Just the act of getting online to seek out others was super niche, so I feel like it was a bit of a "finding your own tribe" experience for me.
How so? Because we could send mail instantly instead of using a stamp and envelope?
Because we could buy stuff without leaving the house?
Because we could read/listen to/watch stuff without paying the people who created it?
I can tell you I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am without this, yes.
First because I (/my parents) didn’t have the money, second because of pure geographical access.
I saw movies and shows from countries that would never sell near me, read books that would never be in my country’s libraries, took courses straight from scientists and engineers rather than a thrice translated work…
The barrier of entry was also useful, curiosity is much better fed when you can download a medicine textbook just to check rather than venturing into the library of a university you’re not part of.
That is the one thing the internet did right, spreading culture. It was over when they took boredom from us, that was the big evil.
I'm guessing you were still pretty young/not yet born at the time?
Online shopping didn't just mean "I don't have to leave the house", it opened up a whole world of what was even possible.
Prior to the web if you didn't live in a big city (and less people did then) then your access to books, music, movies was insanely restricted.
I deeply recall how painfully limited my local Sam Goody was, even major "alternative" bands only had partial discographies available. I remember visiting my father's college campus as an early teen and being beyond excited to find a copy of NIN's "halo 1" in a college town record store. True indie music was reserved for kids with cool older siblings that both knew where the stores were and could drive there. In order to watch Dragon Ball Z I had to rely on a friend whose dad was a plumber in NYC and knew where the bootleg stores in China-town were. I got to tag along once and picked up a single random episode of a Gundam series, never to be finished because I could never find another.
Sure it was sort of fun to figure all this stuff out, but at the same time my bookshelf is filled with books that changed my life in various ways I would simply never had been able to find (or even be aware of) in the pre-web days. If you wanted to learn programming in the 90s you had to hope your local Walden books had some good options, and you certainly weren't going to learn Haskell or Lisp. Mine only had books on Excel, so I didn't learn to program until I was older.
Now the fact that American suburbs where a complete cultural wasteland in the 90s might be the bigger issue than the cure which was the web, but nonetheless the early web did make the world of information much bigger.
That's not to say that the internet in 2000 was without flaws, but I do think on net it was beneficial to humanity.
I think it is more a problem of not caring (especially when not caring will result in social and/or economic reward) rather than not anticipating.
For any technology that is created you can and should anticipate that it will be, literally, weaponized since there are hundreds of thousands of years of precedent for this happening.
Or, I can think of something, and find the answer quickly. I can make friends with people (or argue with them) across continents.
Still, there are things that I do miss that were objectively "worse." Like there only being a few dozen channels, and cable TV being less important, so you knew everyone was watching the same thing. There seemed to be more of a shared culture.
I think a lot of people would be tempted by the nostalgia, but would quickly realize how much they'd be giving up.
But the internet and technology in general was so much more fun and exciting back then than it is now, IMHO. I'm sure some of my feelings there is nostalgia and youth or lack thereof, but a circa 1995 Socket 7 desktop motherboard could take cpus from Intel, AMD, Cyrix, IDT, and some others, and then there were all the non-pc options; that's a lot of competition and fun. Video game consoles were meaningfully different than each other, instead of the massively consolidated situation we have now. Arcade machines were more capable beyond just having large screens and specialized input devices.
I didn't get on the Internet until ~ 95, but at least for several years after that, it was a community of choice, rather than a place everyone had to assemble. That made interaction special in a lot of ways that are hard to reproduce now. There's some communities of choice on the internet, but they don't have the same kind of broad reach where you got all sorts of people where they would appear because computing was fun or helpful but they often had other things going on too, but most people didn't appear because they could avoid computing. The mixing function was pretty cool, but it's hard to replicate when forums tend to be all encompassing and there's too many people to really converse or are so narrow that everyone is too much alike.
I could certainly live with larger bid/ask spreads and fractional rather than decimal stock pricing as well as no odd lots and T+3? settlement. Current situation is better, but it's really not a huge deal. I can wait for slow shipping, and call people on the phone to make special orders...
By most aspects the world of 1990 didn't change that much from today's world, with the exception of having computers in our pockets and some advances in medicine.
I used to work with a guy who would tell me that, except email, life didn’t really change since the 80s. All we did was stick a screen onto everything, whether we needed to or not.
I was only born in the 90s but I mostly agree that far back.
