I Still Believe in the Internet
“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
— John Gilmore, 1993
💾 Jacked In (1998)
I got the internet in 1998. A 400MHz Celeron processor inside an HP Pavilion, clunky as hell, but beautiful. Windows 98. 56k modem. AOL discs in the mailbox like manna from cyberspace.
Within days, I wasn’t just surfing — I was spelunking.
Cult of the Dead Cow. SubSeven. Packet sniffers. Backdoors. I wasn’t hacking the Pentagon — I was figuring out how to prank my friends by making their CD trays pop open remotely and change their mouse cursors to skulls. It was stupid and brilliant and wild.
It wasn’t content. It was discovery.
IRC taught me how to talk like a machine and listen like a human. Usenet gave me access to conversations that rewired my brain. BBSs connected me to people I never would’ve met in my Virginia hometown — people who were weird like me, wired like me.
I didn’t find the internet. I grew up inside it.
🕶️ The Real Ones Were Always Lurking
Before social media turned everything into an ad, the internet was a bazaar of weirdos, poets, coders, freaks, gamers, queers, seekers, pirates, and prophets. Nobody was posting for clout. We were posting to connect — or confess.
You didn’t need a real name. You needed a handle.
You didn’t need a profile picture. You needed a presence.
There was no algorithm smoothing out your feed. It was messy. You had to dig. But what you found — it stuck with you.
A line of code. A zine. A cracked app. A forum post that hit like scripture.
This wasn’t the “information superhighway.”
It was a back alley of possibilities — and I felt at home in the noise.
🛠️ From Fan to Builder
I didn’t go to college. Didn’t have a roadmap. But the internet gave me a path.
I learned Linux from forums. Built servers from blog posts. Wrote code because someone on IRC walked me through a regex that changed my life.
Eventually, I made a career out of it. DevOps. SRE. Startups.
I went from trolling my friends with SubSeven to managing Kubernetes clusters and deploying infrastructure as code.
And still — after all these years — I feel the same thrill spinning up a box or wiring a CI pipeline that I felt double-clicking that first warez app or unpacking my first .tar.gz.
I’m not just a user.
I am the internet.
💌 Love in the Time of Latency
Most of my best friends? I met online.
Every serious relationship I’ve ever had since high school? Sparked through screens.
Every job? Found through someone I first met in a forum, a Slack, a subreddit, or a message board.
I’ve wept into keyboards. I’ve fallen in love over email threads. I’ve watched revolutions — literal and emotional — unfold in real time from half a world away.
The internet didn’t isolate me. It saved me.
🕳️ The Sludge Years
But something happened.
We replaced communities with brands.
Forums with feeds.
Subculture with content.
We optimized for ad revenue instead of expression.
The DIY punk ethos of the early web got bought out, throttled, and turned into a vending machine of outrage and dopamine.
Facebook became a mall. Twitter became a warzone. TikTok became a surveillance casino where everyone dances to the algorithm’s beat.
And still — I believe.
🔮 Why I Still Believe
Because beneath the sludge, the soul remains.
Because every time I open a terminal, I feel like a wizard.
Because somewhere out there, a 12-year-old is learning how to SSH into their Raspberry Pi and feeling the spark for the first time.
I believe in the internet because it's still the most powerful tool for liberation, creation, and connection we’ve ever built.
Because people are still making open source magic in the margins.
Because someone out there is still hosting a hand-written HTML site on a ThinkPad in their closet.
Because weirdness survives.
And because we can rebuild it.
Not as a product. Not as a brand.
As a home.
I still believe in the internet.
The real one. The broken one. The one you have to dig for.
And I believe it’s worth saving.