The Spirit of the Web

One of a series of agenda-setting essays in anticipation of BloggerCon 2003.

A story I like to tell about Chris Gulker, the San Francisco newspaper strike of 1994, and the Web..

I had just started using the Web in the fall of 1994. I was awe struck. Somehow this was just the thing I was waiting for and I didn't even know. Then I heard about the newspaper strike. I bet they can use a website, I thought. I called around and a few days later I was working on the strike website. The politics were all screwed up because the strike was about automation, the truck drivers wanted assurance that the new electronic media wouldn't wipe out their jobs. The reporters, striking in sympathy with the drivers, were so excited about the Web, nothing could stop the news from getting out that way, even though it was exactly the thing the drivers were striking about. For me it was a perfect moon mission project, no time for second-guessing, lots of incredible problems to solve. I was learning so much.

I heard that Gulker, a man I had met a few years earlier, was doing the management website. I knew Chris because he had automated the Examiner with scripts written in Frontier. After seeing the software he wrote I understood my own software in a whole new way. He taught me about the technical side of publishing.

Now to the point of the story. Even though Chris and I were on opposite sides of the strike, we helped each other. We shared scripts and techniques, we backed each other up, because even though our politics were diametrically opposed, we had a common interest, that information be able to flow though our publishing systems, to the public.

To me, that's the spirit of the Web. I'd write about it many times in the years to come. Holding Hands In Cyberspace, Billions of Websites, I Promised My Grandfather, Edit This Page, and on and on. I'd hear other people explain it, listen to the fantastic interviews Chris Lydon did with David Weinberger and Real Live Preacher. Jakob Nielsen drew a dichotomy that explains it, the dark side of the Web that sucks in traffic and doesn't let go, and the light side that distributes flow, trusting that if I send you somewhere good you'll come back to me for more.

The Web is about that kind of trust. The weblog world, when it works, works like that. But human beings populate this world, so we see lots of un-weblike bullshit too, resentment, jealousy, exclusion, even hate. But this is not what the Web is about, it's the opposite, about linking, about listening, about respect. Perhaps an appropriate motto for weblogs is that we trust the universe. We're all bozos on this bus, we make shitty software, and so do you.

It's not like anyone gets out of this alive.

Dave Winer

PS: You can write a BloggerCon essay too, even if you're not attending BloggerCon. It requires approval of one of the editors, to keep out the nasty stuff, spam, hate, etc.

PPS: Comments on this essay go here.

Discuss this message.

Unless otherwise labeled by its originating author, the content found on this site is made available under the terms of an Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license. This page was last updated: Monday, September 22, 2003 at 7:31:01 AM.