We could probably do without the porn and the little kitty videos; but the knowledge that you are not necessarily weird, nor struggling alone makes up for it.
So many of us have had a better life made possible, even if not acted upon, because information is freely available. Yes, there’s a lot of hate-speech online, granted, but how much easier is it now for, for example, gay kids or trans people to find out that they aren’t alone?
(Insert your own example/group/interest)
It’s made my life easier to understand, for sure.
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Most research being currently done would not be possible. You’d be able to get papers in your field once someone had laboriously printed them on dead trees and shipped them across the world at the cost of many dollars and many tons of carbon. The technological advancement and lifting out of the poverty of anywhere that isn’t the western world would be vastly slower due to there being no efficient way to coordinate outsourcing, or send information and technical know-how abroad.
Just-in-time logistics would be impossible, or at least vastly more expensive, and, as a result, there would be less diversity in the marketplace and everything would cost a lot more. The free software movement would not exist in any significant capacity, not having any way of coordinating, and likewise, the free culture movement would be gone as well. The only entities with global cultural reach would be massive profit-driven corporations and the government of ethnostates, which could, if they so desired, implement the sort of censorship that, today, would be the envy of any country without ‘North’ and ‘Korea’ in its name. It is highly unlikely that the fight for LGBT+ rights and inclusion would have gotten the traction it has outside small progressive enclaves without a decentralized communications system.
But, you wouldn’t be annoyed by your Facebook feed, so that all would be, in some way, worth it I’m sure.
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I wouldn’t have wasted a decade trying to use it to become a famous drawing person. Then I wouldn’t have spent another decade smothering the ashes of my failed dreams with the whipped cream of MMOs.
I’d still be a cynical snarker. I’m generation X after all.
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Would it be too unkind to ask if we could see one of your drawings? It’s easy for talent to go overlooked in a big pond, but at the same time, if you’re happier not revisiting old dreams, I can understand that.
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See this is the part I’m not sold on either by you or Codey. Yes these movements would be lessened, but university campuses have been traditional hotbeds of counterculture and innovation. You would still have electronic communication, someone was bound to tackle the particular problem of ‘how do I get two machines to swap information so I don’t have to cart over this huge heavy bulk of data tapes’ since that was the original reason for packet switching in the first place. BBS’s would still happen in my view, and bbs’s from what I’ve seen in poking about had gotten through to be fairly industrious. Sure you had a lot of literal ‘kid working the one phone line in the house’ boards that ran from x to y, but then you had fully commercial systems that had twenty or even sixty lines. I have a feeling if the internet didn’t happen we would see perhaps something like a mix between an Americanized minitel system (it was tried in a few markets here… why they chose the ones they did I HAVE NO IDEA, but given the prevalence of other options and the… well… lackluster funding it went nowhere) for more commercial ventures that wanted to work through the regional baby bell, and BBS’s that were a less regulated, but ironically through fidonet, far wider reaching place.
Codey’s core problem is he seems to bundle ‘the internet’ up with Now. Maybe he didn’t live through any pre-internet time. I know I’m enough of an edge case that I’m starting to not trust my pre-internet experiences (which themselves were limited to high school and younger.) So it honestly feels like he’s outright throwing out every non government effort at networking and thus ignoring the communities that were forged from them.
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We’d still be using Datapac, Tymnet, etc with their awkward (for the provider) pricing model. (Oh, and don’t talk to me about trying to make Xmodem work over Datapac!)
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What is wrong with you?
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Ahh, here’s what I was looking for.
Hover text: Wrote this comic first, then went looking for images…found this one right away and was all like ‘YESSSSSSSS’
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Right. We had AOL, Compuserve, Genie, etc. Private for-profit networks. And we had the volunteer and home hobbyist networks of BBSes - Fidonet and WWIVnet, etc.
At the time, for those without a direct internet connection, almost anything could be done via e-mail (although not as efficiently). You could send an email to request a file from an FTP server and it would be UUencoded, split among several emails, and sent back to you, after which you could piece it back together, UUdecode it, and have the file just the same as if you had been able to connect to the FTP server and download it.
If the internet hadn’t developed and commercialized as it did, it would’ve just done so differently based off of those systems. The inefficiencies would have been ironed out.
