It's 2006. You power on your computer, rocking a cutting-edge Core 2 Duo processor. You were rich enough to have a fiber connection. You had an icon on your desktop labeled "INTERNET". You clicked on it. A window popped up asking you for your credentials. You hit "Connect". Immediately, a door to another world opened right in front of you.
Fast forward to today, and that door is always open for you to enter. Except it isn't a door anymore. It's just air. You walk right through as if the two worlds were one. Welcome to the future. You're in 2026, where AI is right at your fingertips. You can generate images and even ask a chatbot for instructions. But even with all that, everything seems so stale, and you wonder why. Everything seems so orderly, so controlled. You wonder who is behind all this.
In the past, you had fun surfing all sorts of sites. If you liked watching Flash animations or playing browser games, you went to Newgrounds.com or Friv. YouTube was in its infancy - most people had to wait minutes or hours for an MPEG file to finish downloading, especially if they were on DSL or dial-up. (Were people on dial-up in 2006?)
But despite being slow, it was also fun. You could create your own Habbo Hotel profile and hop into different worlds to chat with other people around the world (before 4chan took over and nearly destroyed it), or host your own website and embed it in your forum signature.
The Internet of yesteryear was chaotic. Each community had its own culture and way of thinking. When you went to, say, DeviantArt, the culture - even between users and groups - was different from Newgrounds. You might also remember Albino Blacksheep, where much of Internet culture took root. But most "normies" (i.e. regular people) probably had their own MySpace profile (or Hi5 if you were where I live), which let you customize your page layout to fit your style. You didn't change the background color from a menu option; you made your own CSS layout or copied it from some sketchy website you found on Google.
Before Discord and Microsoft Teams, there was IRC. If you used Windows, you probably remember pirating mIRC and connecting to some underground chat room with dozens of people, and being flamed (insulted) because you said one wrong thing about somebody. Or maybe you weren't.
The thing was, the Internet was a place of the unexpected - full of wonders and surprises. It was unpredictable. You checked your email for any viruses that lurked in your inbox. You used Firefox because you were too afraid you would get them if you clicked the twenty-second link on a Google search.
Before Reddit, there were forums. They were small gathering spaces for people interested in a topic. You had dozens of game forums and guitar forums. If you ever wanted to be in an Internet community, you had no other choice than to join one.
But all good things must come to an end. And that applies to the once-beautifully chaotic nature of the Internet. The moment clocks struck 12 AM on January 1st, 2010, the world changed. A new decade had just arrived. You no longer had crazy cool layouts, a decentralized culture, forums, chat rooms, or anything that screams Web 1.0. Instead, you had to stick with what was new. And that new sticks even today. That new was Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, and Discord. Sending images to your friends is now trivial thanks to 4G and 5G connectivity. Before, you had to pay extra cash for MMS, and the images came out as monochrome and pixelated.
The Internet of today seems dull and boring. Every site feels the same. Every community feels the same. The oneness feels uneven, and you know it. Opinions? Hell no. You have to agree with what others say, or face losing karma and reputation for good.
Send them to me@luchiz.eu or dial the SIP address sip:me@luchiz.eu.