Old Days of the Internet
Back in the old, dark days of the internet when men were men, women were men and children were FBI agents, no one cared what people thought of them. This was when the internet was still merely a bright spark of newly discovered freedom burning bright against the darkened backdrop of a world half enslaved by totalitarian freedom-hating governments, unscrupulous money grabbing corporations, backward millennia-old religions and millions upon millions of dead eyed sheep. The internet burned brightly as an escape, a way to show who you were to a wider audience, a way of discovering and sharing things you never knew existed, a way of forcing back the ever encroaching shadows of the real world to keep your internal flame burning just that little bit longer.
The internet burned brighter and stronger as the rush of people to it acted as fuel to the fire, and the rush of companies to it was the oxygen it needed to sustain itself, and to grow. The Napster and Kazaa era came and went as the dark lords of the world attempted to wrestle back their power from this bastard child of technology and freedom that we know as the web. People pushed each other by finding, creating and sharing things that would have people in the old world hung, drawn and quartered but in this new space, this virtual plane of existence it did not solicit the fiery condemnation of preachers and politicians alike. We laughed. We saw these examples of hate, of destruction and of evil and we laughed and encouraged them, for it was not the same evil as that which ravaged the lands of the physical world, but an evil unsullied by power, money, dogma or time. This was new evil, strong evil, and pure evil it shaped a generation and a way of life was born. The internet was no longer an escape from life, it was a mirror of it, a dark and distorting mirror in which our reflections are not always what we wanted, hoped or indeed expected to see.
anonymous
Thank you