Welcome,
dear Netopia-reader! The Internet has been around since the Seventies, the World Wide Web since the early Nineties. We all use it every day, in fact it is almost impossible to get by without (try for a day, it’s a lot more difficult than you may think!). We carry phones in our pockets that can access the Internet in an instant. It’s all around us, it touches everything we do: work-life, money, friends, news, entertainment, housing, shopping, travel, banking, education, insurance, government institutions… even our love-life. And yet, we almost always talk about it in the future tense. How many times have you heard that the internet will change our lives? But it’s here. And it’s been here for quite some time now. And it will keep evolving, but we can learn a lot from what it already is. And we built it. Our tax money provided the basic research, many of the inventors worked in public institutions, our elected policy-makers passed the laws that made it happen. Sure, it’s complex and maybe no-one completely understands it, but it is our creation. It is about time we talk about what we want from it and how that can happen. We are not slaves to technological development or abstract markets, we are humans with free will and the responsibility and power to build our society the way we think it should be. Netopia’s mission is to be part of that conversation – not the “if”, but the “what” and the “how”. You are welcome to join!