Reminds me of a line by John Maynard Keynes from 1919 about life before WW1 —
“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep”
That said, the later generations probably are going to have a more shitty life, because of economic downturn since 2008. I can't even imagine what kind of life my son (5Y) is going to live through whence the cyberpunk world falls.
You mean innumerate and STEM ignorant politicians manipulated by tech bros high on their own supply financially engineered into existence?
Poverty wages everywhere except tech jobs was intentional. Ignoring the externalities like reliance on sweatshop labor and sacrificing diverse skills development was intentional. Little different than what they are doing with the ICE hiring bonus.
They got employees to go where they wanted; not operating from a diverse playbook: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...
Offshoring the late 90s and 00s was 100% meant to protect Intel, copyright; this isn't anything we did. Broad strokes were gamed out 2 decades ago.
The elder politicians don't want Americans in a position to win. They didn't want the risk of open compute production thriving in America; back in the 00s Napster made the threat to their IP and copyright schemes obvious.
They want political serfdom, fealty to elders delusion about themselves. We did little but follow orders because what choice did we have?
I am not owning this circus.
If you imagine we just got unlucky with the _wrong_ people in power, you haven't yet learned the real lesson, and are doomed to support the entire thing continuing, or being reborn in new form.
Am almost 50. Was in the room being told I had to help offshore others jobs. That's why I claim this was no accident.
I like how you make it a character problem of the masses! How dare they not know things intentionally kept from them! How dare they select the subset of dumb options.
Media intentionally kept people like Chomsky and others off the airwaves to keep control of the narrative, but damn gen pop! They should have known!
You going to sell me on Intelligent Design next?
"Us"? Don't lump me into this. I’ve been mocking tech bros and software startups the whole time. Low skilled, know nothing work. I started in EE. I look forward to AI that organizes machine states without software engineer middle men inserting their preferences on me.
We need to look at ourselves, and the dream we've swallowed. It's not going to get better by voting out the current crop of criminals. There is a never-ending line of equally corrupt applicants, right behind them. The entire system has been subverted. There's no fixing it.
I know I learned more from having ops in #unixhelp than stack overflow.
But the 90s were different, and it really depended on the channels.
I remember going into #nanog to finally get uunet to pull bgp routes once.
Sure there were bad parts, but at least you still had agency unlike with modern social media.
Everything2 is still around? whoooa, totally forgot about that. Gotta definitely get back into that. That seems like one of those great anti-modern-social-media ideas that the kids might like to learn about.
>If you do phone a friend at 4am to say "I'm down" they take it seriously.
Well, I mean I've never had friends so I can't really say too much about that. But I never really had anyone in my life that would do that so... eh?
> In RL, you can be alone on purpose without seeming antisocial.
>People try to get you to stay "just a little longer" and make you feel wanted.
No one's ever done that for me. Quite the opposite actually. I'm rather repulsive in real life so most people would prefer me away in real life.
> A hug is always nice, but a real, close, body-touching real life hug is … nicer :)
Is it? The two times I've been hugged in my life have been more just uncomfortable.
> You can know for sure that people who are being nice to your face aren't simultaneously bitching behind your back
... my father was praised as being a good man. He was also the same man that grabbed by my hair and violently introduced my face to the kitchen floor. Broke my nose and lip, then made me clean the blood up with my tongue as apology to him for forcing him to hit me. He's flung coins into my face hard enough to cut the skin. Broken coffee mugs over my head.
I don't blame him for doing what he did; I was difficult as a child. But it never really made any sense to me why his peers would praise him for being good when there was so much controversy over just spanking a child vs what happened to me when it seemed perfectly normal to me to get hit with a stick hard enough to bruise for a month afterwards.
Always made me wonder what else someone would hide from strangers.
> You can hear the warmth in the voice that says 'I love you' and see the look in the person's eyes
... This is something I've kind of wanted to rant about for a while. But no. I don't want love in my life. 25 years of my life were spent receiving bruises, cuts, and humiliation because my parents loved me. And I spent 25 years enduring it in silence because I loved them. Because that's what you're supposed to do when you love someone.
They're gone now. And I've had more then enough love in my life to say that I want no part of it anymore.
No, I think the quiet of an IRC screen is quite a quite a bit more preferable to outside.
I've never had to go through anything remotely similar.
I'd just want to point out what you've experienced is not love. There may have been some form of love from those people towards you, but the things you've described are not manifestations of that love, they're manifestations of something else.
I hope you can believe me. Sorry if I'm intruding.
My email is on my bio if you ever want to chat in a non-public setting.