what if we had places free from commercial imperatives altogether? The overwhelming majority of the time we spend online is on platforms or spaces that are actively attempting to commodify and commercialize our attention. It wasn’t always this way. The earliest version of the internet, and then the one that blossomed in the late 1990s and the 2000s, was built on a whole host of entirely noncommercial structures that allowed people to interact and build community, and share and flirt and chat and the like without any undergirding commercial interest in what they did.
