The Old Net

The Wild West of Our Times

This is gonna sound very much like an old man yelling at clouds sorta thing, so I apologize in advance. But I reckon that I’m not the only old geezer who feels this way. So maybe it’s worth shouting in the void just for this.

There was once a time when the internet was a lawless, yet more innocent place. A period where people felt authentic, for a lack of a better word. An epoch that many of us yearn to go back to, even if we know that it’s a pipe dream at best.

Back then, the internet was a truly wild and untamed place. As such we were free to roam in the wild as we pleased. In a way, we were like outlaws. Anonymity was seen as a virtue, and privacy reigned supreme. It helped us post and talk about all manner of things without regard of the silent majority. The internet was a revelation, an escape from our ever-increasing sordid reality.

It wasn’t all perfect though. The Old Net was often rough and very clunky. But those downsides didn’t matter in the face of what was offered here. Content would be posted and shared for free. Ads, totally non-existent. We were all free to roam the net, to encounter strange websites that hadn’t already been seen by a million people already. Everything felt more personal. When you saw a site, it was because someone made it out of fun, not to get clicks or money. Sites were simple too, none of these fancy menus and GUIs that ate up most of your bandwidth.

It used to be our refuge from our life. But now our life is a refuge from it. Once the businesses and government wanted to monetize everything, the end began. It was slow and gradual, but now their efforts have borne fruit. And while we’re all better off in some ways, we’re also worse off in other ways.

The internet is a strange, unrecognizable sight these days; a vast connection of networks that eclipses everything before it due to sheer size, and yet somehow, smaller than ever too. The Wild has been tamed, the roads have been paved, and progress prevails.

Gone are the random websites where you would accidentally stumble on to something completely weird; now every search now runs on a predefined algorithm that siloes you to a select few sites that have spammed enough relevant words to make it in. Ads invade every inch of the cyberspace, trying to sell you everything and nothing at the same time. Everything is curated as the numbers try to guess what you’d like the most. Big companies dominate as they collect and analyze data from you and me, striving to provide a more streamlined experience. And to their credit, it’s not all bad. It’s led to some good things and an easier way of livin’. But something got lost in translation, something important.

Sure, not everyone minds it. Hell, even I don’t most of the time; in fact, I actually quite like some parts of the internet we have today. It’s more streamlined now; faster, sleeker. It’s got all the info on anything that you could ever want to know about. It’s even allowed people new ways of making a living, people on this very site, for example. There’s a lot to like about the Brave New Net.

But even all the bells and whistles aren’t enough to make me forget about what it used to be like, when privacy wasn’t a long-lost relic, when every site didn’t look and feel the same, when things were more personal, when passion didn’t have a price tag attached to it.

For the ones who remember all that, it’s extremely disheartening. To see it progress so much, yet regress too. Not that it probably matters, since not many remember, and even among those who do, many have all but gone offline. Now all that’s left of us are on old forums from a decade ago, from another lifetime.

Folks like us who yearn for the bygone days, the days where we free before the commodification of it all, we’re the ones that do not belong anymore. Sure, there are still old forums and the likes, but they’re just dying gasps of the old internet. The world’s moved on, and all we can do is remain in these little pockets and remember what used to be.

Perhaps one day, this big monolith that we call the internet will collapse. Perhaps one day, we may get a renaissance of sorts. Perhaps it’ll emerge even better than ever. But for us old timers, our internet will always be the one that we used to browse in, in days long gone.