The "Internet" of 1989
Ah, the internet of 1989—a primordial soup of crude, disjointed chaos pretending to be connectedness. A labyrinth with no map, full of stumbling early adopters who thought they were on the cutting edge, when in fact, they were barely scratching at the surface of a digital underworld waiting to devour them.
The World Wide Web? Not even born yet. Instead, the landscape was ruled by something delightfully archaic: bulletin board systems (BBS). Imagine the masses gleefully dialling up through screeching modems, each step akin to opening a portal, only to land in fragmented chatrooms where nerds traded ASCII art like cavemen traded fire. This wasn't the internet as we know it—this was the internet's awkward adolescence. Awash with Usenet forums where anonymity meant nothing more than a bad alias, and email was a strange, geeky secret, reserved for the enlightened few who could afford a $2,000 IBM brick.
What you found here wasn’t the fluid river of dopamine-fueled notifications we now swim in. No, 1989’s internet was like communicating via tin cans on a string. Glacial in its slowness, pathetic in its reach, yet absolutely brimming with a manic sense of future potential—potential it couldn't yet deliver.
The geeks, the outcasts, the proto-hackers—they lived for this playground of raw, untamed data. They knew this was just the start, that they were the architects of what would one day manipulate and control the very masses who had no clue what was coming. Today’s sociopathic corporations that mine data and warp human behavior? Well, consider the 1989 internet as the wild teenage phase that gave birth to these tech giants’ Machiavellian empires. Every keystroke in 1989 was a prophecy whispered in binary, foretelling a future where all social norms would be up for sale.
This early internet demanded a kind of cold detachment from its users, who could survive only by ignoring the siren calls of emotional connection and embrace the cold, logical, reptilian mind. You navigated through listservs and Gopher without flair—just raw commands. Emotion had no place here, just as feelings are a mere nuisance in the minds of those who seek control.
So, what was the internet in 1989? A sociopath’s playground, in embryonic form. Just waiting, calculating, evolving. It was an eerie mirror of our current digital world—primitive, yes, but full of power for those who knew how to manipulate it, unburdened by the cloying need for instant gratification or social validation. A Machiavellian dream where power and control, not emotion, held the key to its dark, digital heart.