I was watching some old Ghost in the Shell anime stuff, and it brought back memories of what it was like to live in the 90s and early 2000s.

You kids don't know this, but there used to be a time when you had to walk to your friend's house if you wanted to see them. You had to call them on the phone line, and there was only 1 phone line per house (unless you were rich and had 2, but even then the 2nd line was for faxes.)

We had to read books to learn things, and if we didn't remember them, we wouldn't know them. There was no Google. There were card catalogs in libraries that you could use to search a limited number of topics. Research meant reading a book, finding the books it referenced, reading those books, and finding those books that were referenced. Etc, and so on and so forth. Eventually you might find a living person and you could go talk with them about the topic, see what they know about it.

The 90s and 2000s brought in the "Information Age", when information was at our fingertips.

There were are a lot of questions people had about what would happen if people integrated with technology. In other words, what would a society where everyone had the full power of the internet at their fingertips all the time look like? Well, you are living in it, and some of you young ones were born into it. You cannot imagine what life used to be like before the internet and smartphones.

One of the things we learned fairly quickly was that there was something called the Wisdom of the Crowds. Ask a million people a question, and there is a HIGH chance they will get it right. No, not everyone, but generally, the consensus leans towards the correct answer. Lots of people tried to harness this, to various degrees of success. Probably the most successful was Wikipedia, which almost encoded all the information in the world in a neat little website. (Wikipedia today is NOTHING like it was back when it started. Today it is all edited to reflect a left-leaning ideology.)

The other thing we learned is how powerful internet marketing could be -- if done right! If you could get your message to go "viral" you could potentially reach millions of people with hardly any effort.

As people began to interact with each other, politics shifted. By a lot. In the mid 2000s, it had become clear that the average internet user was deeply conservative, if not a full-blown nazi. It became clear that all of our social problems could not be hidden, swept under the rug, explained away with trite phrases. It didn't take long for people to start shouting from the rooftops about all the things you are not supposed to shout from the rooftops. (A classic example is the 13-50 statistic.)

And thanks to the viral nature of the internet, conservatism was spreading faster and faster and nothing could stop it.

Today's internet is a dumbed down version of what it used to be. You are no longer free to say what you think. You are no longer free to engage the wisdom of the masses. You are not allowed to create viral content. Everything you say and do is carefully monitored and filtered. Why? Because the internet was out of control, and threatened to destroy the power of the elites and replace it with actual freedom.

Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, etc... All these things exist for ONE purpose and ONE purpose alone: To CONTROL you. They NEED to control your thoughts and your actions. They NEED you to stop connecting with other humans on the internet and stop forming opinions based on your observations. They made these things so they can banish you and force you to disconnect.

We used to imagine that to be banned from the internet was the equivalent of a death sentence. Imagine living as a cyborg, and then someone pulling the plug on your data processing centers. You would die. That's how important we imagined the internet would be, and how important it was that everyone be free to access it and do with it what they felt was best.

Nowadays no one thinks twice about banning someone from the internet. This is how low they value individualism and the human spirit.

My 2 cents: Get off the internet. Disconnect. Read books. Learn how we used to do things before Google and Wikipedia existed. The things we used to do, the way we used to do them, didn't stop becoming relevant because of a small technological revolution in how computers connect. Their replacements are definitely not better! The "real" internet is coming, and you can help create it, but you have to free yourself from the prison of the current internet to do so.