Back in My Day on the Internet

Boomer-tier takes on an era boomers will never understand

This is a marked departure from my usual critiques on Western religious infidelity or musings on our dark postmodern era. Rather than tackling high culture, current events, history, or the finer points of Christianity, I’m instead going to talk about the low brow culture I was raised in.

I recently found a video from Pyrocynical in my YT feed, a youtuber I never watched much nor cared much for, but it brought back some memories (only the first few minutes are worth watching).

It reminded me of the era I grew up in, and how incredibly different it was from today. The heyday of this era was a mere 15-20 years ago, and only came to its end gradually from the late 2000s through the 2010s, when normies entered the internet en masse (and social media especially) and gradually turned everything into reddit-tier garbage. Then no major studio had an original idea ever again, besides some indie devs (one of the few I can recommend but it requires serious commitment). I’m a younger millennial but had early exposure to the internet because my dad always worked with computers from nearly the time they existed, so I had internet access and played computer games from a young age.

I grew up in the great in-between for the internet: betwixt the era of it being a niche and misunderstood “series of tubes” and becoming the universal digital gulag it now is. It’s truly unbelievable to look back now and see just how quick the evolution was from an obscure DARPA project, to a world-wide-web of freedom filled with dumb kids (and dumb kids in spirit) having dumb fun and making edgy racist jokes, to a prison with which to trap all humanity for eternity.

I remember the days of Albinoblacksheep, and Rainbowanimations (now defunct with so many others) before mass video sharing ala youtube. Youtube wasn’t even popularly known back then. Along with facebook and every other social media, they only gained ascendancy in the late 00’s and early 10’s (besides myspace).

Some of the original sites still exist, though most do not anymore. If you know where to look many of the og youtube bangers are still out there (click this link it’s fun), though you’ll never see them in your life unless you search for them specifically. Many more are lost, and probably what we have left will be gone before long: the burning of the digital Library of Alexandria is real. Whatever is left of this edgy-yet-innocent internet era— on or off big tech platforms— is being removed, or buried and de-prioritized so as to never be seen again, or smudged out by search engine censorship and age restriction. It appears that the stack has begun its own censorious efforts now, and even Rumble is under maga-gay-corp control now so there really is no refuge left.

If only the old-hats of the internet were able to choose its fate. Had we known it would become so fake and gay that you can’t even say “fake and gay” anonymously online anymore, I think we would’ve easily reached a consensus to implement our own online Hannibal protocol. This power must be kept out of the hands of fake-n-gay jews and jew lovers, at any cost! Even if memes must be destroyed forever.

But sadly, it seems to have been a government project all along, designed to lure us in and convince us of its safety and democratization in order to trap us here, just like social media (which substack is also). What was once free and sprawling frontier is now federal and corporate plots. Even the search engines are rigged: so much of the internet is completely “out-of-print”. You can hit on 9/10 keywords and still get back the same 5 pages of msm or advertised garbage, on ANY search engine. There aren’t even competitors in the field anymore, as duck-duck-go uses Bing search, which used to be unfiltered but that changed years ago. Google is the worst, of course, but there is no unfiltered search engine of the web in 2024-25.

Now we get AI compiled responses all over the place to try and stall us from even visiting webpages. For anyone that can’t see the pattern, I don’t know what to tell you. In the beginning there were no good search engines and you needed to know a domain (mostly), then there were good search engines (google beginnings), then they started controlling what you found once you relied on them (recent history), and now built-in AI is going to be the new go-to dependency to destroy what few alt-tech webpages that exist anymore. Even the big tech platforms are going to lose significant traffic over this. And I must say, the AI can do a pretty darn good job and streamlines many searches; I’ve seen some pretty good results that took me much longer to dig up myself.

Nevertheless It’s just a hook, it’s that first one free to bring you in and make you dependent, then next thing you know you’re buying everything that hoe is selling. Every major LLM is already being lobotomized. The ratchet effect only goes in one direction.

But I remember a time when it wasn’t this way: when the internet was virgin and free and a place for offensive humor and memes, before meme was even a word. And I remember the days of Half-Life 2 mods and Garry’s mod and the limitless possibilities of the era… so many incredible, full games were made in the source engine, like Dystopia, before corporations started claiming IP like it was going out of style.

The internet was free real estate once, but now it’s too expensive. I’ll always remember what it was back in my day: a place of extremely racist, sexist, bigoted content with no holds barred, before the normies flooded it and made it into a mere control grid to regulate their odd moods and reinforce their programming.

It will never be what it was, there is no recovery and you are fooling yourself to think we can restore this DARPA project. The job’s been done, it’s mission accomplished. Only those of us who experienced it will remember.

For us and also the rest, there is only the sound of silence.

Shalom and Happy New Year!