Septembers to Remember

Want to reckon time all Septemberized? See the code for that here on Codepen, to copy and use for whatever you want...

This article features a bit of (quite ancient) web lore, some musings on it, and some quaint, related codes you can snag for your own site. The history of the Internet, like that of IRL can, I think, be divided in different ways. Think of them as eras of the Internet. You might already be familiar with certain ways of thinking about this, ie, in terms of the prevalent online aesthetic of a time period.

Here, though, I’d like to talk about the migration of people within online spaces, and two particularly weird instances of it. I consider both to be important online turning points, amongst many others. The first one we’ll discuss is a vague, but well-known meme from the early 1990s; the second is merely a matter of historical record. In both cases,

I’m (rather cheekily) providing two codes here, to display the “current date” on your website as if these significant Septembers really had never ended. Confused? Read onwards, and it might make sense - I hope.

Eternal September?

The Eternal September began in late 1993. Admittedly, I was in grade school, but I was decidedly part of it, ultimately. I’ll write more about that later.

When the Internet was new, the primary users were university students. Your average civilian (if I may use the term to refer to non-academics) usually lacked a home computer with Internet access. Even in later years, most home Internet users accessed it through a sort of “walled-garden” internet service provider like America Online, CompuServe or Prodigy.

When these began to proliferate more and more, the existing (university-based) users complained about the influx of new users who simply didn’t understand the Internet (yet). It reminded them, apparently, of the (usually only yearly, in September) influx of new users who had just arrived at the universities, but it didn’t end. Ever. It just kept going as more and more people logged on, and more and more slowly left the confines of the (quite corporate) walled garden ISPs for places like Usenet and beyond…

Superficially, the complaints sounded those on most online platforms over the years every time a bunch of newbies show up. It was, you see, to become a trend. The “Eternal September” effect, as it became called, was an early meme, I suppose, and referenced for many years in similar scenarios. I guess there’s some lesson here about how adaptability to change is a necessary virtue, but that’s not my point in writing this, not exactly.

I’m writing this because it’s incredibly fascinating that it was treated as such a turning point. People began to peek, en masse, behind these “walled-garden” ISPs like America Online. Sure, the original netizens to be found elsewhere (Usenet, for example) found this annoying, but it did change the landscape of cyberspace forever. And actually? It was for the better, as hindsight would tell anyone.

We cannot imagine the modern Internet’s unique proliferation of creativity, both terrible and wonderful, within the auspices of America Online or CompuServe, after all. They remained as ISPs, and even with an interface/browser of their own, yet it sat abandoned on my hard drive as soon as I learned to use an alternative. Outside of those walled ISPs was the real web

The real web was incredibly different, and searching it opened amazing and terrifying doors for me, even at such a young age. Instead of going to America Online and typing in the keyword “hacker” to be whisked away to a movie advertisement, I might end up on the website for DEFCON. On the actual web, anything seemed possible. Instead of carefully-moderated bulletin boards and chatrooms, there were places where I (and other people) could just… say anything. And did, of course.

I found strange, wonderful, and terrible things, but didn’t we all? Either way, some might still say…

It's the ...

September of 2006, Tho...

Flash forward more than a decade, to September 26th, 2006. Or, perhaps, the 4774th of September, 1993? Either way, that was yet another turning point for the Internet, as far as I’m concerned. With it, sadly, we saw the beginnings of a slow return to those awful, deeply-corporate walled-garden spaces that had dominated early consumer access to the Internet.

True, we weren’t talking about AOL or CompuServe anymore. It, rather, started with Facebook. Facebook, like the Internet itself, had beforehand been the purview of university students. On that day in late September of 2006, Facebook began allowing those without an academic-associated email address to join their social network.

Some of the university students were really unhappy about this, much like the original netizens who witnessed the influx of newbies during Eternal September. Others just didn’t care. That’s beside the point, though. I consider Facebook’s decision to include anyone (not just university students) a watershed here, because it began the long, twisted exodus from the actual internet back into (new) “walled-garden” places. This time, we were talking mostly about apps (in the end) rather than one’s entire Internet experience.

As phones (designed for that purpose) slowly supplanted desktops, though, the effect was the same. You might as well be back on America Online, but not in a good, nostalgic way. We stripped what good features those early ISPs had, and have the multitude of bad, or merely functional aspects available on the App Store, it seems. Where are we moving? Backwards? Towards those consolidated, corporate “walled-gardens?”

You are probably wondering why I don’t including MySpace as an earlier turning point - it was, after all, social media of a sort. My reasons for this? MySpace featured vastly more customization than Facebook and its descendants ever would, and more resembled - let’s be honest - actual websites. There are reasons so many millennials learned to code on MySpace.

I’ve no clue what will happen next… until then, by some reckonings…

It's the ...