That Whole Internet Thing (not just the cat memes)

Back in the day, before people had personal computers or a glimmer of what that might mean, I went to the New England Folk Festival in the burbs of Boston. It was a yearly event and still goes on. That year, the nerdier nerds of the folk dance community had set up something called the Internet Petting Zoo where you could sit down at a screen and look at something called “web pages” which had information about dance and singing and other kinds of events in places other than the one we were in. Via something called “the internet.”

My brain went KA-BLAM.

The idea of being able to put information out there, somehow (who knew how that actually worked?), so that other people could look at it was revolutionary. Not a mailed newsletter or a poster or a flyer you might hope to get to another event for people to pick up and take home and tell their friends about. Not a paid ad in some obscure magazine.

We got a computer that could be hooked up to this thing, via a phone line (which meant the phone was pretty much non-functioning most of the time). I found something about how to create this thing called a web page and did what it said to do. But then… It sat there on my screen and it looked like it was supposed to but it was just a file on my computer and that wasn’t right. I called the guys at albany.net and explained my problem. How do you get this thing called a web page so that other people can see it?

Oh, they said, you need this software that lets you do FTP and here are the bits of information you need so you can UPload your files to OUR computers so you can tell other people where the files are and this is what your website address will be.

KA-BLAM.

A few years later, while trying to get a new quilt show up and running I put all the information up on some first gen web pages, creating a website and I’d go to meetings and tell people, “for more information go to our website” and they would stare at me like I was speaking Russian or maybe some rare Mongolian dialect. It was several years before anyone would say, “what was that address again?”

For awhile, I even worked in the halcyon dot com world, helping people create websites and community on this thing called the world wide web.

All these years later, the internet still surprises me.

This week I got caught up in the Exploding Kittens Kickstarter phenomenon. I pledged $35 and these three guys promised to create, publish and send me a card game. Well, me and 219,381 other people. The most number of backers and the third highest amount of money crowd sourced via Kickstarter to date.

I add those last two words without hesitation because I’m sure there will be other wonderful things to come. Now, you might be thinking, what is all this craziness about a silly card game involving exploding kittens and other weirdnesses? Surely there are important things in the world that deserve our attention and resources. Yes certainly there are. There always will be. (And there will be a lot of talk about what happened to create this phenom.)

When they met their goal in the first couple hours and saw the goal buried in an avalanche of pledges, the team didn’t get tied up in deciding what t-shirts and wonderful prizes they should offer as “stretch goals.” They stayed focused on their original idea, added a single known bonus for everyone and an undisclosed surprise for everyone and then they had three final days of partying with their backers:

Day one: a twitter-fest of posts and photos and quasi-drinking games
Day two: they sent pizza parties to a whole bunch of animal rescue organizations.
Day three: in the closing hours of the campaign they had a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) session.

After the Kickstarter clock ticked down to zero on the Exploding Kittens, I got update #16 from the project team. These are sent to all backers but this one I’m sharing because this is what I love about the internet and all its power and silliness and people:

#16
thank you
Posted by Elan Lee

On the very first day of this campaign, we hit our funding goal. That was a big deal.

But after that, the campaign stopped being about money, and started being about a community. We decided that everything we did from that point on would be to celebrate you guys, and help you celebrate each other.

In the last 30 days, you’ve broken a lot of records, but we wanted to highlight our favorite one: you made this the most fun Kickstarter to run of all time.

Thank You,

The Exploding Kittens Team

And that, my friends, is what I love about the internet. There are a lot of fun people out there which you might never have met if it weren’t for the internet. Maybe you don’t meet them but you can communicate with them, share with them, learn from them, maybe even meet them in real life as they say. You can be part of a crowd that backs a card game or part of a group that builds a community or makes change happen in the world. And if you don’t think that’s true, you don’t know enough about how the world wide web works. And you need to.