Remember when they used to call the Internet the Information Super-Highway? Those were good times, good times indeed. If we were to use a road analogy for the Internet today, I think we'd have to call it the Information Rural Road in a Major State of Disrepair.
How could we have let things get so bad? I remember back in the good old days, turning on my computer, waiting for a good 15 minutes while my 386 processor would try to boot up Windows 3.1 (all be it unsuccessfully the first couple of times.) fighting with my PPP Dial-Up connection software to my internet service provider (which probably couldn't handle more than 10 people logged on at one time) on my 14.4 modem, and access the internet on my beta version of Netscape.
Those days were great! No pop-up banners, you never needed to download seven million plug-ins or ActiveX devices. NOTHING! Sure things took forever to download, but websites were really small, and whatever you typed into search engines was exactly what you found.
There wasn't fifty million messenger programs either, you want to chat with people? You had one choice: mIRC. That was it, and we liked it fine.
Porn sites were free, on-line auction sites were an unheard of thing and bordering in the world of science fiction, you wanted to file transfer? Well There were FTP sites (and none of them had ratios either!) or mIRC (again). MP3's were unknown to the general populace, the MPAA didn't try to shut down sites offering screeners. You could put up porn on your free Geocities site, hell you could even get free websites with unlimited downloading space back then.
Hotmail, Geocities, Yahoo and the like were independantly run and weren't owned by the major corporations.
But then somebody out there decided the internet should be a place for everyone. And what was once a stress free secret society reserved for people who actually knew how to use a computer, became a waste land of idiocy and stupidity.
Pop-Up Banners. Shockwave. Seventy Million Fucking Video Codecs, that despite the different names ALL DO THE SAME FUCKING THING. Ad Banners. Voice Chat. Web Cam Chat. Spyware. Trojans. Trolls. Spam. Censorship. Flamers. Newbies. Java. XML.
Fuck it all!
Call me old fashioned (and at 23 years old, at the time of this writing, it's a pretty big stretch if you are) but I miss the old days. You could ace any assignment you had at school, have an intellectual conversation, everything online was free, and you could download just about anything you could ever want online -- if you knew where to look of course --and back then the internet wasn't a big labyrinth of false links, add banners, or idiots who have no idea what they were talking about.
Chat rooms, messenger programs, and personal e-mails were the first to go, it opened a doorway for morons to communicate online and giving the corporate fat-cats a target audience to turn the internet into yet another commercial enterprise to turn the masses from cattle, to slightly retarded cattle.
The end result of making the internet "easier" and "more accessable" to everyone, is that not only are you letting in the people who know what their doing, but your also letting in all the idiots, agenda seekers, and fraud artists. I mean, fuck, 10 years ago you could log in and find information that wasn't written by someone with the religious agenda, or a websites content wasn't dictated by the sponsors who advertised on it (shit, they were happy you even bothered to put their banners on your site!) and nobody, and chat rooms and message boards were most certianly not bogged down by stupid teenagers, asking stupid questions, that they could learn by searching online or (God-Forbid) paying attention in sex-ed class or reading a book!
Was this what they expected when the first internet message was transmitted in the United States over 35 years ago? For all you uneducated morons out there, yes, the earliest incarnation of what is now the modern internet was first invented in 1969. Experts would say no, not in their wildest dreams (or most vivid nightmares, or most erotic wet dreams) I however believe that perhaps this idea is not so far fetched. The first thing that was transmitted over the internet on that faithful day in October of 1969 were the letters "L" and "O", the server crashed before the entire message could be sent. People who were there, and historians all over the world forevermore will insist that the first message that was attempted to send was "login", however, I offer a more sinister theory, one that given current trends of cyberspace makes a hell of a lot more sense. I believe that the first word that was possibly attempted to be sent over the internet was not "login" but "LOL", as in that horribly chat room abbreviation that everyone loves to hate known by people who can type more than three letters at a time as "Laughs Out Loud." For such a word to be considered possibly the most fucking retarded message anyone can send over the internet, would it not be surprising that only a bunch of fucking morons couldn't build a server that could sustain more than two letters in an attempt to send three?
Perhaps, perhaps not. This is just a round-about way of getting onto the subject of chat rooms, I realized in mid rant that it was a failed attempt, but since I don't give a fuck either way let's just get onto what I was going to talk about next anyway:
I remember when you could go into a chat room (remember the only choice back then was mIRC, not that it was a bad thing, it was just complicated enough to keep total fucking morons out.) you could have an intelligent conversation with someone. Nobody said "LOL", nobody said "ASL?" as far as the chatting community of yesteryear was concerned, everyone on the internet was androgynous conversationalists that may or may not give two shits about what episode of Star Trek was the best.
You know what it's like today? Well, over the years a million and one messengers and chat programs have surfaced. ICQ was the one that made instant messaging and chatting accessible for the stupid, and it all went down hill from there, it seemed everyone and their fucking cousin had a fucking instant messenger and people were downloading each and every single one onto their computer, filling up their system-tray with virtual memory eating icons so they could chat with the same five fucking people with ten different programs. It just seemed like there wasn't and end, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Chat, AOL Instant Messenger, Gator, and the like were coming out of the wood work.
Let's do an example to give you an idea what sort of idiotic people chat on the internet these days shall we? Try this experiment sometime. Set yourself up an account with a messenger program, go into a chat room and test people. Today I'm going to conduct my experiment with Yahoo! Messenger Just for shits and giggles.
So let's see here, we've got a 17 year old Italian kid who likes to show off on his cam, people with Emoticon fetishes and people lacking any sort of social graces. What the fuck is happening to people? We're isolating ourselves to our computers so we can type in ASL over and over and marvel at how witty we are because we can figure out the two key combination that makes a hugging smiley face?
Do we lock ourselves away and shackle ourselves to instant messangers as our only social interaction, and in doing so use it as our only source of information (which, I'd like to remind you, above, will probably educate you in the mystique of the illusive 17 year old Italian with a hard on for "showing off" on cam, and let me allay to you that whatever that kid is doing, you'll probably end up in jail seeing it.)
Have we been reduced to talking to some shit head 15 year old try and tell you the deep lyrics of Eminem? Eminem isn't deep, he's a fucking smart ass who got a record deal and laughs whenever he gets a royalty cheque when stupid shits like you buy his CD. The only thing that's deep about that guy are his pockets.
The internet used be a learning tool, a source of information, a source of free porn, and now look at it! It's like that prodigy of the class who got top honors in everything, and then one day got smucked by a truck and now wears a helmut and drools, his parents get killed in a freak accident, the family dog becomes rabid and has to be shot, and then his house burns down and he's stuck living in a group home where the male nurse analy rapes him everyday, and his only source of joy is getting to unclamp his jaw from the pillow that kept back the screams from the ass-pounding he got the night before, so he can take a short bus to school because today is Tuesday and not only is it Pizza day, but it's finger painting day. That's what the internet is like today. It's fucking sad.
I remember a time when you typed something in a search engine, you actually found what you were looking for, instead said today search engines force seventeen links in your face of their advertisers that are paying them money to put their links ahead of anything you are really looking for. Go ahead and try it. Type in any subject into a search engine and I bet the first 10 links are to buy whatever you were looking for. In fact, copy this whole paragraph and search for it on Google, chances are my paragraph (if found) will be lost in that long line of "O's" they think are novel and cute to tack in the number of search result pages they have.
The internet used to be a free enterprise, you could find anything you wanted for free. Now even downloads cost you money.
I guess what I really wanted to say is that the internet has become a fucking cesspool and in spite of everything I hate about it today, I can't stop using it. It's sick.