Login
But You Promised: An Open Letter to the Internet of My Youth
Note: the way this Substack usually works is that every public piece has a follow-up piece for paid subscribers only containing all the screams I restrained to make the free one either come in under the character limit or nice and civilized enough to not have to argue reality with sea lions in the comments. As a creature of the early internet I am about to address, I would prefer to make all things free. Alas, bodies are stupid and prefer dumb things like food and shelter.
I said what I said in Blood Money: The Anthropic Settlement. But there was this sad, pitiful, childish little phrase, this plaintive thread in my mind all through it. I knew if I pulled on it the focus would be entirely lost, so here, instead, is that thread, depressingly pulled upon.
The little phrase was: But you promised.
Oh Internet of My Youth.
For so long, I have looked back on you with melancholy sadness, bittersweet longing, a cloud of nostalgia of the best and worst kind. The sort of feeling you have toward a home country you cannot return to, a street you grew up on now lined with strip malls, or a lover once held tight and now lost.
You were the one that got away.
But the thing about nostalgia is that it is a clinging cloud, and clouds obscure the landscape. The more I think about the Way We Were, the more clearly I remember us. It’s not that all that love is wrong or untrue, or wasted on you, beautiful, weird, disgusting, awkward, miraculous thing that you were. Those worlds of good, those little villages, that fellowship, those nights by the blue screen-fire, the lives you made possible, the friendships you facilitated, that was all so real, and maybe more importantly, very much authentic, not a droning monotone of bots talking to bots about bots.
I believed in you. I believed in us. In the potential to make a world different than the one we thought was non-negotiable. And I guess it sure is different. It’s also nothing like you said it would be before you locked us all down and felt totally secure that we could never, ever leave. Before the mask came off.
But you promised.
You promised that the problem with the Old World was that the popular kids were in charge. The jocks and preppies, the born-rich, the beautiful and strong, the ones who found it easy and natural to fit in, the regular cast of the yearbook photo-spreads, the social butterflies, the goody two-shoes churchgoers, the bullies, those so accustomed to being in charge they never had to even look at the rest of us on their way to the top.
But you promised.
You promised that if we just flipped the script, if we could just start over with a new new world where the geeks and nerds and weirdos and techies were in charge for fucking once, if the ones on the bottom could find a way to the top, if wealth could find its way to the nerds in basements instead of prom kings and queens in parades, if the outcasts and matheletes and student body secretaries and artists and science kids who actually knew how things worked got to make things work, if the obsessive and the dedicated with their strange and wonderful passions were to remake the world and its rules, things would be better. They’d make different choices. They’d know what it was like to be powerless in a way the powerful never had before, and so they’d naturally remember the little guy. They’d make mistakes, sure, but different mistakes. And since science has no trouble adjusting to new data, they’d easily learn and adjust to any missteps, too.
