The Pnictogen Wing is getting old.
We've been online, in some persona or other, from some account or another, since late 1992. Indeed, getting addicted to the early 199x Internet was one of the main reasons we flunked out of Caltech–to be fair there were others, like movies and comic books and weed and playing too much DOOM. Back in those Caltech undergrad days, the Internet still looked miraculous. There was the nascent World Wide Web, which was mostly hand-coded flat HTML back then and therefore easy to browse even from a terminal emulator; there were FTP servers to browse for freeware and shareware; and there was Usenet for endless Discourse[tm] among awful nerds with arrogant opinions about every little thing–i.e. just the milieu in which I (well, our 199x self) was struggling to find a place and a posture.
Arguably, I'm still an awful nerd with arrogant opinions about every little thing. But I'm no longer very excited about sharing that with the entire world, or at least with that fraction of the world that's always online.
Back in 1992 it was easy for our naive adolescent (and profoundly withdrawn) self to believe the glowing promises about the Internet and "cyberspace"–for example, I vaguely remember coming across the claim that the Internet could be treated like a universal library, with URLs being equivalent to library-catalogue entries for books, and...well, that didn't work out. Now make no mistake, I'm grateful for what access to general information the Internet allows me today, mostly thanks to the Internet Archive, public-domain archives like Gutenberg, and Sci-Hub permitting me to read a good number of scientific and academic articles. But I feel like I'm always nervous that these things are temporary, liable to disappear on me overnight (Sci-Hub especially), and that's one of the many reasons why I feel like those old 199x daydreams of the Internet as a gigantic virtual library now seem ridiculously optimistic.
But using "cyberspace" as a library or reference source isn't really why I got addicted to the early 199x Internet. Sure, it was wonderful to be able to look things up and feel as though the knowledge of the world was merely a few keystrokes away–but the really important and alluring thing about the Internet was that you could spout off there. You could put yourself forward, advertise yourself, develop an online presence, build yourself a kind of virtual shopfront or clubhouse. And thanks to the progressive corporatization and capitalization of the Internet throughout the 1990s, there was even the promise of money: if you worked hard enough on the Internet, if you amassed enough social capital and spread your personal brand around, it could even make you rich. Some ghost of that daydream still haunts the Pnictogen Wing; we're broke and devoid of career prospects, but we still find ourselves thinking of the lucky people who turned (say) a blog or a webcomic or a freelance programming hobby into successful self-employment, with the help of the Internet.
It's the "American Dream", some version of it anyway; it's like virtual settler culture. Grab yourself some territory (without asking yourself any awkward questions about why the territory is there for the grabbing), build yourself a private empire, and reap the rewards of "entrepreneurship" and success.
We've lived through thirty years of this mercenary Internet colonialism, watching it spread and flourish, watching advertising and brands and marketing–and the antic culture and corruption of language and thought that results from absorbing too much marketing–spread into every corner of "cyberspace". It's gotten to the point where merely existing online, especially if it's on any sort of commercial social-media site, feels exhausting. The simple act of posting on a particular social medium feels like a move in a tedious and protracted game of building and protecting one's social capital. Every squabble online feels like something that could hurt us forever, because when you have next to zero social capital, the loss of even one friendship can feel lethal.
It's all become so intolerably sad to me. I'd love to be able to do what a lot of other people have done, in an attempt to find some way of living online, and take refuge in older methods of Internet expression–going back to simple hand-coded websites, older protocols, even reviving stuff like Usenet and Gopher...trying, I guess, to recapture the magic of those golden early years like I experienced at Caltech in 199x. I've had ideas like that, but without much enthusiasm. Isn't it still being online? "Terminally online," even? Why should we be online at all? Maybe we should be reading books (or writing them) or working on the garden or spending more time with people in "real life" instead of worrying about what sort of posture we're striking on Discord (or Bluesky or the fediverse or Cohost or self-hosting or wherever.)
There's no fun in any of this, any more. It's not been fun for a long time.
~Chara