I started a BBS network. That was my social life. Those digital pen pal friends were my life line. Probably the most intense, intimate relationships I've ever had.
I don't know what happened in the medium transitions since. Dial up to internet, FidoNet to UUCP & NNTP, FTP & Gopher to HTTP, multiuser to MMORPG, blogs to social media, desktop to laptop to mobile, social media to livestream.
Maybe it's like Chomsky tried to warn us: Anything ad supported is bad for us.
Maybe it's like David Graeber suggests: While winner-takes-all is something like a natural law, we can always find nooks and corners to connect with each other and have genuine relationships.
I really dunno.
Long ago, I trusted people I met online in a way I can't anymore and that creates a barrier that protects me from potential predators, but it also keeps out potential friends. Multiply that across literally billions of people and it's a hard problem to solve.
I don't think the tech, per se, is the problem. We opened a social Pandora's Box and having seen how things can go wrong at scale, we optimize for trying to guard against potential evil rather than for fostering good.
With that, our fears deepen. It becomes a case of "Going to war to preserve the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity."
Ultimately, it comes back to the people and how they live their lives and what is in their minds. Tech is a problem because we've decided The Tech is the problem rather than deciding how we use it is The Problem.
Then we very ironically design new apps to remedy our problems rooted in the idea that The Tech is the problem rather than designing new philosophies and new ideas and new social norms which has historically been the effective remedy for social ills.
Because of the internet, I've had friends -- real friends who were extremely important to me -- in Canada, in Guam and in the Middle East. They helped save my life and shape my character.
While largely housebound due to my health, the internet was how I had close relationships with people the world over without exposing me to their germs or them to mine.
I left my corporate job that was helping to kill me and slept in a tent for a few years while trying to figure out how to make a few bucks online. That helped save my life and helped me get healthier when there's not supposed to be any hope for me.
Once, my oldest son said to me "There's both good and evil in all things." I thought that was profound and life giving and eye opening.
I asked him where he learned such profound wisdom given his relative youth. He told me I taught him that. He learned it from me.
That was even more surprising. I didn't have any memory or awareness of having done any such thing.
I don't hate tech. I see tremendous untapped potential in it to build a better world and I flail about trying to figure out how to write about it knowing that I have no audience and I have no credibility and no one believes my story.
I start little blogs that peter out and go nowhere. I start little reddits that sometimes have me as the only member for ages.
And I'm sorry to hear that someone who likely de facto helped to save my life by being one of the cogs in the machine that built the tech that helped me live when, by all rights, I should have died is someone so bitter and disillusioned with the very thing I still find wondrous and life giving and a means to connect with people in spite of my incurable condition and compromised immune system.