You’re sitting at a wooden desk in front of a mammoth of a PC tower. It’s beige and blocky; the buttons are chunky. Its idling sounds like the low hum of an aircraft taking off, and the hard drive clicks like a woodpecker having a seizure.
It’s late November 1995, and you’ve just installed the new Windows … 95. This was a process that took many hours, as you had to reformat your hard drive, and that is not a simple, or even quick task. There were, of course, some hardware errors, because you didn’t configure an IRQ correctly, and your drive letters were messed up.
But all of that is over now, and you’re sitting on your pristine, clean new desktop. Time to boot up Netscape Navigator and surf the web! You’re one of the cool dudes now.
The modem comes to life and dials into your ISP, which sounds like a Borg assimilating your computer, screeching with pings that rubber band back and forth through your PC’s speakers. After it finishes, all noise ceases, and you are now connected. Sweat drips from your forehead, and you pray that nobody picks up the phone that hangs from the wall in the kitchen. You need those cheat codes, and you forgot to bookmark the webpage, so it’s going to take you a while to find it again.
That’s okay, though, you’re sure you can remember the videogames chatroom you found on a random Geocities webpage through your webring.
After about an hour, you’ve found them! Now you can finally beat Command & Conquer, and be better prepared for the one-on-one your friend at school has been planning to have against you.
Recollections of the past aside, the internet was vastly different in the nineties. Especially different, as Windows 95 came out, mostly rendering the need to use DOS for everything null and void. The era of demo CDs, and megabytes of ram. Doom, and its lesser spoken about sister, Quake. Terminal Velocity, Tomb Raider, America Online, e … e-mail!
A lot of people, including myself, look back upon this era with heavy nostalgia. Some of it may be rose-tinted glasses, but I really do think some of that, “It was better back then,” philosophical waxing is true. Thirty years ago, corporations had much less control over the internet. It wasn’t really a thing billion-dollar companies saw as the place to be, like they do now. It was a disjointed mess of personal websites, businesses, chatrooms, and p … not safe for work material.
Going online was like an adventure. Discovering things felt exhilarating. Even just connecting to another person in Quake and playing against them in a deathmatch felt … it felt like the future.
And it was.
But the future came, and then it passed us by. And now we’re dealing with the enshitifcation of everything we once knew. And some of you never had the chance to know the internet the way it was before it became a money-grubbing, subscription begging, click-bating, engagement farming, ad-infested hellhole.
Maybe this is a bit of doomsaying, maybe I just miss the way things were when I was a child. Simple. Not terrifying.
I mean, I guess it did kind of suck to wait four hours to download a single episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion.
What’s the point of this post? I think we can double-back. I think the internet can become fun again. And I think the only way to do it is to learn. Go open source. Delve into Mastodon. Rid yourself of as much corporate software as you can. Even if you love your iPhone, you can still use Linux. You can find a free and open alternative to every single thing you use on a daily basis, and if enough people do this… well, there’s only so much money the corporations can suck out of the masses until they just stop giving them money. Until there’s no reason to keep shoving “AI” into every orifice offered up by the bastardized internet. Until they’ve decided, “You know what? Maybe we should go back to printing ads in magazines or something, I don’t know.”
Besides, what’s better than free?
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