If anyone is interested, the address is 986 Bathurst Street (right between Dupont and Bathurst). It is currently staffed on Thursdays and Fridays, from noon to 6pm. Here’s the website.

The article also reports on two couples who are planning to move to another country (Cambodia and the Philippines, respectively). Two of the three couples have direct family ties to the destination country. 2/3 already had jobs in their destination country, while the third lives on disability and pension checks. It would be interesting to follow up with these couples in a few years to see whether they planned responsibly:

• Inflation is currently worse in the Philippines than anywhere else in Asia and there is no sign of improvement. The country is considered by the UN to be the most disaster-prone in the world, and these unstable conditions will only worsen due to climate change. Will that family prosper in a country living under increasingly constant emergencies?

• Cambodia is already badly affected by climate change and conditions will only worsen there. The Mekong River, which supports much of the country’s agricultural industry, is already starting to dry out. This will also cause massive flooding and disease spread during the rainy season. Can an older couple on a fixed income, one of whom is disabled, survive unpredictable climatic and economic changes in a developing country?

• Barbados is almost entirely dependent on the tourist sector. Any negative impacts on tourism, for example a future pandemic or the effects of global warming on the country’s tiny beaches, can be ruinous. The country’s entire economy contracted by 14% in FY2020/21, for example, and despite their PM’s strong personality the government still had no solution but to beg the IMF and UN for assistance. Does the business owner in Barbados have a plan for what happens when tourists stop visiting Barbados?

These and many other factors need consideration before you move to a developing country…

What I mostly remember is the sense of hard work and discovery.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, after the internet became a public phenomenon, but before it totally dominated our lives, spending time on the web felt very different than it does today. There was no publicly-accessible index of websites, search was in its infancy, and link aggregators as we know them today just didn’t exist. For the first time, you didn’t need to be a tech-savvy person to experience the WWW, but it was still pretty incomprehensible to most people, who didn’t understand what the internet was for.

New “homesteaders” developed websites on free hosts like GeoCities/Tripod/Angelfire; the former host organized itself into “neighbourhoods” of sites because we still thought about the internet as a physical space. Web rings served as pilgrimage routes that connected websites together, irrespective of domain or host, into self-selected communities. They organized around subjects/themes, like Lemmy communities, subreddits, hashtags, etc. are today. They emerged around the same time as public bulletin boards which, for people who were not familiar with BBS, were also a transformative technology, and also the source of life-changing memories.

I am so privileged to have been around to explore the early internet.