It could have been quite different if we’d ended up with a pair of nets - the commercial AOLnet and the decentralized BBSnet. That could be an interesting angle. But I don’t find the angle where all computers are more isolated now than they were in the years before the internet opened up to be very believable.
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Me either, which is why I suspect Codey didn’t really do much research on ‘pre internet’ networking and or ‘netowrks not directly a result of d/arpanet’s being merged with NSFnet and opened to the public.’ That or he’s simply going with the absolute worst possible alternitive to show that for all its faults the fact the internet exists is ultimately a net positive.
Would it be too unkind to ask if we could see one of your drawings?
The only unkindness would be me to myself when looking over which ones to share. And I’m pretty cruel. 
Most all of my webcomic work has been deeply shoved down the memory hole for good reason. While grit and gumption and a Geocities page could get you far in 2000, by the time I gave up on it in 2008 the preferred style and subject matter for the medium had been pretty cemented and I wasn’t good enough to get past those audience expectations. Joey Manley and Cayetano Garza were fans so at least I can smile at that.
The only thing I really do nowadays is draw some quick fountain pen sketches of various amounts of effort to get the drawing urge out of my system for the six months it takes to smother it again. I pretty much only share them with friends on FaceBook.
Finished art is pretty rare though… Mostly because it never seems finished to me. I get so deep into fussing about with minor bullshit no one ever notices I tend to just drop it for my own sanity. This thing I did the day Adam West died would probably be the closest.
ETA: I am working on some photographic/ cartoon memoir of my decade and a half as an ESL Cowboy in East Asia but accumulating all of those stories is slow going.
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This is the part that casual users forget.
I’m with you on the BBSs. Before CompuServe, I could call up a BBS and get to Usenet or look through Gopher to find interesting things.
BBSs saved my life, before the Internet could. That’s where I found other weird people who actually wanted to keep learning and discovering, and gave me hope for the future.
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I like them, a lot!
This might be a weird sort of compliment (it’s intended as a compliment, anyway) but you’ve got some strong symbolism -type-elements in there that I look at and think “This would make an amazing tarot card!”
Batman with his bomb there is totally the Fool with his foot raised about to step off a cliff, and your singer & friend struck me as a great design for the Lovers, though I’m not really sure why (I’m a little off my meds, so stuff is going straight through my visual cortex to my heart without stopping to explain on the way).
So yeah, waffle aside, I really do like them, both. They are impossible to ignore and they really talk to you.
You certainly know way more about drawing than me (I can fuck up stickmen), but any time you’re feeling a bit hard on yourself, remember that these days, a lot of fulfilling our dreams is straight-up luck. You can work and work until you are the best in the world, and there will still be at least 10,000 people in between you and anyone getting the chance to find out how good you are.
Which is another thing the internet has given us - global competition for every job, opportunity and scrap of recognition out there - and an awful lot of traffic congestion in the channels to getting noticed.
That said, luck can happen. After I’d given up, the woman who is now my boss randomly picked a bunch of names off linked in and gave us the chance to apply for a role, with a writing test to filter us out rather than "x million years of experience. There is luck and then there is that, and I really hope you get your shot too, in whatever form will make you most happy 
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Basically, we are the internet.
(from Marc Ngui’s illustrations to Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus)
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Bit backward. The Internet is Us.
…though sadly that is the exact reason the Internet is Porn.
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I like them, a lot!
Thanks!
and your singer & friend
http://www.charanporantan.net/
Go through their videography. They’re great. Their backing band are great too.
You can work and work until you are the best in the world, and there will still be at least 10,000 people in between you and anyone getting the chance to find out how good you are.
That’s the thing, I’m at the stage in my life where reward has to match effort. No one is going to buy my groceries for me, if you get what I’m sayin’
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Stroking issues…
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My first thought was that with no internet we’d find all that missing productivity that’s holding back the economy. How many of us actually save more time online than we waste?
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Am I being insulted here? I emailed Jason Scott to get his take on the whole matter since I really don’t buy codey’s conclusions and… I dunno.
https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/909812726222000133
Eh well. Still a pretty alright guy, archive.org needs money to keep the lights on. Give them some if you can.
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And cats. Don’t forget cats.
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