This is another interesting point to me as a pre-2000s internet user, because I remember when the Internet was touted as a means to _BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER_. Remember the Information Superhighway? Remember the _World Wide Web?_

Now it's more like, "World? You're wide, weeb!" https://twitter.com/MortalKomrat/status/1346077640151674884

It's just very funny to me that you would expect the most powerful communication tool in the history of humankind to not, you know, facilitate communication between groups. In fact, the idea that disparate communities online should not interact is pure wishful thinking.

Because that's the nature of the beast. In point of fact, we were always going to end up here, at this crossroads, because the internet was explicitly designed to operate like that. Sure, there's always been pushback to the inevitability, like the fuss over Eternal September.

And that brings me to another focus point I've often thought about. What caused the paradigm shift between Old Racist Internet and New Woke Internet? The pragmatist in me wants to apply Occam's Razor and say that the democritization of Online brought about by smartphones did it

Namely by bringing in a larger scale of nonwhite, nonstraight, nonmale voices. But is it that simple? And there's few who can consult with me about this because the split between New/Old Internet is largely being memoryholed.

I have noticed that the few black people like myself who were exposed to Old Internet were either so scarred by their experiences online that they refuse to acknowledge the past, or have undergone a sort of boomer brain transformation, a hardening of the mental arteries...

...in which they mock the younger generation as being too soft and Woke online. These are both unhelpful paths to take, in my opinion. There is very little discussion in a fruitful manner about the evolution/paradigm shift of the Old and the New internet online, or at least...

...I have yet to see it tackled at length. By and large I notice this deeply disturbing cultural phenomenon in which most Black people act as though the internet was invented when Twitter came online, and this total memory holing of the pre-2000s internet is upsetting.

By not acknowledging the past, it makes this cultural reckoning with the Internet's old racist history that much more messy and difficult. The wound suppurates and festers under the plaster, growing fetid, rather than being cleaned out and cauterized, and so....

this endless Kulturkampf stretches on with no end in sight. But why are people afraid to confront it?

In further contemplation, the business of how people think Twitter is when the First Black People Were Online is very scary to me, because I knew a lot of black folks who were online long before then, and it was...quite different than now, actually. And this seems engineered.

Almost as if there was some sort of push by some shadowy hidden force to obscure the past. But why?