This is an interesting theory but imho, it's way too romantic about the old Internet, and that's what I want to comment on. The whole video is built around this premise, and so for me, it totally discredits the theory because the early Internet was objectively worse in almost every way. I'm no spring chicken either. I've been a very avid Internet user since Windows 3.1 in the early-mid 90s... I was the first kid with a Windows computer and Internet in grade school and one of the few in my high school. Did I have lots of fun back then? Sure, but if I'm honest with myself, it was nowhere near as amazing as this theory makes it out to be. Even though I had fun and have fond memories of that time, that's mostly because the Internet was new and exciting territory, not because of its capabilities. It was slow, buggy, unreliable, visually-jarring, and had an extremely small and mostly esoteric user base. Lots of this theory's premise has to do with the way our minds romanticize our youth too. I'm willing to bet that most of you, like me, were kids or teens during the early Internet, maybe some of you were in your 20s. I'm sure that if wehad been 40 year-olds using the Internet in 1995, we wouldn't be looking back on it so romantically. There were some fun things about the Internet back then, but to say that it was better than what we have now is just oversimplified nostalgia at best, and at worst, it's delusional.
The reason some of us tend to romanticize the early Internet is because that's what all people do as they age... most of us find adult life less exciting and fun than we had hoped it would be, and so we romanticize the things twe experienced growing up. For many of us, it was the early Internet.
Older people tend to look at these things more cynically than young people do though, which is why many Baby Boomers were largely suspicious or even scared of the Internet when it first became popular, and why many of them use it mostly to spread memes about how they miss the "Good Old Days", you know, when kids used to go outside and drink water from hoses while not wearing bike helmets! It's the same reason why Gen X and Millenials romanticise the early Internet but are now so scared of the modern Internet. Gen Z and their contemporaries will likewise be scared of the next incarnation of the Internet after that, whatever that will be. It brings to mind the memes that Baby Boomers pass around the Internet even today, reminiscing about riding around in truck beds, staying out til the street lights turned on, drinking water from hoses, dying from lead poisoning due to eating paint chips, etc... you know, the "Good Old Days". What most of us (somewhat) younger people can readily identify is that, objectively-speaking, it was a WORSE time to be alive. That's the same reason why young kids likely find it hilarious that anyone would claim that the early days of the Internet were better than today. They're not seeing things through the same rosy-colored glasses that the creators of this conspiracy theory are.
This is just a warped form of the same Baby Boomer nostalgia, except it's more cynical and wrapped in a conspiracy theory skin. Instead of just waxing nostalgic like most people as they age, Gen X/Millenials compulsively turn everything into a conspiracy theory. It's not satisfying to just say, "Life itself was more fun, free, and exciting when I was younger". Instead, there's a compulsive need to find a villain, to invent some insidious plot to explain why things aren't the way they used to be. The reality is that corporate interests have had their nails dug into the backbone of the Internet since even before the Internet became widely available to consumers. Let's not forget that the biggest tech companies that exist today were started during this same time on the Internet. Their influence over things back then wasn't for lack of trying. It was because it was a new and wonderful world, and it simply had not been around long enough and did not have the technological capabilities to do what it does today. All of those ISPs, web hosts, and so on from the early Internet were making money too. They were serving up ads as well, and often in more annoying, less avoidable ways.
There was never really a "Wild West" period of the Internet. It's always been mostly controlled by private or public organizations. Nothing has really changed there except that those companies are now gigantic and well-known. It would be far too obvious or mundane for people to accept that their perceptions have also changed. Instead, there needs to be some sort of nefarious plot going on in the background to explain why we feel so discontented with the state of the world. It's simply more palatable to most people to look to the outside world as the source of all our problems rather than to look in the mirrors and face ourselves. For Gen X/Millenials and even some younger generations, this manifests itself as conspiracy theories. So when we look back on the Internet of the 90s, there are indeed things we might miss, but what we're really missing is the way it *felt*, the feeling of being young and experiencing something so new and cool. The way that things feel shiny and new when we're young sometimes start to feel boring, tedious, and even dreadful as we get older. And yes, although the Internet, like many things, has indeed changed a lot over the years, so too have we.
, with real people, about real topics, without being banned for having an unapproved opinion or being ever so slightly edgy.
