#splinternet

Here’s the bad news: there never was another universal town square for science fiction. The community splintered across many different platforms. While that was a real loss, it wasn’t an unmitigated loss. Those communities incubated all kinds of writers and readers who found the SFRT inhospitable or overwhelming.

But the other reason the community never recohered is that we kept trusting other businesses to own those communities, and they kept betraying our trust. Prodigy wanted us to “stop talking to each other and start buying things.” Livejournal purged its queers.

The most successful successor to GEnie SFRT is Archive of Our Own (AO3), a freewheeling, welcoming, volunteer-run, nonprofit fanfic site with a gaggle of pro-bono lawyers and a deep bench of community specialists and technologists.

The internet came along. It was bigger. It was better. Once web browsers entered the picture, it was easier to use.

GEnie was text-only, accessed via a terminal program that used arcane text commands that were easier to use than, say, a text-based Usenet reader, but still too much for many. When GE finally released its first graphic interface, it was slow, buggy and crude.

But mostly, it the GEnie died because GE didn’t give a shit about GEnie. These were the Jack Welch years, when the company was getting out of the “doing things” business and converting itself into a doomed, cockamamie finance scam.

A mediocre, ultrawealthy sociopath found himself in charge of a once-in-history, all-encompassing town square, and he destroyed it, without even noticing.

Sound familiar?

As a 16 year old baby writer, putting stories in the mail and collecting form rejections, I found myself in a thriving, accepting community whose members included virtually every living writer I idolized. Many of them became friends. Many of them became lifelong friends.

When I was accepted into the Clarion writing workshop in 1992 and realized I couldn’t afford it, some of the greatest writers in the field mailed me $10 and $15 checks to help pay my tuition.

One of those checks came from Patrick Nielsen Hayden. A decade later, Patrick — then the senior editor at Tor Books, the largest sf publisher in the world — bought my first novel. He’s bought every novel since

.I wasn’t the only fan or aspiring writer to join that endless consuite. It was huge. It was vibrant.It was amazing.And then, it died.

GEnie aimed to absorb those idle cycles and fill those empty leased lines. For a flat monthly fee, GEnie subscribers could dial into a special subsection of GEIS designed for socializing — but only between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m. If you stayed online after the sun rose, you got hit with a $20/hour dial-in fee.

GEnie was divided into “roundtables” (RTs), each devoted to a different subject: politics, Disney, sports, pets — and, of course, science fiction.

The SFRT (Science Fiction Round Table) was the first and last universal town square English-language science fiction ever had.

This was made possible by a stroke of genius (or accident of history): every paid-up member of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA, now the “Science Fiction Writers Association”) got a free membership to SFRT, with unlimited time, including in that 8 a.m.-6 p.m. slot.

Before long, every sf and fantasy (and horror!) writer with a modem in the USA and Canada (and elsewhere) was dialing up to the SFRT and carrying on a kind of infinitely large consuite dream blunt-rotation. Wanna see Damon Knight trading quips with George RR Martin, only to be interrupted by Neil Gaiman tag teaming with Kristine Kathryn Rusch? That happened like every day.

Your internet experience now depends on your passport

Remember when the internet was supposed to connect the world?

Yeah, about that...

The Digital Iron Curtain:

🇨🇳 Chinese Internet: No Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube

🇺🇸 American Internet: No TikTok (soon?), No Huawei

🇪🇺 European Internet: GDPR everything, Right to be Forgotten

🇷🇺 Russian Internet: Kremlin-approved content only

🌏 Everyone Else: Whatever's left

TikTok isn't just an app ban. It's the death certificate for the "World Wide Web."

Digital Sovereignty Is The New Nationalism:

Every country now wants:

Their own data centers

Their own internet rules

Their own content moderation

Their own digital borders

"The era of the global internet is over. What we're seeing with TikTok is just the beginning." - Internet governance expert

The TikTok Precedent:

Once the US successfully bans a major platform for "national security":

🇮🇳 India already banned TikTok in 2020

🇦🇺 Australia eyes Chinese apps

🇬🇧 UK considers similar measures

🇪🇺 EU drafts more restrictions

The domino effect is real.

What This Means For You:

Future internet starter pack:

✅ VPN subscription (mandatory)

✅ Multiple app stores

✅ Regional versions of everything

✅ "This content is not available in your country"

✅ Digital passport checks

The Irony:

The US criticized China's Great Firewall for YEARS. Called it censorship. Undemocratic. Against free speech.

Now the US is building its own firewall, just with "national security" gift wrapping.

The real victim? That naive 2010s dream of a borderless digital world where information flows freely and connects humanity.

Pour one out for the global internet. 2005-2025. It had a good run.

Welcome to the Splinternet Era, where your geographic location determines your digital reality. The future is local, fragmented, and controlled.

TikTok didn't kill the global internet. It just showed us it was already dead.

Sources: MIT Technology Review, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic