When my father passed away last year, I decided to digitize my decades of family home movies. I just finished the task this month. Among this treasure trove of family memories, I also found this video. It is from 1999, when I worked at WebLab. Watch this short news piece from NY1 (as embarrassing as some of it is) to learn about this innovative approach to fund models demonstrating the potential for the Internet to have positive social impact.
I knew at the time the spread of the Internet was not without peril. It came with baked-in inequities, and housed many a dark corner to avoid. But I never imagined how the technologies we were promoting would be so distorted that decades later it would be used to inspire and coordinate an armed insurrection of the Capital building nor cause a sitting President to be banned from some of its most popular locations.
On the other hand, without the Internet, how would we have tackled the social isolation created by this pandemic? As a result of these digital tools, my wife and I work every day, my kids go to school, I have mourned, celebrated, prayed, danced and generally maintained essential connections with family, friends and communities.
So in retrospect I do not think I was wrong about the importance of the Internet, just naive about how much evil it could arm, and how much we each must commit to fight to ensure we use it more often as a force for good.
