems like everything old is new again, choom! And for those of you that fit the characterization from the article about not being alive the first time the internet was like this, as an old, crusty veteran of the BBS days and first dotcom bubble, this is the way it was and this is the way it should be.
We have a saying in Austin - “Keep Austin Weird”, which encapsulates the fight to keep Austin’s artist culture from getting overrun by corpo interests (primarily tech). I think the same sentiment should be applied to the Internet. Weird needs a place to thrive, and the Internet is that place.