When did the internet become so tedious? It wasn’t always this way. It once felt like a frontier town, with outlaws and sheriffs, sure — but also expanses of empty land where a person could be free. We’ve tamed this digital wild west, exhausted its gold mines and polluted its rivers. Paved its rolling acres and put up subdivisons and stripmalls.

Born in 1986, I belong to that generation with the unfortunate name “Millennials.” As a baby, I had an original ’84 Macintosh in my bedroom, thanks to my technophilic father. With no hard drive, it ran entirely on floppy disks.

My dad was a serious early adopter. As a journalist in the early ’90s, he had to labour to convince his editors that he needed access to the web. He wrote a column about the intersection of popular music and the internet called “CyberPop,” and often had his emails confused with an online dad who fancied himself The Cyber Pop. As a young child, I accompanied him to an extravagant media event where Aerosmith did one of the first-ever internet interviews. It’s probably hard to believe how exciting this was at the time.

After that, I was in love with the possibilities of this emerging technology. But access was a precious thing: it took a complex series of modem squeals just to connect, and once online, it meant monopolizing the only phone while I “surfed.” Teaching myself HTML to make an embarrassing Angelfire page (mercifully lost to time) was an agonizing process; at any moment a sibling could abruptly sever my silver cord to this astral plane just by lifting a phone. As joedapro01, I played text-based games and befriended other nerdy kids around the world.

I was thirteen when the century ended. My house had recently been the first in our Toronto neighbourhood to make the switch to broadband. Wikipedia and Facebook didn’t exist yet, but Napster was brand new, and I used it to steal hit singles at blinding speeds. Just in case there are any younger readers who do not already think me antediluvian: before that, I would listen to the radio with a tape cassette in, ready to record the second a favourite song came on. Around this point, I had what might be deemed my first sexual experience, “cybering” in a chat room. (The transcript of this encounter is mercifully lost to time.)

I devoured cyberpunk. Works like Snow Crash, Neuromancer, and Otherland were prophetic texts to my teenage self. The protagonists of these books were hero-hackers. They donned mirrorshades, booted up, and jacked in! They coded utopias, battling the evil corporations and governments that had usually turned the physical world into a repressive nightmare place. I loved it all, and couldn’t wait for The Future.

Writing in 2019, I’m thinking of this optimism and how it all went wrong. Cyberbullying is an epidemic; fake news sites have shattered public trust in real ones. Governments stand accused of using the internet to subvert democracies and spy on citizens. We’ve got some terrifying questions about what corporations are doing with all that information we freely handed them.

You’ve heard this all before, so instead I wanted to lament the loss of that sense of wonder. The internet just seems banal. Everyone has ubiquitous access, and what do we do with it? Avoid strangers in bars. Bump into people on the sidewalk in a texting fugue. Perform who we’re supposed to be on social media. Check fifteen reviews before trying a new restaurant. Shame and drag those who step over the line.

You’ve probably heard this all before too. But did you know the net was once a technomagical place where you could be anyone and fix all the problems of the world? Sadly, I think it’s been lost to time.

Originally published in White Wall Review 42: Special Issue (2019)