It was a magical time, hearing the scrambling sound of your phone line connecting you to the Internet. Launching Netscape and staring at the throbber animation while...
One can occasionally see things which are just as magical in our time.
It’s just that - the Web is like Coruscant, what was magical is the lower levels, abandoned, decaying, full of predators and infections and barely supported ; people live on the middle levels, which are full of usual life with all kinds of stuff, and upper levels, which are heaven, but for few.
These things still happen. Just mostly not in the Web.
We have forgotten, but most of the magic is created by separate human beings, and it was a very rare situation where corporations would help it, in the 90s.
But then talking like that is a pretty tired cyberpunk trope. We’ll see something good. Humanity finds new pits and stinky places, as the time goes, but these are not the only kind of things it finds.
They were magical.
The third of Arthur C Clarke’s three laws:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
One can occasionally see things which are just as magical in our time.
It’s just that - the Web is like Coruscant, what was magical is the lower levels, abandoned, decaying, full of predators and infections and barely supported ; people live on the middle levels, which are full of usual life with all kinds of stuff, and upper levels, which are heaven, but for few.
These things still happen. Just mostly not in the Web.
We have forgotten, but most of the magic is created by separate human beings, and it was a very rare situation where corporations would help it, in the 90s.
But then talking like that is a pretty tired cyberpunk trope. We’ll see something good. Humanity finds new pits and stinky places, as the time goes, but these are not the only kind of things it finds.