I vividly remember my first day on the internet. I was sat in my teenage bedroom, staring at a bulky cathode ray tube monitor, which my dad had surrounded with spider plants in order to hopefully absorb some electromagnetic radiation. My 14.4K modem connected - loudly and slowly - to an Internet Service Provider that my mother was testing out as part of her job as a telecommunications analyst. I was already using Bulletin Board Systems and had participated in conversations on FidoNet, but this was something new.

Instead of flashy websites or apps, my first internet experience took place in a black terminal window with monotype text and a maximum width of 80 characters. There were no links, no movies, and no startups. I didn't have a connection resembling broadband, and there was no WiFi. My only guide was a location called Gopher Jewels with a menu of places I could visit.

I visited a Coke machine at Carnegie Mellon University, thousands of miles away from my bedroom. It told me its temperature and whether I could buy a Coke, and I still remember how it made me felt. It seems mundane, perhaps, today - but in a way, that made it cooler. I wasn't reading a speech by the President of the United States. I was connecting to a Coke machine on another continent, probably in some dusty corridor somewhere. It was like speaking to a hatstand in Antarctica; absolute magic.

Not long afterwards, I downloaded a software application called NCSA Mosaic. It let you browse something called the World Wide Web, which was kind of like Gopher, but easier to use and write content for. A developer called Marc Andreessen had proposed a new extension that allowed you to share and view inline images, which was exciting, and allowed for a new kind of experience: watching a live photo of a coffee machine at Cambridge University. Cambridge was really just down the road, but like the Coke machine, it still felt like magic. I was able to travel through space and time.

The internet wasn't about making money. It was always about sharing knowledge and connecting to people. It had its problems - notably exclusivity of access - but I fell in love with it. It seemed like a glimpse into a beautiful new future, where anyone could connect to anyone and they could collaborate and learn from each other to create new kinds of art, culture, academic work, and scientific endeavor.

The 14 year old version of myself who connected to the early commercial internet was, himself, part of something that older users called the eternal September. Prior to 1993, the internet had been overwhelmingly dominated by universities: every September, new students rolled in, temporarily lowering the quality of discourse until they learned the etiquette of communicating online. Suddenly, commercial internet service providers arrived, and September never came to an end. There was an avalanche of new users (me among them) that just kept coming.

And then some. There were roughly 14 million internet users in 1993; there are around 4.7 billion today.

The growth curve of the internet is S-shaped, as you'd expect. It took a little while to pick up steam, then skyrocketed, before reaching relative saturation. The businesses that were lucky enough to tether themselves to the high-growth middle and could keep with the pace generated billions of dollars in wealth: the Googles and Facebooks of the world were certainly filled with skilled, ambitious people, but they were also in the right place at the right time.

Which is how the internet became about making vast amounts of money. Startups could achieve enormous growth (and VC investment) just by placing a banner ad on the Yahoo homepage; Yahoo, in turn, could raise more money based on its ad growth. Meanwhile, the nature of the internet meant that businesses could grow to monopoly size faster than ever before, egged on by investors like Peter Thiel, who famously argued that competition is for losers.

This wave of unabashed capitalism washed away most of the utopian dreamers, replacing them with the kinds of bro-ey hustlers who would have worked in hedge funds if this had been the 1980s. Worse, their sudden riches came with sudden self-belief, as if the ability to make money building a website during a period of unprecedented growth somehow unlocked the secrets of the universe.

I'm not blameless: I've benefitted from this gold rush. I started my career working for universities, but Elgg, my first startup, raised a fairly modest half a million dollars after its first few, bootstrapped years. My salary at every subsequent job has been paid for, at least in part, by investor dollars. It's not, I feel compelled to point out, that investors are inherently bad: they empower a ton of really useful websites and communities to exist. It's that the Wall Street startup bros who swarm around them are no fun at all to be around, and that the investor-powered web shouldn't be the whole internet.

I very badly want to return to that utopian sensibility: that something doesn't have to make money to have value. That doesn't mean I want to go back in time: the early internet was a predominantly white, male, wealthy platform that people mostly accessed by having been admitted to an elitist institution. I want an egalitarian internet: not just one where all voices can be heard, but where everyone can help to build the fabric of the platform. The true joy of the internet is that everyone builds it together. It has very little to do with engaging with someone's ad-powered social media website.

I've come to realize that I resent the expectation that everything I make has to be profitable. Sometimes, I just want to make: one of the coolest things about software, as with writing or art, is the way you can whip something up out of nothing. I want to see what other people make too, for no other reason that it's what moves them. It's not the revenue or the valuations that make the internet special; nor is it the protocols and technologies, at least not in themselves. It's the connections and the communities. The internet is people. The internet has always been people.

I can't exactly opt out of the commercial internet: I'm far from independently wealthy and need to earn money. Nor do I exactly want to. But I do want to remember that what excites me about the internet is the quirky creativity and connectedness of the diversity of human experience. It's about empowering people to connect and to be found, in a way that transcends the superficial. And it's about reclaiming the sense of magic I felt decades ago, when a magical vending machine in a dusty corridor changed my life forever.