Oddly, I don't see 3 years from 20y+ ago as History, as I've still got nameserver IP addresses and domains in my head from back then that are still up, but it's

Oddly, I don't see 3 years from 20y+ ago as History, as I've still got nameserver IP addresses and domains in my head from back then that are still up, but it's giving me the sense of how a lot of what we think of as history are minor events used as synecdoche (when a part is used to represent a whole) to represent an era. I took for granted that a 3 day concert in a field gets called the Woodstock Era and that the ideas attached to it were somehow important, and now 2 years of post cyberpunk bubble riding is being used as some kind of a foundation for meaning. That certainly puts that in perspective. :) It was an inflection point of some kind, sort of marking pre/post-internet in the culture. The story of doing what we were all doing without a sense of the impact it would have would be entertaining. I worked at one of the early ISPs as a teenager in about '95 and was in my early 20s when the dotcom boom happened, all after spending a few years playing in industrial bands and after raves went commercial, and y2k created a sense that if you were going to do anything, you needed to do it now. What can we learn from it? To me it was a story of co-opting and gentrification, where you had a small community of hackers scaling their bbs and fidonet services into ISPs, the last years of subcultures (as a thing at all) throwing their final parties before they got absorbed and homogenized into the internet. It was the beginning of a new abstraction, where I think culture became unmoored from physical relationships and (as predicted by po-mo theorists) is mostly simulacra. To use that era as a reference waypoint, I'd say we've reached peak credulity in regard to virtual, simulated culture that originates on the internet, and I'm optimistic the pendulum will swing back.