The Free Love/Internet Days


Napster in the late 90s is as close as my generation will ever get to Free Love. The start of the sharing economy. The takedown of the big record labels. The movement that made everyone think that every song, image, video, and article on the Internet should be available at any moment and with no charge attached. My university was among the first in the nation to get broadband, and one dorm in particular was parked on top of the pipeline. I remember hearing years later that 20% of all Napster traffic in 1999 could be traced back to that one dorm building. It's like our dorm was the Haight-Ashbury of the Free Internet movement and we never had any idea.

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