Who Stole Your Eyes? - parascene

There was a real dream once.

Not a fake PR dream. Not the polished TED-talk version. I mean the older one. The one where personal computers felt like a jailbreak from institutions, and the internet felt like a way to route around gatekeepers entirely. The machine was supposed to put more power in the hands of ordinary people. The web was supposed to be a common information space, open enough that anyone could publish, link, learn, and build without asking permission first. Tim Berners-Lee described the dream that way himself: a universal space for sharing information, broad enough to become part of how we work, play, and socialize.^W3C

That dream was not stupid. It was incomplete.

The early digital dream was not wrong about the technical possibility. It was wrong about the settlement that followed.

What the early dreamers got right was the technical possibility. What they got wrong was the settlement that would come later. They thought open tools would naturally produce an open culture. Sometimes they did, for a while. But the pattern that kept repeating was harsher than that. A subculture would build something strange and alive. It would become useful. Then it would cross into public life. And at that point, the real fight began: not over whether the thing worked, but over who would own the bridge between the original culture and everybody else.

That split shows up early, even before the web fully takes over the story. Personal computing had a real hobbyist, tinkerer, builder spirit. That part was real. But almost immediately you can see another type enter the picture: not anti-technical, not stupid, not fake exactly, but loyal to a different thing. Less loyal to the culture of tinkering. More loyal to scale, productization, control, and leverage. That is why the important distinction is not “real nerd” versus “fake nerd.”

That is also why people like Gates, Jobs, and later Zuckerberg matter so much in this story. The point is not that they were dumb or nontechnical. The point is that they were not governed by nerd values. They were governed by a different instinct: turn technical possibility into organized power. That is how you get from a workshop ethos to platform rule.

The real split was never between technical people and nontechnical people. It was between loyalty to the culture and loyalty to power.

The early internet still carried a lot of the older dream with it. It felt open, weird, linked, improvised. You could still imagine that this thing might democratize not just expression, but actual control. But even in those early days you can see the first warning. Eternal September became the symbol for what happens when an online culture stops being a scene and starts becoming public territory. The complaint was not merely that new people showed up. The deeper issue was that scale changes norms. A culture that forms slowly can absorb newcomers. A culture that gets flooded becomes something else. The old assumptions break. The old manners break. The old center of gravity breaks.

That same arc played out again in the Web 2.0 period, only bigger and more consequential. Web 2.0 was supposed to be the participatory internet. User-generated content. Social publishing. Profiles, comments, blogs, channels, sharing, connection. In a way, it delivered. But it delivered on terms that changed the meaning of participation itself.

MySpace still felt like user-authored chaos. Ugly, messy, expressive, often bad, often alive. It had a little of that older internet smell on it. Facebook took that energy and translated it into something cleaner, more legible, more administrable. In early 2009, Pew still found MySpace ahead among adult social-network users, with Facebook behind it.^Pew-Jan-2009 By October 2009, Pew was reporting that Facebook had become the most popular social network for American adults.^Pew-Oct-2009 That was not just a market shift. It was a civilizational shift. The social web had moved from scene to infrastructure.

And once that happened, the logic changed. The winning social platform was no longer the one that felt most alive. It was the one that felt most governable. Cleaner identity. More legible relationships. More trust from institutions, employers, families, advertisers, media, and later politics. Facebook did not kill participation. It enclosed it. You could still post. You could still share. You could still perform yourself in public. But you did it inside a system you did not own, on visibility terms you did not control.

The internet democratized expression. It did not democratize control.

YouTube did the same thing for media. At first, it looked like an explosion of ordinary people finally getting a publishing channel. And again, that part was real. But over time the channel itself became the thing you did not own. By 2013, YouTube said it had more than a billion unique monthly users. At that point it was no longer some scrappy video site. It was attention infrastructure at planetary scale.^YouTube

That is the recurring trick. Expression becomes more democratic at the surface while control becomes more centralized underneath.

Even file sharing fits here. In some ways, it was the old dream in outlaw form. Information wants to move. Gatekeepers should be bypassed. Ordinary people can build their own shadow distribution systems. That spirit was not identical to the noble version of the early web dream, but it rhymed with it. File sharing may have been one of the last wild eruptions of the older internet ethic before the walls started going up in earnest. It was both climax and death rattle: a final, unruly proof that digital information could flow freely, followed by the institutional immune response.

The user gets the power to create, but not the power to govern the channel.

Then there is GitHub, which is the uncomfortable part of the story because it forces a concession. It is too easy to say the builders always get robbed. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they also centralize themselves quite willingly. GitHub became a kind of developer commons in practice, then Microsoft acquired it for $7.5 billion in 2018. That is almost too on the nose. Even the place programmers treated as shared ground became a strategic asset inside a much larger empire.^GitHub

That matters because it kills the easy innocence story. Builders do not only get dispossessed. Sometimes they collaborate. Sometimes they sell out. Sometimes they decide convenience, scale, and money are worth more than stewardship. Fair enough. But once you admit that, the argument gets sharper, not weaker. The problem is not that paradise was stolen from pure souls. The problem is that the social layer keeps getting surrendered to people and institutions whose deepest loyalty is not to the culture that made the thing worth caring about in the first place.

That brings us to AI.

A lot of the argument around AI is framed like a moral fight between good people and bad people, artists and thieves, humans and machines, soul and slop. Some of that is real. Some of the criticism identifies real harms. But there is another dynamic underneath it that people do not seem to want to admit out loud.

If you can convince a large class of dreamers, artists, tinkerers, and builders that a technology is shameful to touch, you do not stop that technology. You just narrow who is allowed to use it openly. The people with money, lawyers, compute, enterprise distribution, and policy influence do not stop. They continue. Quietly, confidently, and at scale. The result is not restraint. The result is selective permission.

That is why blanket anti-AI politics can wind up serving control freaks even when that is not the intention.

A technology condemned in public but used in private becomes the property of power.

If the only socially legitimate users left standing are giant firms, well-funded labs, approved enterprise vendors, and institutions insulated by money and influence, then the field has already been surrendered.

That does not mean every objection to AI is fake. It means the political effect of broad stigma can be the opposite of what its loudest champions claim. It does not keep the technology from shaping the world. It just makes sure the shaping happens from above.

And that, really, is the whole story.

The digital dream did not die because broad participation was a mistake. It died because every time a living culture crossed into public life, the terms of that crossing were set by people more loyal to leverage than to the culture itself. The old dream promised open flows. What we got instead was managed access. The old dream promised disintermediation. What we got was re-intermediation at enormous scale. The old dream promised freedom. What we got was participation under ownership.

So the real question is not whether the public should be allowed in. Of course it should. The real question is who owns the welcome.

The real question is not whether the public should be allowed in. It is who owns the welcome.

Because that is where the future gets decided. Not in the workshop. Not in the lab. Not even in the first wave of invention. It gets decided at the bridge between the people who make new worlds and the much larger public that eventually moves into them.

That bridge is where digital dreams go to die.

It is also where they could, maybe, be defended next time.

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The warning is not just that power consolidates. It is that your attention, your judgment, your sense of what matters are always at risk of being captured by people who do not care what made a space worth entering in the first place.

That goes for whether you are pro or anti on AI. And that is why it is not enough to simply hate AI and walk away. Blanket rejection does not stop a technology like this; it just leaves it to the biggest players, the safest corporate wrappers, and the people most eager to turn it into another system of control.

Restated for emphasis: in very real sense, your anti-AI stance helps those who seek to consolidate and maintain power almost as much as those who are pro-AI and corp-dependent.

The real choice is not AI or no AI. It is whether this tool will belong only to power, or whether smaller, independent builders using it responsibly will have any say in shaping what comes next.

If that matters to you, follow along, share this piece, or reach out.

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1. Tim Berners-Lee, “FAQ for the World Wide Web” (W3C). ↩

2. Pew Research Center, “Adults and Social Network Websites” (January 14, 2009). ↩

3. Pew Research Center, “Adults on Social Network Sites, 2005–2009” (October 8, 2009). ↩

4. YouTube Official Blog, “Another Milestone: One Billion People Use YouTube Every Month”. ↩

5. Microsoft News, “Microsoft to Acquire GitHub for $7.5 Billion” (June 4, 2018). ↩