i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.
i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.
This something we cannot bring back: when we were all new to this, it felt so unbelievable. Suddenly we were casually chatting with people thousands of kilometers away, who were of a completely different background. I’ll never forget when I (living in Germany with a turkish migration background) was talking to a US based Neonazi who said that he had nothing against turks, but he heard turks where the nxxxers of Germany. I mean, that was not a pleasant conversation, but it was just so unbelievable that this was actually happening. It felt like everything was possible now. I mean back in 2001 I thought “Hey, let’s hear the other side” and just went on the talibans website. Just a few years earlier that kind of insight was simply impossible. The internet just felt borderless.
A lot of things were terrible though, like “asl” or when any wrong click could easily land you on a disgusting and deservedly illegal website. Crazy times.
Crazy times indeed. My cousin brought home an Egyptian guy she met on the internet in the early 2000s. Turned out to be just fine but it seemed sketchy at the time.