I identify fully with the thoughts and feelings expressed and the way they are expressed in this essay.
I don’t believe there is any fundamental difference between Online life as described here and Offline life as I experience it daily, that is yes the internet is not what it once was but then again neither is the world.
The internet is no longer the untamed frontier it once was. I’m fine with that.
The idea of a post-internet is interesting and actually looks useful.
I don’t know how to connect all these ideas logically, some overlap, some contradict.
Where has that cherished feeling gone? I won’t find it by tossing my phone aside and going to live in the woods, like Henry David Thoreau. Nor do I want to start bitterly raging that I’m lost in a world I never made, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. What was it that I wanted in the first place, and how did I mistake the technical means for the moral end?
This is something that needs addressing, we can continue as we were, putting our hopes in technology or we can move and put our hopes in the specific actions we take, this is where we as a generation that grew up on the promise of cyberspace as a marvel of the modern world and a thing worth pursuing will either continue the lament or think fondly on it, wistfully, as one more folly of our youth. I distinguish this generation from the one that views the internet as infrastructure only because of the danger of a disillusioned romanticism taking hold over us.
