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Comment by nebulousthree | Hacker News Reader

Once the human became the focus of the computer and internet usage, I think that's when it lost that amazing feeling. When the real identity became central to the majority's experience of the web.

If you stay out of that (decidedly big) circle, you can still get a bit of that sparkle.

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this is a huge part of it. I was a dork in high school and the Internet let me connect to communities of people all over the world and make relationships I wouldn't have had otherwise, and all of it was just cool as shit. nobody cared who you were in real life or what your social status or physical appearance there was, people were just handles creating and playing and talking about stuff together. it was great. I joined a group of kids making a far-too-ambitious Game Maker game and became close friends with one guy, and we IMed almost nightly on MSN for like a year before he even mentioned that his skin tone was different than mine. none of that shit mattered at all, and it felt like the future.

then social media and smartphones happened and celebrities and normies immigrated en masse, bringing their preconceived notions of meatspace social norms along with them. remember when nobody ever publicly whined about "harassment" and "death threats" aimed their way by pseudonymous Internet users, because that kind of just came with the territory and you got used to it and it didn't affect you after awhile? I sure as hell didn't use my real name as my handle back then, you'd be crazy to do so. then celebrities got on Twitter and the masses of iPhone owners followed and all of that went away—cyberspace and meatspace merged together, and meatspace brought all the baggage we had been so happy to leave behind in with it.

then Denny's hired a social media intern to post on tumblr and through the dark magic of this new, normie Internet, corporations became People, Too, because see they post to the Internet with memes and support for social causes just like you and me!, and any hope of the libertarian hacker future was forever shattered. it was fun while it lasted though.

Corporations becoming People would be the natural outcome of a libertarian society as well. That’s what happens when they have unchecked influence and power. It just took ours a little longer to get to that state.

sure, but my point is, that happened right around the same time that everyone got used to having a a 3G-connected screen in their pockets at all time as a societal default. if you wanted to get on the Internet, you had to use a desktop computer in your house, school, or place of work, or take your laptop to a coffee shop or McDonald's or whatever. when smartphones because a societal standard and social media proliferated, that's the vector corporations used to become People, Too, and also when the Golden Age of the Internet Libertarian died as well. the Internet Libertarian future of the Internet is Mastodon et al. and federation and such, but it's not going to catch on because normies don't want anything it has to offer over the mainstream social media networks. the inevitable thing that killed the Internet Libertarian future and gave way for everything to be an ad-filled walled-garden corporate nightmare world was mass walled-garden smartphone ecosystem adoption by the general public instead of a more Internet Libertarian open, federated software landscape. we figured this out too little too late and were in the process of dying out, no longer the Default Internet User, and then #Occupy happened, the concept of modern identity politics were deployed as a countermeasure, various political subfactions formed in the online space, and now few people who were Internet Libertarians at the time of the article's writing would still consider themselves to be such today, and with good reason—the Internet of today is not the same Internet that they were absolutely sure would lead to the culmination of their techno-libertarian ideals at a global scale, through proliferation of Internet connectivity. whoops. things didn't end up working out that way because nobody foresaw how utterly chemically addictive the average person would find stroking a piece of glass to consume a literally endless supply of visual stimuli—whoops.

What you have described would happen as the natural end result of a libertarian state. Because before smartphones we have seen how postwar industrialized America foster all sorts of addictions in consumers. From self-medication, which started in the '50s (watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers and count how many times characters casually pop pills or imbibe in the background), to fast food, to television, and then on to social media and everything else that the internet enabled that is what unregulated industry does where there is no opposing force- whether governmental or otherwise- to check its power.

Libertarianism manifests in many forms, and I would say the Internet Libertarian early-90's WIRED cyberpunk cowboy ideal one is less of a cohesive project than a scene. It's a vibe, a mood, that was doomed to end just as warehouse techno raves did as well. The libertarian ideal of being a cyber-cowboy on a wild untamed frontier, without intrusive power structures- whether bureaucratic government, fuddy-duddy corporations, or the uncool normie hoi polloi- taps into the same American dream of the Wild West or of a land of Jeffersonian yeomen. And is just as sustainable.

I understand your loss and anguish. But the same historical forces that created the technologies that captured the dreams of Internet Libertarianism are not all that different from the same forces that created social media and brought everyone else online into Eternal September. This is how society, perhaps all forms of growth, operate.

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