Welcome (back) to the Internet! :-)

I've been spending lots of time lately thinking about the Internet. The real Internet... 
that dream that was on the verge of existing right after the turn of the century. It was a virtual place... 
         a neighborhood of ideas... 
                                    a series of virtual houses with open doors. 

Ideas were exchanged freely. It was a place you could spend hours wandering through and not see the same thing twice. Maybe I sound like I'm exaggerating… seeing the past through an old pair of rose tinted bifocals, maybe I sound like I'm hallucinating, maybe I just sound old.

I've been spending lots of time thinking about that old good Internet. 
I've been thinking of the generation that follows me and thinking... 
they'll never think of the Internet as a good thing. 
It's just a fact of life and, I think for most, not a particularly positive thing. 

And that's when it hit me. It's still here... 
          it's not gone... 
                           that old Internet didn't go away. 

Sure, it's mostly abandoned. Most folks have left it for the new Corporate Internet... a few giants gobbling up information so they can sell it back to us, sometimes at the low low price of knowing everything there is to know about us.

In a lot of ways, that makes it more like the Internet I remember. The only people here aren't all that different from the only people here before the crowds showed up: 
Misfits...
           weirdos...
                      good people... 
                                     my people.

So what do we do now? I'm talking to you right now, the person that has left Corporate Internet to come reads this. What can we do? Can we start over? You could make one of these websites too. Seriously, it's not hard or expensive. Even if you have no idea how, you can learn everything you'd need to know here in no time... if you wanted to. In fact, if you thought it was important enough, you'd do it. I'd be excited if you did too! I'd even link to it on my little website that no one reads... and that would mean something right?

I don't know if it would. I'd like to think it might... but really I don't know. 
I'm not trying to convince you of anything. 
I'm just a middle-genx dude on 
    the Internet...
                    thinking about... 
                                      the Internet.


  

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   1. A Wild Contraction appears!

      
      
      In TNG Episode “Silicon Avatar” Data uses a contraction. It’s even in the subtitles. It took me twenty some years to catch a wild Data contraction. Before this they were known to me only as legend.