The Dark Days of the Internet

I initiated my first chat protocol over a modem in 1994, when I was in 6th grade. After spending about three hours alternating between collaborating with my buddy down the street on the phone, hanging up, plugging the phone jack into my bulky external modem, dialing him back with my computer, failing to connect, plugging the phone cord back into the phone, and repeating….the high pitched alien squawking noise finally squawked in a slightly different and longer fashion. The blue dos-prompt looking screen rattled off a series of technical jargon and left behind a flashing cursor that, after a moment, blipped down a line leaving the word hello on my screen, which I didn’t personally enter.

Using the two-finger typing method we proceeded to "chat" back and forth, for several hours, about absolutely nothing. Often just sending one another such stimulating conversation topics as asdkljaasdklfj. What we discussed wasn’t important, because in that magical instance we had figured out how to do something that nobody we knew had accomplished before. We discovered how to manipulate someone’s computer, even in the small and menial nature of making text appear on the screen, before anyone else.

This was before the days of what would later become known as browser internet. There was Compuserve, and American Online, which used the existing internet as a means of viewing text information and sending emails, but it wasn’t until Netscape came around, with it’s pulsing connected icon, that the internet was allowed the sort of wide spread contribution and free range that we have today…but unlike today, every company in the world wasn’t trying to tap into the internet market. That would come many years later. Webcrawler was the dominant search engine, and when you searched for things you generally got exactly what you wanted. There were no pages of advertisements hidden behind ten billion key words; no "pop-ups" or big-company "recommended" sites. It was just an endless sea of creative web pages, as anyone who was using the internet at the time was doing so because they were pioneers and simply thrilled with the experience and the idea of being able to share things with others in new ways. They weren’t using it as a means to acquire something else, but rather as an ends with which to shape something personally unique and beneficial to remote persons in random corners of the world, who might happen to stumble upon it. Every program you downloaded was what was known as Shareware, meaning it functioned at nearly 100% capacity, and the creators of it simply requested donations if you liked what they provided. In short, back then there was very little money on the internet, as very few people were actually using it at the time. I was enthralled by the possibilities of what I was toying with…that there now existed this virtual universe, which was ever expanding, much like our own universe. The people I encountered there, in web pages, or external chat rooms, were innovative, like minded, and creative individuals…riding the forefront of this new and amazing technology. I opened windows to people’s minds that I would never meet, and even if I did, I would still remain unable to access the level of intimate honesty that came through the excitement of fresh and inhibitionless forms of communication.

My mother was the third person in the state to sign up for standard internet access, after using Compuserve to exchange letters with priests a year or so before that. The process of getting online was much more of an adventure back then. The old dial up modem sputtering to life, establishing a connection that would maybe last for an hour if you were lucky (and if someone didn’t accidentally pick up the phone…or even call the phone {call waiting beep would terminate the connection}). During the first year we had it I downloaded a 2 megabyte game called Realmz, which took six hours to download…and about three hundred tries beforehand, thanks to the unstable nature of the connection, and having to start over from scratch if it was dropped. When the stars finally aligned and I was able to stay connected long enough to pull it off, the satisfaction was akin to that of a starving hunter finally trapping a gazelle after days of effort.

Money slowly began seeping into the internet as it started to climb in popularity, and for a while there was this incredible balance of innovation and easily-dodgeable advertisement, which actually leaned more towards the innovation side. There was incredible potential to be had, and when it first started to be gained there was a momentum and a sense of fresh and modern thrills that carried it along. Instant messengers came out (ICQ), mp3s and file sharing (Napster), multiplayer games (Warcraft 2), and finally broadband speed, which finally tipped the scales. With the onset of broadband, and the hindsight realization that the Internet had inspired people out of the early 90s recession, every douchebag dumbshit motherfucker and their inbred brother jumped on the bandwagon, Payless Shoes and 7-11 included, and flooded the place with more creatively-annoying bile and garbage than I thought possible. Money completely took over the face of the internet browser, and forced people seeking quality and substance to find back doors.

Now the magic of the internet is all but gone, replaced instead with a sort of regretful and taken-for-granted expectancy. The last great potential was reached just a few years ago with the ability to post and view video without hassle, and since then the world seems to have spiraled out of control, with nothing fresh or exciting to look for in the future. Coincidence? I think not…