The same month the web learned to share, it learned to spy.

October 1995 gave us two things worth remembering together. CPAN, a shared archive that let programmers around the world build on each other’s work, and the first recorded use of the word spyware, buried in a Usenet joke.

Both were seeds. One grew into the culture of open collaboration that made modern software possible. The other grew into surveillance, dark patterns, and the parts of the internet we now try to protect our parents from.

Every powerful medium ships with its shadow attached. The people building the web were not naive about this, but they were optimistic, and optimism has a blind spot. I try to build knowing both seeds are always in the packet.