The old white men who claimed that the internet was some kind of magical digital hippie commune on the information superhighway back in the 1990s were fucking insufferable. I worked alongside a couple of them when I was 19, my first and only print magazine job. All they wanted to do was smoke weed in the office and hang out with self-proclaimed futurists, who seemed happy to hang out with anyone who was providing weed. Some of them wore tweed jackets and acted like they were proper scholars, some of them were the t-shirt and short-shorts type. But all they could talk about was how the web was going to change everything, maaaaaaan. They all seemed like clowns, cavemen who acted like what happened on the computer was literal magic. Every time R*shkoff--who did not invent the word "Screenager," by the way, a sales guy at the magazine I was working for at the time coined it--comes up I just kinda shake my head and chuckle, thinking about how absolutely out of touch they all seemed to me. It ain't magic, old man, they're just computers.
I mean that's what I get for not having an account on The Well, I guess. I fell in with a somewhat harder-edged group of people. I don't say that to brag, I mostly say it to say that I was shaped by people who thought a lot of the people getting online in 1993-94 were fucking idiots and the whole thing was slowly running down the drain. You wouldn't call these new friends "cyberpunks" in the extremely dumb '90s sense, I suppose, but they were the people out there building their own machines, getting their hands on parts by any means necessary (meaning credit card fraud, mostly, something I'm glad I never got wrapped up in). These were the sort of people who made sure I was smartened up and got on the right side of Eternal September even though I really only got online (in a global, internet type of way) a year or so prior to it all going bad. I got into the idea of phone phreaking, but most of the cool shit had already been patched up and forgotten by the time I was old enough to get out of the house and properly steal phone service. We built a lineman's handset and did some dumb shit. We recorded 25-cent tones onto a mini-tape recorder and used it as a makeshift red box, but we never had anyone worth calling from a pay phone. We vandalized local BBSs in ways that absolutely led directly back to us because we were idiot kids. Now I'm waiting for my Flipper Zero to arrive and wondering how easy it'd be to clone someone's car key from a distance. I... almost certainly won't bother to find out.
It all used to feel so open. The world wide web felt like it was the absolute dumbest of shit--even the official sites were ramshackle domains that were desperately trying to figure out why, exactly, they had a web site in the first place. Usenet reigned. One of the coolest things you could do with a web browser was look at a coffee pot across the country to see if that particular tech lab had any coffee left or not. No one ever typed their credit card number into a website because web sites weren't selling anything. I mailed a guy some carefully concealed cash to buy a hacked cable box and watched a lot of wrestling and somewhat less pornography. I learned enough HTML and made a little money building some insanely bad websites for people once my magazine job vanished, but once frames came along I was out of my league. I reviewed websites for a search engine that felt that humans should write reviews of websites for a search engine, like that was a possible task. At that point, shit, maybe it was. I don't think they ever launched.
Now everyone's actual livelihood is tied to this fucking network. And there are still a billion different companies out there clogged up with a trillion different middle managers with zero vision and a singular loyalty to their division's P&L. Nothing more, nothing less. I mean, at least we all know where we stand in this scenario. But god damn it, I'm sick of seeing people doing good work and getting laid the fuck off, fired, or burned out by all of it. The technohippie dudes of the early 1990s and their extremely embarrassing visions of the future were abysmal and it was never going to be like that... but it wasn't supposed to be like this, either.
Too late to go back now, and at this point all the flowery "internet for the people" language has been co-opted by crypto dirtbags anyway. I wonder if any of them had accounts on The Well back in the day.