The Early Internet

Twitter, Facebook, the 24 hour news cycle, wanting to be first, algorithms that put you into an echo chamber ... it's all bad folks. I got off Facebook 4 years ago and Twitter last year and I have to say my mental health is so much better. 

A lot of these companies hire psychologists who's specialty is gambling addictions. They don't do it to help you stop being addicted, they do it so they know exactly how to make you addicted to checking those sides and feeds all the time. 

And one of the things they found is most successful at getting you to come back is RAGE! It's something Fox News discovered in the early 2000s, it's something Twitter built into their algorithm a decade ago, it's something Facebook introduced the moment they added a news feed. 

If you are pissed off about something, you will engage with the site and posts more often. So the angrier you are, the more money they make off collecting and selling your data and advertising to you. 

I'm of the last generation that knows what is was like before the wide use of the internet. Granted, I was a kid, but I remember being much happier then. I wonder if older generations feel the same? 

It's sort of a blessing and a curse that you have access to the entire world. 

One the on hand, you get exposed to people and viewpoints you wouldn't in your cul-de-sac. This makes you a more well rounded person, considerate of others, and either strengthen or collapse the beliefs you had as a kid. 

There's a lot of studies and polls that show the access to the internet (and more diversity in the generation in general) is one of the many reasons why Gen Z tends to be much more tolerant of other races, gender, and LGBTQ+ issues. 

They aren't growing up thinking a gay person is a boogie man that might give them AIDs like kids coming out of the 80s did. They just know them as Julie, the person they play Fortnite with. 

The flipside to wide internet access is that you also get to see how incredibly evil most of the world is. And with wide spread camera usage (thanks iPhone), things that were whispered about like police brutality and political corruption are out in the open. All it takes is for one person to pull out their phone and capture it for the event to go viral. 

I have memories, mostly fond, of playing long games of roller hockey at the St. Jerome's Church parking lot. 

I used to ride my Huffy through the cornfield behind the school, jumping dirt ramps and exploring the creek. 

And of course, gathering up whatever loose change was around the house to go to Render's Drugs and buy 20 for a $1 Laffy Taffys. There was even one time, in my infinite wisdom as a child, I purchased an entire container of cake icing... cause I loved cake icing. I ate most of it, then threw up in the hot sun, and couldn't have normal cake icing again for years. 

We played freeze tag, kick the can, games that vaguely resembled soccer and whiffle ball, but ended more like Calvinball. Where the rules were made up as we went.

And sometimes we'd play Star Wars, where Ryan, Jake, and I would grab whiffle ball bats and smack the living hell out of each other because they were our lightsabers. 

That's some real hop scotch / jump rope / Little Rascals memories. 

And then the internet came. 

I still remember one of the first times my dad connected. We were called around the giant computer monitor to see a low graphic checkers board and a chat window with Chinese characters being typed. The Storys were online and playing chess with someone across the world. 

There was the distinct 90 second garbled tone in those early modems, one that I can still imitate, that was the sound of connecting to the internet. Despite it being an inarguably terrible sound, it still hits my ears like a warm blanket. 

Unless you were rich and had two phone lines, this sound signaled an uneasy truce in the house. No calls could come in while someone was on the internet, they would get a busy tone. And no one could pick up the phone or else the connection was gone. There was a lot of yelling up and down the stairs, blaming each other. 

There wasn't much to do on the early internet. 

You'd fire up Netscape Navigator and browse categories on Yahoo! instead of searching. So you'd click
music, then see 40 or so bands listed. When you clicked the band, you'd see if there was an official page or fan pages. 

I spent a ton of time on the first Limp Bizkit fan page. One of the first "viral" moments I remember on the internet was when one night Wes Borland (guitarist) signed into the message board and sent a super low res picture with the date and the board name and chatted to the 100 or so people in the message board for hours.

And the connection was so slow, sometimes you couldn't tell if you were disconnected or not. So I spent likely hours of my life watching the Netscape stars in the top corner of the browser. 

Then there was Gamefaqs, a site that still exists, where users write extensive text heavy video game guides. I probably burned $30 worth of ink printing off the walkthrough to Resident Evil and the fatalities for Mortal Kombat 2. (Where I sold them on the playground for a $1 a character. Sorry mom and dad, that money did not make it back into your pockets)

Soon we moved to Internet Explorer. We didn't realize it at the time, but Microsoft was doing some shady monopolistic practices to crush our old friends at Netscape. But this was the first time I felt the internet got an "Upgrade." 

The application looked sleeker, but our transition just happened to coincide with other quality of life Internet tools... like searching for a site. Instead of browsing lists of sites, you could search Yahoo! or Ask Jeeves. Gone were the AOL keywords. 

Eventually chat rooms became popular. My buddies and I would get on whatever Yahoo! forum, spend hours chatting while we very very slowly downloaded one song at a time through Napster. A good night would mean you downloaded two songs that were the actual songs you wanted. 

Then there was Battle.net. The future was in our hands. You could play Starcraft over these connections. Gone were the days of the low graphic chess boards. Now you were playing paper, rock, scissors with aliens. 

It was around this time the internet stopped feeling like a magical place. Companies started understanding what a website should look like. They started collecting domain names to buy and sell like stocks. The Dotcom boom made the internet corporate and much less cool.

I feel like Y2K was the event where we switched from the pirate internet where people were trying interesting things to the Disney internet, where everything was safe or there to make money. 

I don't know what the future looks like. Social media exploded as a sort of offshoot of AOL Instant Messenger. We had My Space and when you went to college, if you were a cool college, you had Facebook. And since then we've burned through more ideas and acquisitions than I can count. 

Anytime there's innovation, a bigger tech company (or private equity firm) buys the smaller company and bastardizes whatever was cool about it. Four Square was snatched up by Snapchat. Instagram and Whatsapp grabbed by Facebook and heavily integrated in their data collecting scheme. My precious Vine was killed by Twitter. My Space has been bought and sold by several big companies. It still exists, but I'm not sure why.

I don't know what the future holds for the internet, but it sort of feels like there's a backlash against it now. The influencer culture is driving large portions of the internet back offline and into nature. But those still on there, constantly refreshing their feeds, can't put it down and I don't know if they ever will as long as smart phones exist.