Around about 2000, I began to consider how it would be, when and if I became an Old Hippy.
Old Hippies had been a common part of my cultural heritage ever since the Eighties, when it was generally understood that they were terrible embarrassment to everyone — including, somehow, hippies. They continued to wear the fashions of the 1960s long after everyone had moved on, they grabbed you on the street and tried to explain to you about hemp or organics or vegetarianism, and they played very bad music on their shameful acoustic guitars at otherwise perfectly salvageable parties.
The dominant feature of Old Hippies is that they had overstayed their welcome: clinging onto a culture that had faded away, trying to re-start arguments that had turned ashen cold, manning barricades that had long been dismantled. The world had moved on, but the Old Hippies had not.
In 2000, full of the excitement and zeitgeistiness of the Internet, a happy little barricade-warrior of the moment, I still had enough sense to think about how I would feel when it was all history. Would I move on? Would I just be an Old Hippy, only talking about the World Wide Web and modems instead of Glastonbury and The Mommas and Papas?

You didn’t need to be very old to be an old hippy, at least for someone as young as me. I remember a friend of my sister noting that one of their friends had somehow ended up an old hippy in their mid-twenties. The canonical old hippy in my understanding was Neil from the Young Ones, who was a college student. Thinking about it, if you were 25 in 1969, you were forty in 1984.
I am 55. I have been an old hippy for nearly a decade. I knew it, but I didn’t want to talk about it. Instead, like baldness or liverspots, I just watched it form, in a deadly fascination, on myself and others.
A few fates that I’ve avoided, barely: one is joining the Nineties Internet Re-Enactment Society, where communities scrabble to re-inforce the dominant vibe of — what, two? three? years maximum? — the early networks. I mean, I still have it in my habits — my dinky RSS reader, my affinity for plain text, email. A co-worker described watching me work as “like someone playing one of those adventure games”. I can see it.
I (mostly) don’t try to enforce all this onto the world, or tut-tut those who don’t get it. I know why I got it. I learned vi to impress a girl; I liked incantations and real names and esoterica. The Nineties internet was in many ways, an expansion of 1980s America, and learning UNIX in a foreign country was like decoding what TGIF was, and what were Saturday Morning Cartoons, and Saturday Night Live, and Sunday NFL: the feast days, the martyrology, of an alien dominant culture.
There’s a tradition you draw from, but the tradition evolves, it doesn’t mindlessly recreate. You don’t stay in the moment that you entered that tradition. My daughter says that Discord is IRC for young people, Slack is IRC for old people, and IRC is for people who can’t get out of their chair. I use Discord, and Slack, and barely remember to log into IRC (are there really 3,416 messages waiting for me in #neomutt?). I’m not trying to stay hip, chat, I’m just continuing to float downstream.
A related path of old hippydom I could have taken, which is deciding the web is it. This is more old hippydom for 2000s kids: the post-WHATWG apotheosis of web as the once and future platform. Why would you want (WWyW) anything else? You got your virtual machine, your abstracted i/o, your interop, your package delivery, your security model, what else do you need? Bluetooth?
I think getting burned out at the W3C punched this out of me. The EME fight was partly predicated on a belief that if they didn’t let DRM into the web platform, then the W3C would lose part of the universe to native apps, and that must not happen. I remember at one meeting saying, in effect, “would that be so bad? That maybe DRM is just a thing that is so alien to the web model, that it is better to leave it outside?” But the feeling was that if the web was not everything to everyone, then it would lose.
The emotional response in me was, then let it lose. But that wasn’t right: but it certainly figured in me thinking that maybe the values that I wanted to stick around for, that I wanted to keep as the core of my old hippydom, did not necessarily just stay in one technology, or one era. If I was going to act like they were eternal values, worth freeze-drying myself for, they should and could move between implementations, and across decades.
January 17th, 2025 at 4:49 am
I owe you a comment, because I promised you one under the post about Pavel Durov. When I was 17, I wrote articles for computer magazines in Poland, such as Magazyn INTERNET. There was a text about you in that magazine, and when I was 33, I was looking through my old texts, I came across a link to your site, and that’s how I looked at it.
I don’t understand everything, my English is not very good. But I understand enough to like you and your way of thinking and look into you and your new articles.
My laziness caused me to lock myself completely inside Facebook for a few years. It was only in the last year that I noticed some ways out and the internet outside. It’s funny, because now my laziness means that instead of dealing with an RSS reader, I have Excel in which I have my favorite www addresses, which I browse from time to time and your site is there.
I currently have professional problems, I don’t know which path to take, I lack programming skills, so I won’t go in that direction. At the moment I do DTP, but the pay is getting worse.
Well, just wanted to share a bit with you … Take care and go your own way. I will read whatever you add here on this website :) Take care!