HUGE problem there. The thing I'm nostalgic for isn't a collection of objects, a style/aesthetic, a retro-computing platform, or music or films from a particular era.
I’m nostalgic for what people used to just call “The Internet”, which meant much more than access to a network. It meant the shared experience of being one of the first people to use a brand new information technology, which was moving so fast that it brought together liked-minded people in an explosion of youthful energy, while filtering authorities, corporations, and avatars of cuckserviance and moralfaggotry.
Early attempts at adverting, tracking and control were so laughable, it gave the sense that we'd already won.
It wasn't Napster itself, but the world which Napster exploded into. The experience that with just a PC and the right technical knowledge, you (and YOUR dudes) were unstoppable.
Picrel because it's the start of a journey. The starting town in pokemon where you have no knowledge of what's ahead, and you're filled with anticipation.
The end is represented by vaporwave. The afterparty where it's so completely over, and all you can do is parody, and say it was actually all ironic, and we didn't really believe technology alone would create a better world.
Could also be represented by "the metaverse" where true believers (and crypto grifters), are in complete denial and try one last attempt to reanimated the dead internet. A hideous chungusified travesty of the real internet, where they combine soulless recycled aesthetics with fucking digital ownership. The one thing we'd stolen out from under the big corps.
The boomers had no idea anything went down, and kids/teens don't believe any of this actually happened. They commit the fallacy of thinking that technology was relatively primitive therefore everything that happened before they were born must have been shit and irrelevant. And if you look at a few geocities screencaps you can't really prove otherwise.
That's the problem. The REAL Internet was bulldozed one corporate merger at a time, until all the evidence was annihilated. You can't expect people to fight for something they don't even believe existed.
I'm nostalgic for the tech milieu which radiated with the certainty that the situation we're in now could never happen. It was impossible in the face of our collective power.
And yet we did lose. Not last month when the age-checks started popping up, nor in September 1993. We lost battle upon battle, by attrition spread over decades.
It’s gone. The evidence is either annihilated, or impossible to understand what you're even looking at unless you were actually there.
Can’t go back.