I was going to make a flippant post about a 12 year old Julia Stiles in the PBS show GhostWriter playing a hacker. Seriously, check it out. The clip is only 41 seconds long and it's so incredibly cringe.
But then re-watching the clip myself, it reminded me of how optimistic we were in the 90s about the future of the internet. There was a time when the internet was a new frontier. It was a way to find people with common interests, or have conversations with people on the other side of the planet. It was a way to share ideas without any boundaries. This could only be a benefit to humanity.
I remember seeing someone talking about Trouble and Her Friends and how the book was written from this optimistic perspective. It was written in 1994 (the same year as that Julia Stiles episode). The book takes this 1994 optimistic vision of the internet and extrapolates it out into a future world. And now, in hindsight, it just feels anachronistic. That future never happened. It's a world of ubiquitous internet and virtual reality, but the internet of Trouble and Her Friends has no commerce whatsoever. It was never monetized. And that just seems quaint now.
It reminds me also of the early 2000s internet where things had picked up but only young people and tech enthusiasts used it. "Old people" just didn't get it . I remember politicians trying to regulate the internet when they themselves had never used it and only had others briefly explain it to them.
There was a band at the time, Machinae Supremacy, who had a bunch of songs about internet culture and the politicians trying to stop them. Like their song Force Feedback:
This is the world you're in
And this is where ours begins
A borderless nation of thoughts to replace
Your walled-in existence in space
Sure you already know
That your age was long ago
We augment reality online
And you hail from ancient times
Again, this protection of internet culture just feels quaint today. I don't know if internet users in the 90s and early 2000s could've predicted what would happen when everyone was online or when businesses realized there was a profit to be made online. Maybe they could never envision that future; or maybe they just didn't want to.
I guess I don't really have a point here. I just wanted to watch a silly clip from a tv show but ended up feeling nostalgic about the optimism we used to have for the internet, and for what could've been.
I think this is part of it. There used to be a barrier to entry where in order to get on the internet you first had to figure out how to get on the internet. It meant most internet users had at least some level of skill to figure things out on their own (since they couldn't search the internet for an answer). Now, of course, you can buy a smartphone with facebook pre-installed and no extra effort at all.
If you're not familiar with it, Eternal September is a concept that directly relates to this.