> you were from a small shitty place that nobody ever heard of, but you had transcended those humble origins to become a being of pure information, sharing thoughts, philosophy and maybe code with other similar beings, and that physical location was irrelevant and really the whole idea of it was quite vulgar.
I truly think that postmodern (Facebook onwards) social media destroyed this ethereal, noncorporeal aspect of the internet by forcing users to identify as the social media profile. Bandwidth and compute on the early internet were not sufficient to exchange HD pictures and video at the volume we deal with today, and so the early internet was a primarily literate medium, with all the characteristics and benefits of literacy that entails: an affinity for autodidacticism, learning, information exchange, rationality. It seemed to exist on an ideal plane, where we dealt not with people but concepts, and characteristics such as geographical location, ethnicity, skin color, accents, and even sex simply were never even part of the picture to form a basis for discrimination - all one could see were your words and your pseudonym, and they could be judged on their own merits irrespective of whatever postmodern notion of "identity group" authored them.
The internet was not hi-fi enough to be confused with reality, and this detachment from the messy particulars of meatspace was well-suited for the exchange of ideas along the "information superhighway." It's only when people started posting pictures and videos of themselves that we saw the culture war heat up and begin to divide people along lines of identity, for the cold rationality of what was once a literate medium had now regressed to an audiovisual medium of spectacle, soundbytes, and shorts; no longer the meritocratic marketplace of ideas where all users were treated equally and ideas could be expanded upon at length, of words and concepts responding to other ideas and thoughts, the internet is now where talking heads spew 15-second invective at one another and people are judged on their appearance, accent, sex, or any number of other dimensions orthogonal to the quality of the ideas they express.
> Being from “the library” is maybe closest in spirit in terms of being infotropic and on an autodidactic mission
Illuminating, how you chose "the library" as the nearest neighbour and not "the cinema" or "the radio." I empathize very much with the OP and finding not only refuge from a chaotic living situation but also a way out towards gainful employment by drinking from the firehose of freely available information that was the early Internet; again being a primarily literate medium it was my library-from-home where I spent more time amongst documentation, or crawling through obscure technical fora just soaking up any and all information I could, than I did talking to my friends, family, or even people in general. There were innumerable days of my life (even still true to this day) where I spent more time writing bash and talking to a computer through a terminal than I did speaking English to another living soul.
I truly think that postmodern (Facebook onwards) social media destroyed this ethereal, noncorporeal aspect of the internet by forcing users to identify as the social media profile. Bandwidth and compute on the early internet were not sufficient to exchange HD pictures and video at the volume we deal with today, and so the early internet was a primarily literate medium, with all the characteristics and benefits of literacy that entails: an affinity for autodidacticism, learning, information exchange, rationality. It seemed to exist on an ideal plane, where we dealt not with people but concepts, and characteristics such as geographical location, ethnicity, skin color, accents, and even sex simply were never even part of the picture to form a basis for discrimination - all one could see were your words and your pseudonym, and they could be judged on their own merits irrespective of whatever postmodern notion of "identity group" authored them.
The internet was not hi-fi enough to be confused with reality, and this detachment from the messy particulars of meatspace was well-suited for the exchange of ideas along the "information superhighway." It's only when people started posting pictures and videos of themselves that we saw the culture war heat up and begin to divide people along lines of identity, for the cold rationality of what was once a literate medium had now regressed to an audiovisual medium of spectacle, soundbytes, and shorts; no longer the meritocratic marketplace of ideas where all users were treated equally and ideas could be expanded upon at length, of words and concepts responding to other ideas and thoughts, the internet is now where talking heads spew 15-second invective at one another and people are judged on their appearance, accent, sex, or any number of other dimensions orthogonal to the quality of the ideas they express.
> Being from “the library” is maybe closest in spirit in terms of being infotropic and on an autodidactic mission
Illuminating, how you chose "the library" as the nearest neighbour and not "the cinema" or "the radio." I empathize very much with the OP and finding not only refuge from a chaotic living situation but also a way out towards gainful employment by drinking from the firehose of freely available information that was the early Internet; again being a primarily literate medium it was my library-from-home where I spent more time amongst documentation, or crawling through obscure technical fora just soaking up any and all information I could, than I did talking to my friends, family, or even people in general. There were innumerable days of my life (even still true to this day) where I spent more time writing bash and talking to a computer through a terminal than I did speaking English to another living soul.