Trying to understand the Internet, the Universe, and everything else.
Why should I start blogging in 2023?
The first time I produced any content for the Internet was in 1999 when I created a personal page on the now-defunct Yahoo! GeoCities. It worked more or less like a blog where I shared some things I found on the Internet. Nothing too special, just some animated gifs and links.
Those who lived in that era may recall how difficult it was to access cool things. There was no YouTube and the closest thing we could get to a streaming service were P2P networks to download MP3 files. Google was not yet popular because it had barely been launched the previous year, and Altavista was the best search engine that I knew back in the day.
It was all very precarious compared to what we have today, but they were still promising days. As promising as they were worrisome for some people.
It seems reasonable to say that each era manifests its fears through artistic expressions such as books or cinema. To give you an idea of this fear to which I am trying to refer, let us remember that in 1999, the films The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor were released. Both speak of dystopian worlds where reality is a computer simulation. In bookstores, science fiction was once again stealing the show with novels about high-tech societies and space colonies in titles like William Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy, not to mention the rescue of classic works such as those written by Isaac Asimov such as I, Robot and the Foundation trilogy. The counterpoint was The Lord of the Rings fantasy series by J.R.R. Tolkien.
At that time, I read Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, and I felt really excited about the future — we would be more lucid, kinder, more concerned about our actions and more committed to critical thinking. We would become an intellectually emancipated society.
In the following years, I ventured into at least three blogs, a podcast, and occasional appearances on YouTube, a long presence in the early years of Twitter and Facebook, not to mention the long discussions I had in some communities on the now-extinct Orkut. I spent many hours on ICQ, MIRC, and MSN messenger too.
I had a very solid impression that I was part of an enthusiastic minority. Most of the people I knew didn’t seem to be very interested — or fearful — about the online world, especially the older ones who had reached adulthood even before the internet existed.
At some point, all that enthusiasm of mine cooled down. Something seemed not to be going very well. It became increasingly clear that the environment on the internet, especially on social media, became, let’s say, unpleasant. That “look how cool” spirit gave way to a feeling of “who are we going to ridicule today?” Suddenly, I found myself being attacked on Twitter for such silly and childish reasons by people whom I didn’t even know existed. I even convinced myself that maybe I was getting too old for the internet.
Just like people’s patience, the content became shorter and shorter. It seemed that no one wanted to listen to others or read those long texts that we shared on blogs, like the one you’re reading now — and if you’re reading this, I’m not sure whether to thank you or apologize.
Things got stranger and stranger for me until in 2012, I gave up on the internet, at least as a content producer or active figure. I closed all my accounts on social media. I deleted my blog, my vlog. I jumped off. I disappeared from the map.
Well, things change. Today, I probably only know half a dozen people who don’t have a profile on some social network — and half of them are over eighty years old.
It was a long hiatus for me, a long time during which I almost believed that things could change so that I could return to the internet, but things didn’t change as I expected (or imagined). The internet remains a complicated and dangerous place, perhaps even more so than before, just like offline life.
2023!
At this point, I understood that maybe — like so many other people — I idealized the internet in its early days as a place immune to the most frightening side of the human being. I think that’s why so many people — like me — seemed to run here, to have virtual experiences that would alleviate the harshness of life outside.
The internet was occupied and became more real than we (or want to) conceive. There’s no longer this story of real and virtual life. It’s all mixed together as one thing. And it’s good to realize that soon. Online life is a mirror — albeit somewhat distorted — of what we experience on the other side of the screen.
I ended up convincing myself that we’re on an irreversible path. I probably won’t see a world without the internet anymore — and that left me with two basic choices: to withdraw and try to live like some kind of legendary ancient Greek who isolated themselves from the polis, a recluse (idhiótis); or to accept that I needed to come back here and occupy my space and be the protagonist of my own role as an individual in an interconnected world.
So, here I am, writing this blog.
It’s been twenty years on this road trying to understand the Internet, the Universe, and everything else.
Carrying more questions than answers, I’ll keep trying.
By the way, this is my first text on Medium. Thank you for taking the time to read it. See you on the next one.
