And they think everyone just ate the WMDs in Iraq thing. No, I was there at the protests. Many of us knew it was a bullshit excuse.

The only thing Iraq and Al Qaeda had in common was the Q. We knew that then.

Living through an event isnt the same thing as being knowledgeable about it.

But it can definitely help to understand the background before the event which is something that wouldn’t typically be captured by regular news reports.

To be fair. Truthers for 9/11 don’t disbelief in the event ala Holocaust Deniers or “Covid Truthers”

They believe that the event was arranged by the US government in order to go to War… which many believed at the time and still do “No blood for oil.”

January 6th too

Oh, man, I both agree AND think this post is one of those things.

See, people around Mastodon keep saying “everybody is nice, like in the early Internet”, and my memory of the Internet is full of drive-by porn and gore, weird political takes, illegible websites and malware.

Apparently some study recently flagged zoomers as being worse than even boomers at spotting online threats, with millenials being best, and that checks out to me for the reasons you list.

Before itunes really caught on and ages before something like spotify would rise up, millenials cut their teeth on kazaa, limewire and a host of other p2p services trying to get digital copies of our music and movies. Is this really just a low quality pirate rip or is a virus laden exe? ONE WAY TO FIND OUT!

There are even fewer of us that remember the totally text based forums and IRC that was in many ways the innocent Garden of Eden era, before Eternal September happened. I was very much a child, so I’m not really nostalgic about that era of the net, since it was far more of an echo chamber in many ways back then, but it was “safe” and “innocent” back then. You had to verify sources even more, since the majority of sources weren’t available online, but the vast majority of people using it were not only fluent in at least one human language, they were also fluent in multiple programming languages, Assembly being far more popular than than it is now. This is when you could trust any link. The false actors hadn’t managed to infiltrate the protected Geek Sphere, quite yet.

Then CompuServe happened, and it was no longer a refuge for us computer geeks, all of a sudden there were business people looking at our ideas. They didn’t like them much at all, to say the least. AOL followed and further saturated the net with people who had no idea what they could do with it. This is when us netizens started warning to check the link address before you clicked. Back then, you could easily keep a database list of the false actor domains.

Then the late 90s and mostly 2000 happened. That’s the Wild West you’re talking about. All of a sudden, you HAD to have antivirus programs, you needed many programs such as adblockers that wouldn’t exist for another few years, IRC and Use.net had been piracy hubs, but all of a sudden Napster and Bearshare made those archaic forums unnecessary. Metallica did their thing, accidentally creating a bunch of Metallica fans that would never buy anything by Metallica, but they had access to their entire discography. Hell discography downloads became a thing about this time. Don’t download the entire discography of The Kinks. That shit contains literally 40 to 120 gigs of MP3s across 40(?) albums, depending on compression quality.

I’m a Xennial being born in 1980 and on the net as early as late 1986, early 1987, my father was in the industry and literally helped code parts of UNIX, while he was in The Navy in the early 1970s. I’ve been shown evidence that we were the first household in a multi-state area, thanks to the meticulous data keeping of The Baby Bell that we were part of, that had two dedicated phone lines far earlier than anyone else except my father’s colleagues, all of whom lived multiple states away from us since my father has been remote working as much as he can since SSH was adopted as standard in UNIX. He rejects all technology that he can. He claims that it is all based on extremely faulty programming, and we can’t trust it.

There have been several periods as the net gets bigger, and I don’t doubt that we will look at right now as a “special time” in the future. I’m not sure if that will be because we finally found the limits of LLMs or if it’s because the net will evolve into something that is closer to the spirit of “a place to find the truth through facts,” which is what it started as.

“Margot Robbie teased Sonics longest spines.”

I’m in my 40s, a project manager at my company and half the time when I can. Tech support I have to send them the goddamn tech support article that I want them to follow.

Plus I have to train all these kids in their 20s on how to use outlook and various other software programs that I’ve been using for 20 years now.

For real though! Also, can anybody give me a lead as to which instance on here where I can find bad fanfic? A friend of mine was wondering.

phuckin’ THIS.

While that response is probably very relevant to current US military doctrine, I feel compelled to mention that the “threat” was very centralized in Saudi Arabia, and that while its sad that many innocents died in 9/11, at no point during the last 22 years was an actual credible threat to america. W’s lies and subsequent invasion of Iraq no doubt shaped the US military into the fedex-on-steroids that is is today’s as well as destabilized the entire middle east (and maimed and killed countless people on both sides), but ultimately they were just that - lies. None of the countries the US has fought in since 2001 have ever been an actual threat to the nation.

