Reaching Out Into the Void
It seems like only a short while ago you could create a blog not unlike this one, just start posting, tell your friends about it, and soon enough you would have some kind of audience. You could say whatever you want, whatever came to mind. People just liked to hear other people’s unfiltered thoughts. And people liked to share their unfiltered thoughts–unedited, earnest, no post-Twitter irony to let people know “I’m thinking about this, but y’know, it’s really no big deal.” It seems like back then, if something was cool, even if it was only cool to you and you alone, it was a big deal.
It seems like back then, there was much more hope for what the internet could be. There were certainly a lot of great ideas for what the internet should be. I spoke with an economics professor once, a really brilliant guy on the older end of the millennial age group, and he told me about how everyone thought that the internet would be the end of ignorance, of bigotry, of all that stuff. It makes sense on paper: unlimited access to all the information our world has to offer, ready to be explained in careful detail, in any language, to anyone who could ever think to ask.
Of course, now, in our 20/20 hindsight, we recognize the cavernous gap between information and truth. Nobody ever wrote, “information will set you free,” because lies are information. Hateful ideology is information. I’m no anthropologist or anything, but I think most people can agree that it’s probably not even in human nature to be all good and virtuous all the time.
And so, people started to get hurt. People started to get lied to. The collective culture of the internet, then in its adolescence, just as adolescents do in high school, began to adapt in response to the shock that it suffered once it realized there are people in its midst that seek to do harm. We cast away our childlike wonder at the brave new world before us, and instead decided, “y’know, it’s really no big deal.” Blogs dedicated to passions and democratization of everything everywhere ever fell to the wayside, and Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and Instagram took their place, as people decided they prefer not to wear their hearts too conspicuously on their digital sleeve. We are very obviously worse off for it.