Hello there! About a month ago I watched Bo Burnham's Netflix special, Inside. Of course, the entirety of the special was pretty captivating, but one segment stood out to me, which is Welcome to the Internet.
Long story short, in this song, Bo takes the role of a salesman, trying to get people interested in the internet, promising that it has everything one could ever wish for. Near the end, he breaks out of this persona and takes a nostalgia filled tone, talking about the old way the internet worked, simpler times, featuring travel blogs, chat rooms and stuff like that, only for his salesman persona to come back with a maniacal laugh and a more sinister tone, acting as if the early days were just a hook to get people addicted to the current state of affairs on the internet.
I couldn't really stop thinking about this song, playing it again from time to time, and I'd like to share my perspective on this wonderful but rotten medium which has become a vital part of our society. My family got an internet plan pretty early in my life, around 2005 or 2006 I believe.
Back then, social media was not that big, and me, as a small child did not care anyway. My curiosity for the internet was fueled by cartoon TV chanels, like Cartoon Network, advertising how amazing their websites were, featuring images, written stories and games based on their cartoons. The one game which keeps popping up in my memory is a Camp Lazlo game set in 3 stages, each stage following a different character from the show. Another one which was heavily advertised on TV was a KND game which had you navigate an obstacle course to save your friends, I believe. Alas, those were flash games, so they may be lost to time.
A while later, YouTube came hard onto the scene, and with it funny videos and footage from video games, called machinimas. This is how I discovered GTA, especially Vice City, through a series of videos inspired by the movie The Transporter. Going forward with this Vice City trend, I discovered a mod called Mamaia Vice, which replaced most of the cars in the game with Romanian ones and placed a Romanian flag as a border around the minimap. It was pretty cool, especially for a wee kid coming from Doom 2, BlakeStone, Wolfenstein 3D and NFS II, among other old games like these. I also downloaded demos for games like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow.
After this, the internet for me was for watching stuff on YouTube and using uTorrent to download games, because I didn't know any better back then (in the meantime, I bought most of the games I pirated back then). Some ore time passed and Facebook started to crop its ugly head over here and everyone jumped on it, everyone was friends with everyone even though nobody talked with anybody. I jumped on, and in the meantime a game started popping up on my radar: Assassin's Creed, more specifically, the mobile J2ME version of the game, made by Gameloft. This got me into downloading ilicit copies of J2ME games on my phone and also to look Assassin's Creed up on the internet and I was met by a gameplay demo of Assassin's Creed II and I couldn't believe my eyes at that point. I remember begging my dad to buy me the first game in the series and my mom to buy me this game when it got released for PC and I couldn't run either of them, because I was a dumbass kid who didn't know what system requirements were.
From then on out the internet would continue down the path of YouTube entertainment for me while also consuming everything related to Assassin's Creed and GTA and also discovering a tiny game called Minecraft which was the ultimate game for me with a bit of imagination and modding. The story continues with discovering the concept of memes and my game tastes broadening to multiple different series, but it took a darker turn when I started noticing the decline in the quality of the internet: ads started popping up more often, clickbait really became frequent, internet scandals became more overt. Besides that, social media gobbled up everything it could: Facebook became the behemoth we know and hate today, Twitter gained popularity and people learned that they liked complainig about everything online, forums died in favor of Reddit threads.
All in all, the simpler times of the internet are close to my heart, even though it may just be my nostalgia talking, seeing that in those days the internet was new for me, a vast mysteryous entity which I could explore at my own pace. Nowadays, everything is thrown in our face all of the time, especially advertisements, ruining the magic quite a bit.
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