Welcome to the Internet
Originally posted: 30 November 2023
I was born in 1985, which means I grew up with computers, and I have back pain.
But being born in 1985 means that I was born in a unique generation, originally called GenY, now called Millenials. WAIT, don’t click away, this isn’t another “woe is me, I’m blamed for ruining blood diamonds because I like avocado” rant. This is an “actually, this internet thing seems pretty cool, oh wait, actually...” rant.
I will be interspersing this post with snippets of the lyrics from a song called “Welcome to the Internet” by Bo Burnam from his AMAZING comedy special INSIDE.
Welcome to the internet, Have a look around,
Anything that brain of yours can think of can be found,
We've got mountains of content,
Some better, some worse
As I said, born in 1985, GenY turned Millennial, means that I have memories from “the before times”. The time before there was the Internet.
I have vivid memories of playing SimAnt on my parents computer, on what people would now call an “air gapped” computer, because it just sat there, connected to nothing but a power socket, and with no wireless signals floating around to be picked up.
Another key memory is from late primary school, in the Wodonga South Primary library, with a teacher showing us about “the internet”. The warnings that came with it were to the extent of basically “Don’t search for the words ‘naked people’”.
I don’t know what they were worried about. Back then there were only 256 colors and 640 pixels in most images, so you didn’t know if you were looking at a nipple or a fire hydrant.
But, this Internet thing seemed pretty interesting. So after some pestering by myself and an older brother, our family got the internet at home. Your standard run of the mill 56.6kbps modem which made the noise of a robot slaughterhouse whenever you connected.
And shortly after that, once we had lost one too many downloads due to SOMEONE (Thanks Mum!) picking up the phone, we got a second landline installed specifically for the internet (Thanks Mum!).
And since that point, I’ve always been connected.
Not very long ago, Just before your time,
Right before the towers fell, circa '99...
This was catalogs, Travel blogs,
A chat room or two
Everything was new and fresh, you could have your own website on Geocities for any topic you wanted, and there was a chance someone would actually visit it, because there were only like 10 websites that people went to back then. While it was the wild-west, looking back on it now, it felt like the “Wild West”, but everyone had Nerf guns. It was a crazy time, but not much damage could be done.
It was the start of online communities then, when I started out in Yahoo Chat, I thought I could set myself apart from everyone by typing everything in all caps, until someone told me that was the equivalent of yelling. I played some online shooter games against people in Europe.
I listened to a live audiocast from somewhere in America where they were waiting for a new version of a favourite Modification of a game I played to be released. I was able to write a message to them, letting them know that I was in Australia, sitting up at 1am, in the freezing cold winter, waiting for the release so I could queue up the download before I went to bed. And I still remember them saying the phrase “those damn dedicated Australians” when they mentioned me.
I consider myself lucky that I was growing up alongside the Internet, because when I was naive and wide eyed (stupid), it wasn’t yet powerful enough to kill me. There was no geolocating data, no saved credit card details, no webcam spying crypto-locking ransomware. I wasn’t careful, but it was ok, because I didn’t have to be.
Hell, I used Limewire and Kazaa (For those who don’t know, those are basically Spotify but made out of Computer Cancer) to download the latest Linkin Park track. Sure my computer probably had a virus or ten on it, but the worst that would happen would be it just randomly ejecting my CD tray or making my mouse pointer into an actual mouse.
Welcome to the internet,
Put your cares aside,
Here's a tip for straining pasta,
Here's a nine-year-old who died
The incomparable Douglas Adams put it perfectly:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Which is why I’m not on TikTok, I don’t know what a DojaCat is, and why I have a career in web development.
Think about point one, and think about the kids today. Still as stupid and naive as I was back then, but now, if they tap the wrong button on their iPad, they buy a million ruby gems in a mobile game and send their parents broke. And the attack vectors used against them have been refined over decades, and play on the securities of point two above. “I know what YouTube is like, I’ll just cast an eye over to make sure I’m not seeing any skin heads in white robes and I’m sure it will be fine.”
I have a niece and a nephew who are both quite young and are “digital natives” which means they know how to use a touch screen by touching it, (Give them a DOS prompt and tell them to format the floppy disk and see how native they are then) and I see them both watching their shows on the tablet or phone. Usually ABC Kids or Disney Kids apps, so that’s ok. But soon they will get YouTube access, which is where the best and worst of the world live side by side, and it’s often hard to tell them apart.
Unlike the Chef that comes home from work and cooks themselves 2-minute noodles, I’m on the internet for work, and then straight back on it for personal time, of which a large portion of it is spent on YouTube.
And to quote another wise man, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”
Here's a healthy breakfast option,
You should kill your mom,
Here's why women never f&%# you,
Here's how you can build a bomb
And thanks to a Chef from Melbourne, I now know there is a whole genre of videos on there that target themselves as for kids, often with videos of cake decorating.
If you saw your kid with their headphones on watching a video about cake decorating, you would probably be fine with it right? WRONG!
Thanks to Anne, now I know that there is a portion of those videos made by a content farm in Vietnam, that use stolen cake decorating videos as the video, and then tell stories entirely unrelated to the videos in the audio.
Stories like letting strangers into your home if they say they know your parents, or how as a kid they disarmed someone robbing a convenience store.
So, now that I’ve scared you into double checking what videos your friends and family are watching, let me counter that with the fact that luckily, there still are good people out there.
For every Andrew Tate, there is a Marty T, a New Zelander who repairs old tractors, goes on adventures with his family and teaches us that even rusty old broken down things can be brought back to life with a bit of love.
For every <Insert name of disgraced former game show host/president>, there is an man called “TomatoAnus” who provides in depth explanation and commentary videos of SpeedRuns of computer games (Which is a niche community of people who try to play games as FAST as possible using as many glitches and tricks as possible) where he takes time out of each and every video he makes to remind the viewers that “no feeling is final” and that everyone struggles with mental health issues, and that we need to give ourselves more credit for our own achievements.
Rather than watching videos about Kris Jenner, there’s Kris Harbour, a guy in Wales who built his own house out of recycled and low impact materials, who built his own wind turbine and hydro-electric generator, and is finishing up a barn that he’s built with hand tools, using leverage and pulleys instead of cranes and generators.
And for every blackhat hacker out there, writing the next ransomware virus to extort you from your hard earned money, there’s a silly guy writing blog posts on LinkedIn and posting bouldering videos.
Anything and everything
And anything and everything
And anything and everything
And all of the time
Breath in, breath out, no feeling is final.
