...

title

00/00/2025

internet then, internet now - some scattered thoughts

   i turned 28 last december and ever since then - and in the wake of (looks at date) recent events - i've been thinking a lot about how i got to where i have in life.

   a huge part of that has been realizing how lucky i was to learn about the internet the way that i did. screamers aside, i'm thankful that i grew up with memories of an internet that was still young and full of potential. an internet that was not yet quite as volatile as it's become today, where some nazi fuck can buy a social website and before you know it the government is wasting tax dollars @'ing specific celebrities like they're not the most powerful empire in the world.

   .......back to what i was saying.

   i'm thankful to have grown up savvy to technology and the internet. i was a saving grace as someone who grew up deeply curious about the world but stuck in a judgemental and trivializing society. i learned about the world, learned about myself, saw things i wish i hadn't, and met people i'm grateful to still have in my life. thinking back on my experience made me reflect on how my perspective has become old and unthinkable to the children of today. and i wanna talk about that!

safety

   caution was stressed heavily to us as kids. don't give away your location, use a nickname, don't say how old you are, never meet up with anyone under any circumstance, yada yada yada. i was a precoscious little kid that was left alone a lot, so i learned this on my own already and was able to tell when it was or wasn't safe to go against these rules. still, i knew they were important.

   back then we had no idea that data could be exploited and sold the way it is today. what i cared the most about as a kid was not being found online! kids bullied me in school and i knew they'd bully me more if they found out about my cringe little deviantart or youtube account - i thank my lucky stars every day that i correctly grew scared about my data might be used as a kid and started making sure that people couldn't find me using my e-mail or phone.

   what's interesting is that, though the cautions continue, the attitude of the people who taught me those things has changed. not always for the better. my mom went from assuming every stranger on the internet was a murderer to blindly believeing and sharing whatever frightening misinformation she came across on facebook.

   in my eyes older and much newer generations are both at about the same level of not fully understanding what they get into when they play around on the internet, because unlike gen z and especially millenials, they didn't have to make it through the wild west of pre-2012 internet. the dangers have changed in their presentation but still remain the same. don't show your kids' faces. don't talk about where you live in specifics. if you meet up with someone online, be smart and tell others. it's encouraging to see people try to protect each other when it comes up, but it alarms me to see how often it still happens. education is important!

 

attitude

   it is EERIE how similar our gamergate-fascist-infested 2025 internet is to my memories of the brazen "fuck you" toxicity of slur-happy 2006. they're even bringing the r-word back (no, i'm not saying it, that's my point). the only difference is now the crowds have gotten exponentially bigger and information travels much, much faster.

   now that i think about it, there were similar sociocultural moments framing both early 2000's and nowaday's internet. both occured during moments where the horrific devastation happening in the middle east was broadly televised by the same people carrying it out; during moments in USA history where thousands of citizens died in what were ultimately preventable deaths; and during moments of economic instability in both the US and my home country of Puerto Rico. people have little control over these big, world-changing events. the average joe is often stuck just trying to make it out the other side of the decade mostly intact. it makes sense that in these trying times people took to the internet to vent out their frustrations to like-minded peers, given they couldn't really do anything about them.

   maybe my blooming into a tumblrina prior to college colors my memory, but it's in between these times that i noticed a shift in attitude. for a little while there, things got nicer. if i could pinpoint a year it'd be around 2012? 2014? where for a few years the overall social air in the internet - and in media - became a little more...sanitized? less toxic? these were the Obama years where Steven Universe gays like me started taking cartoons way too seriously, because we grew up resenting those awful prior years in the internet. it wasn't cool to say slurs anymore. it wasn't marketable. nor profitable. though the rise in discourse was and continues to be annoying (i insist that twitter is behind on tumblr be about 3 years on just about everything), i think it was much more preferable in the social side to what we used to have. tumblr was unique in that it preserved a relatively anonymous way to socialize that wasn't facebook OR 4chan.

   i could go on and on about this but suffice to say, that era ended. trump ended it. i remember VIVIDLY reading a post on my dashboard calling out the overly intense attitudes that call-outs had taken on, presenting what was really a small thing as this fundamentally evil act that necessitated the called out user disappear from the internet. the op pointed out that it was relying on techniques used in fascism. i wish i could remember the exact wording or the op, but i've never forgotten about that post, and op ultimately proved to be right. and the rise of trump proved that.

   right now with the aforementioned convicted criminal back in power, it feels as thought 2016 is happening all over again, but crueler, with an economy that no longer pretends to care about minorities not even for the sake of money. in this environment, it gives me hope to see cultural movements like that of Bluesky's rise and the return to "indie" web. i'm hoping more and more people jump on the bandwagon and try this out - especially youngsters. there's so much to learn! so much to see! i have hope for the future of cyberspace.

 

knowledge

   when i was a kid, we were taught the basics of how to use computers multiple times. we learned in rows of windows-xp adjecent monitors that became flatter with every passing year (but, since we were in a poor town, not by much).

   by the early to mid-2000s it became culturally acceptable to assume that young kids were tech-savvy because, chances are, they were. this continued for years - because, to an extent, it was true. however, it got to the point that this assumption became widespread enough that school-sanctioned computer education stopped. cellphones then became mainstream. with children now having no consistent education on using computers, the cultural pivot to the cheaper and easier to pick up cellphones, and - most notably in my memory - the exponential explosion of phone-based social media, it only made sense that that's where they became the most knowledgeable.

   this is where we're at now. a time in which kids are repeating whatever new thing they learned from their favorite streamer, said on accounts with their real names and real faces, who don't know what a File Explorer is or that incognito mode doesn't really hide your information. they can dox their classmates but need to be taught how to find their downloaded files without clicking on the download symbol on their internet browser.

   mind you, i admit i'm generalizing, but i'm going off of what i have seen myself in real life and online. the internet isn't going anywhere and is here to stay for god knows how long. knowing how to navigate cyberspace safely and carve out your own path is more important now than ever. i hope we continue to share the know-how and tools for everyone to make their way.