wow—that's a lot to read into just a single word! > It sounds like arrogance, group-think, and a lack of empathy for outsiders was pretty much at the heart of

wow—that's a lot to read into just a single word! > It sounds like arrogance, group-think, and a lack of empathy for outsiders was pretty much at the heart of your cyber-libertarian dream utopia. that sure is one way to characterize being a lonely teen who discovered a feeling of belonging in an emergently developing meta-culture set in an incredibly diverse environment of digital creativity, inspiration, and hope for the future, that anyone could feel like they belonged in if only they lurked for awhile to acclimate to the social norms of whichever communities seemed interesting to explore—only to watch it all turn into a shit garbage nonstop 24/7 orgy of pot-stirring clickbait, endless screeching about identity politics, opportunistic social posturing and grifting, and just general daily misery, all funneled right into the palm of your hand, ready for you to scroll through and get agitated about whatever the fuck latest nonsense thing is going on elsewhere in the world—and then when you're done with that, swipe your thumb a few more times, and easily access a dozen more endless feeds containing the same digital excrement, just with different seasonings. "normies" got thrown into being online 24/7 way too fast, before anyone could acclimate to the cultural norms that had already been established there, such that said cultural norms were immediately supplanted by a deluge of what was essentially mass immigration from a foreign, incompatible culture. and it wasn't even their fault, really, it was the corporations who were overly eager to usher in the New Age of Everyone Being Online At All Times, So As To Market More Things To More People. > It was just comfortable _for you_ because in that utopia, you had power. were you there for the Old Times? or do you genuinely know no other Internet than today's grotesque hellscape? because that's kind of what it sounds like. if I had any "power", it was the power to create, share, and consume creative content in a way mankind had never thought possible before—contrast this with today's Internet, in which 99.9% of users only engage in consumption, and not just any consumption, but consumption of the highest-bandwidth, lowest-effort, most-brain-cell-killing kind. if you call this "power", then you can hardly claim I was alone in having it, or that some identity/demographic property permitted me access to it—desktop computers were cheap and popular, and pretty much every household had one. anyone with the requisite curiosity and either patience to lurk or humility to be told to lurk could find something to enjoy, no matter what their interests were. there were no endless social feeds to scroll through just to intentionally read things that make you angry for political reasons because they were engineered to do exactly that, no highly centralized websites where everyone could yell at each other online—it was all smaller communities, like this one, with their own value systems, social norms, and so forth. it was good times. > But let's not kid ourselves that it was somehow free from all the failings of normal human society. this is why I asked if you were there at the time, because this sounds like the perspective of someone who either was not, or has since forgotten how much things have changed in such a short period of time—the Internet and the Real World used to be different things, not long ago at all, and everyone used to understand that. you used to have to sit down at a computer in order to interact with the Internet, and it was like jacking into the Matrix—when you logged off, you were back in the real world. that doesn't happen anymore, because even if you log off, everyone around you hasn't—if not physically then at least mentally.