The open web as gift economy

Read the full post at - The open web as gift economy Beautiful essay -> https://tracydurnell.com/2025/01/27/the-open-web-as-gift-economy-part-4/ I got online in 1997, when I was in middle school. My earliest experiences online centered on connection and creation. I’d heard that the school libraries had this thing called the Internet — on my lunch break, I loaded up a chat room and met someone from England. Growing up, my best friend had moved to Montana, and we became pen-pals because long-distance calls were too expensive. Talking to that stranger in England, I knew viscerally that the internet was made for connection: a shy pre-teen girl in California could meet someone across the world… for free. A summer school computer class taught me how to make a basic website — a horrendously ugly page about Monet with yellow type on a repeating water lily background Dial-up internet was too slow to explore around much, so when we got internet service at my house, making my own Geocities site…