I feel you with my August 27, 2001 enlistment date. Thought I was getting easy college money instead I got a lifetime of mental problems from a war we shouldn’t have been in.

Makes me think of a family thing where one young cousin of mine was obviously baked. And everyone knew it. Everyone could see, everyone could smell it. But nobody cared. So the lil fella just sat in the corner the whole time slyly grinning to himself and giggling. Some months later I joked about it in another family gathering and the guy was shocked to find out we knew about weed and what it smelled like.

Weed, ah, what a new fangled thing. Tbh I’ve been in the almost exact position. Something comforting how it keeps happening.

Congrats on cleaning up while still keeping it real

I think it was Behind the Bastards that hit the nail on the head about this in an episode in the last couple of weeks: Rick Rolling is goatse for normies. Even the links you trick people into clicking have become relatively sanitized as the web democratized.

And honestly, goatse was far from the most extreme thing that was completely commonplace on the old web. Turn of the century Internet culture was wild.

www.whitehouse.com anyone?

Torrent sites are safe and sane compared to Kazaa or Gnutella in the early 2000s.

Don’t google on goetse, and don’t google on lemonparty.

I can never see wedding bands and old folks homes the same way ever again.

Tubgirl

Consumption Junction was a window into a very dark world.

I remember “Disney Princesses” did not yield the expected results.

I accidentally saw an old woman being fucked by a German Shepherd when I was 12. Life was wild back then

Even getting the parts for a computer to work right was an ordeal. You could spend months researching parts and power supplies and cases then it only beeps or whirs when you try to boot.

Not to mention installing Windows required boot floppies before you could put in the install CD. Remember Win95/Win98 bootdisks we kept in our backpacks for emergencies?

Remember borrowing time on the mainframe or programming on a punch card (granted, I was in Junior high when I did that)?

My college had gopher early on. You could poke a South African college’s Goper service a few times to tie it up and it’d drop you to a telnet prompt. where I had an early email address from University of Boulder who were just handing them out to whoever wanted one.

One day, there was a pile of people standing arounda computer in the library. Some admin installed mosaic on one of the library computers and we all sat around watching some people hit super early pages, mostly internet project pages. It was a few years before stuff really started getting interesting.

You aren’t kidding. My city was really slow on the Internet so i was using aol. Asking for certs and using CC generators. It was good times actually.

Then I tried IRC and kept getting kicked from every channel and someone finally gave a reason before before kicking me. When i messaged them explaining how i have no other way to access the internet they were actually really cool and invited me back to the channel. I didn’t go back as I knew i carried an unacceptable tag.

A year or 2 later we finally got a provider and oh wow now i remember trumpet windsock and the chaos of trying to find anything.

I still remember seeing a Toyota commercial with a web address and being like wow this internet thing is really taking off!

Now we’ve come full circle and i have to argue with my parents about the “truth” on Facebook. It’s got its perks but terminals and desqview times make me miss the simplicity… or complication. Depends how you look at it .

Pull up a chair son, I’ll tell you a tale of Trumpet Winsock.

That was before my time, but my early schooling still had some marks from that era. Instead of giving links, we were taught to type out the entire URL. HTTPS and all. I didn’t understand why at the time, but it makes perfect sense. You really didn’t want to have a single wrong letter sometimes. Legally.

I can still vividly remember the sounds of the modem connecting

They had it wrong their entire lives, never had it right, or they picked up the narrative somewhere along the way to suit their worldview.

That’s not going to stop happening. “Alternative Facts” is proof that some people never stop trying to block out the reality around them.

E: typo

Yeah the thing is “living through” something doesn’t really mean anything unless you were personally involved in it. Like I remember being in school on 9/11. I was a kid at the time, and everything I learned about it was from like CNN or similar. That doesn’t make me an expert. There are definitely younger people who have studied history who will know more about it than me.

My nephew tried to introduce me to Minecraft. It was cute. I tried to tell him I knew about it but he insisted it was this new thing that I couldn’t possibly have known about.

Hell I’m 31 and still do this with my own father.

“They’re making memes about this show Columbo… ever hear of it?”

And my dad’s like “I love Columbo!”

I just tell my cousins I’ve never heard of the things they talk about. Minecraft? Never heard of it. Is it one of those Korean animays you kids like?

“I am alive during the invasion of Ukraine, therefore I must know more than someone who spends massive amounts of time researching it 20 years from now.”

Not assuming what they’re saying is well researched, they’re probably not- but being alive during an event doesn’t exactly make you an expert on it just because you watched the news.