The death of the internet

hen I was very young, before I was on the internet — even before the internet was really a thing you could “go on” — I would dial into BBSs (bulletin board systems). BBSs were kind of like private, micro-internets that people set up in their houses. You had to use a dial-up modem to connect to them, and the people who were in charge of these networks (usually just some random technology enthusiast) could shut them off or boot you at any time. I got booted a lot when I was kid, because I was curious and annoying and all the things I am today but way less savvy about it. Once a guy who ran a BBS called my house to complain to my mother that her son had been snooping around in places he wasn’t supposed to go — I don’t remember what I was after, but I’m sure he had a very good reason to be angry.

Here’s why I mention this: What I was doing online, in a virtual space, had real-world repercussions. It was real. What I was doing was real. That guy who complained about me was real. And I realize now that I never treated or experienced the internet like some other thing — as if the physical world were “real” and what happened on the internet was something less. That was where my real life was. That’s where I was, as a person.

The internet was the most real thing to me that I’d ever had in my life, before my wife and my daughter; my job, my house, my things. Its existence helped to form the basis of my worldview, my politics, my obsessions. It gave me tools to talk and create in ways that would have been impossible in another age. But it was never not reality. I wish the rest of the world had always seen it this way…