it's impossible to separate our first experience of the Internet from our first experience of college and living in a completely different home. we were young and stupid (and traumatized and dissociated), still apt to be starry-eyed about the infinite promise of technology. it was easy to project our ill-informed idealism onto the Internet. we didn't know how it worked; we didn't reflect on the intrinsic elitism and inequality of a communications medium available chiefly to students of expensive universities. we believed the superficial and outlandish hype about how the Internet and personal computing were going to be a revolutionary, democratizing, unifying force—a gigantic library and meeting-square available to "everybody". ("everybody" and "everyone" are words that fall all too easily from the lips of tech executives and elite programmers, aren't they?)
I feel like there's a larger point to be made here about how the 1980s and 1990s, thanks to the Reaganite counterreaction to the political ferment of the 1960s and 1970s, meant the death of hope for youthful political idealism and true social change. "idealism" itself started to become something a bit unreal and increasingly conceived strictly in terms of conventional social success. people's daydreams for the future became increasingly science fictional (or outright fantastical) and dissociated from present-day realities. why bother thinking about unpleasant things like poverty or oppression when "science" and "technology" and "progress" would simply erase all our problems? surely things were always whizzing upwards—surely, the sky was the limit.
it's rather too easy to see how the heedless and ill-educated optimism of 199x college kids, fooled into thinking that computers and the Internet were universal technological saviours, ended up yielding a STEM-lord culture obsessed with pretending that "artificially intelligent" gibberish generators are poised to replace all human creativity and solve all human problems.
~Chara