A re-introduction.
My name is Brianna Privett, and I've been building the web for a long time.
Sometime in the early 90s I was leafing through a Life magazine of my mom's and glanced at an ad that had a bunch of pinback buttons with funny sayings on them. In the center, one proclaimed "Desperately Clinging To Utopian Illusions" and in that era of irony and double meanings my teenaged brain thought it was HILARIOUS.
I thought it was so funny, I not only remembered it for years, I bought the domain utopian.net in 1999 and named my first agency Utopian.net in 2004 (I don't own the domain or the agency any longer, so all you get's a screenshot).
I'd like to say that I thought it was an apt metaphor for the web at the time, but I wasn't thinking about that yet. In 1999, however, I was earnestly online and definitely thought it was an apt metaphor for the web, but in a way that pretty much missed the point. I was consciously clinging to a lot of ideas about the web - that it was open, public, cross-cultural. That it could connect us all and elevate us in unforeseen ways. That it was a new medium for art. I was not the only teenager to believe the world was radically transforming JUST for me as I stepped into adulthood but I probably believed it far longer than I should have.
I have a positivity bias. I assume the best, too often. I assume positive intent when I fucking know better.
When I started building websites, few people were online - hell, few people had computers at home. I talked my mom into taking out a loan to upgrade from my Commodore 64 to a nameless Windows clone sold by the dudes at the local computer shop, and I signed up with an equally nameless local ISP for dial-up the same day I brought the computer home.
So for years, my family didn't really know what I was doing online. And since I was a mouthy kid with a hyperfocus on the possibilities of the WORLD WIDE WEB, I did a lot of web advocacy at family dinners, to restaurant owners when I picked up takeout, to small local newspapers. "You don't have a website?" I'd ask. "You really should get a website, it's not hard!. Here, I'll show you."
I wasn't selling a service, yet. I just really thought people should know about this web thing. I was emailing friends in other countries. We were trading HTML tips and sharing cool websites. I was meeting people entirely online and it was only creepy a couple of times. Mostly, it was really awesome. At first.
This website is not intended to be a memoir, but I can't write about the history of the web or the current state of it without writing about myself. I've purchased this domain name a few times over the years - at its longest duration, it's where we hosted our "labs" at Utopian.net and tested code and server configurations. But nobody has owned it for years. And earlier this year, I finshed deleting my non-federated, oligarchy-owned big tech social media accounts and realized I still have a lot I want to fucking say about what they are doing to us. Maybe about my own complicity, in all that passionate advocacy, and how I still love it, so much. So this is maybe an apology and an attempt at reparation. Here's how I thought we would be using the web by now, and here's how we still can make it ours.
It's good to meet you, again.
-Brianna