Last week I went to a talk by Dene Grigar about the NEXT and electronic literature at the Born Digital Archives and Memory Conference.

The talk itself was an introduction to the NEXT, its collections, and modern ways of preserving digital artefacts of the early web. Grigar and her colleagues have been experimenting with using virtual reality to display objects which the NEXT holds in its collection. For example, visualising an issue of the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext, which was distributed physically on floppy disks. This example uses the WebXR Device API through three.js to interact with VR headsets in the browser, and the code is on github.¹ Very cool!

The main thing I took away from the talk was the way that Grigar talked about the web. It felt like the web is something she (still) believes in,² holding on to a techno-optimist vision of the web as a space of expression and creativity. This was completely refreshing to me, as someone who has definitely developed a techno-pessimist attitude over the last few years.

Big tech monopolies are on a course to commodify every interaction, push mass surveillance, take power away from the user. I was once hopeful for bitcoin, but became disillusioned by the horrendous tide of con-artists and slimy finance bros. The same grifters are now trying to sell you ‘Artificial Intelligence’, while a swish of the magician’s cape hides the labour of the worker suffering on the other side of the algorithm. The cyberpunk visionaries were right, we are living in the world where the megacorporations won, and the machines are being used against us.

If anything I’m less cynical than I used to be, and I still get to use the web in my own way. I try to maintain this website, I subscribe to lots of good little personal blogs, I interact with friendly people across the social web, and of course, I use an ad-blocker. All of this is undercut by a suspicion that my very human experience of the web is not shared by most people around me.

Standing here in 2025, the emancipatory future of the World Wide Web looks like a hazy dream, so far away from where we are now. And yet, Dene Grigar was there at the beginning, and she saw something wonderful.