I had a thought the other day when I was watching the “Unreasonably Effectiveness Of Plain Text” video. In either this video or another, he talks about a SciFi/Fantasy novel that he is writing where futuristic future people are surfing old text files from the internet, because after a thousand years, every other filetype had mutated so much that their formatting was lost to time. This triggered a specific thought for me.

“Has computing really changed since the 90’s?”

I know, a bold claim. Our hardware capabilities are massively more capable today that they were in the 90’s. Even as I write this, Raspberry Pi (arguably a lower end computer) has released a board with 16 GB of RAM. That’s a far cry of the MB of RAM that was allocated to older systems. Our software has also advanced. Things like Go or Rust hadn’t yet seen the mistakes of decades of software projects that it would take to define their purposes.

So what the heck am I talking about.

If I open my home folder on my daily-driver machine, I’ll see the following folders:

  • Documents
  • Music
  • Pictures
  • Videos

then if you look at the actual programs in my computer, I have things like administrative programs, games, and tools to play with the above data. And this isn’t limited to Ubuntu. If you look at Windows 11, the default folder layout in Home was:

  • Documents
  • Music
  • Pictures
  • Videos

And Mac OSX?

  • Documents
  • Movies
  • Music
  • Pictures

So at the very least, all of the standard Operating systems have standardized on these. But even if you go back to a 90’s operating system like Windows 3.1, you’ll see the same formats. Look at this video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz3YuWfaKvI](A Tour of Windows 3.1 - Software Showcase). Although the author of the video doesn’t show a folder structure similar to the modern layout, I can see the following:

  • Windows Write - For writing and saving Documents
  • Paintbrush - For creating and saving Pictures
  • Media Player - Which can handle both Music files and Video files (although the formats were limited)

After that discovery, I thought about the modern websites that we interact with on a day to day basis:

  • Wikipedia - For discovering Documents and Pictures
  • Reddit - For discovering Pictures, Documents (user created text), and Videos
  • Youtube - A website specifically for watching Videos
  • Instagram - Pictures, Videos, and Documents (user created text)
  • Spotify - A website specifically for listening to Music
  • ChatGPT - A product that Generates Documents for you

It seems like those 4 data types (along with games, data manipulation tools, and admin tools) compose the functionality of the entirety of the web. Even if you want to chime in and say that my definition of Documents is stretched for something like instant messages, or that Video isn’t comparable to a Jitsi, Facetime, or Skype call, it’s still a remix of one of the former data types.

Whoop-de-doo:

I know, who cares right? Every song is composed of the same 8 notes. Why are you harping on this?

There is a lot of talk right now about how the internet should be used and legal discussions about how its use should be constrained. Social media platforms are very uppity because of what kind of Documents, Videos, Music, and Pictures you share, and they are tamping down on users that share the wrong kinds. I’ve heard plenty of people complain that they’d love to stop using tools like Facebook or the Iphone, but they can’t because they are locked into the ecosystem. But all of this confuses me because of this simple concept: All of these websites play the same four notes.

All most people care about is shuffling the same 4 data stuctures around over and over again. Social media has somehow convinced us that we need them to share the same 4 pieces of data. The truth is, we’ve been doing the exact same stuff since the 90’s. If you don’t like how a certain company is treating you, find a replacement. I promise, there are plenty out there.

I don’t know. The network effect is real, and there are a lot of really dangerous issues with the net (i.e. malicious use of the administrative apps on computers to lock down how we use our devices), but when it comes to social media it feels like we’re all drowning in a puddle. Just stand up. Use matrix, signal, IRC, xmpp, etc. I don’t know what to tell you.