Back around 1999 myself and another guy worked on this thing, remember this was an era when ADSL was just being launched, 512k down 128k up, and Windows was on the then greatest ever so far XP, basically the idea was we would build a website and a box and connect it to the net, the box had removable HDD’s and for your money you got one physical HDD to do with what you wished… should disaster strike you rang us, the HDD was pulled and handed to a motorcycle courier and was with you within a few hours.
We never got one single customer.
Due to the “actual physical HDD couriered to you within a few hours” it was superior to anything offered today, and basically much of what is offered today is the same thing, it’s called the cloud….
Now you can come up with lots of reasons why our names are not up there in lights as multi billionaires, we were assholes, we had no budget, we had no marketing, but mainly the world wasn’t ready for it yet.
5 years before that a guy I knew had set up an ISP, I was customer number (I forget the actual number but it was less than 20) to sign up, those days it cost 1p (UK£0.01) per minute for the phone call, and you probably got around 30k downstream, plus the ISP monthly fee, he did become a millionaire and a household name, I did not invest in him when I could have because I couldn’t see anyone except assholes like me paying 1p a minute to get data, so my visionary ability status cut both ways.
We like to chuck all this together as human beings and say it is an idea that has come of age, sure there were pioneers who came before, but we have forgotten all about them now, and all we remember are the ones who commercialised it and made a killing.
Interestingly a lot of those who made a killing also offered something that was considerably cut down compared to what the pioneers were trying to do.
But basically you get ideas that come of age, I’m old enough to remember the UK joining what was then called the common market, and the as yet incomplete exit from the same thing, Brexit, even though both things were different directions and different in about as many ways as you can get, they had an awful lot about them that felt the same, they were ideas that had come of age.
This is the thing nobody gets about, for example, Nazi Germany, historians and liberals like to make out that there was Adolf and his gang of jackbooted raycis thugs, and then there was the poor but good german people who didn’t agree with any of this, but what can individuals do against evil raycis thugs?
“Us first” came of age, that is all there was to it, make ameri^H^H^H germany great again, that is all there was to it, and enough people who self identified as german and not austrian or prussian or high elf or bavarian went for it… and a *lot* didn’t… hence the violent clashes.
But coming of age is a human individual thing too, and just for shits and giggles I am often heard to remark how funny it is that backward third world shithole kids who literally have less of everything (except lice) than our western kids are ready to work and marry and raise kids at 14, but our western kids aren’t even ready to leave educational safe spaces until they are in their twenties, and they are still worthless and weak, how is that?
Between the media and marketers and everyone else, we’ve have pretty much brought about a state of affairs where nobody believes anything the media says, which includes the intertubez, and far from this being some panacea where everyone is enlightened by their total distrust of the media, it is instead a place where if “everything you are told is lies” then there is no barrier whatsoever to believing what you choose, there is no reality check any more, so schism has come of age.
It’s easy to label what is happening in the USA now as trump vs not trump, but it isn’t. not really, it is a schism in society between peoples who only have one thing in common now, none of them believe a word the media says, so they have their own beliefs that are never verified for logic or fact, and they split in to two opposing camps.
Sure, trump may be the poster boy du jour for one camp, but that don’t mean shit.
Many years ago in spain I met a couple of guys, they were getting on in years, and one night over some beers they admitted to me that back in the day, they knew el Che back in the home country, and knew as in knew to talk to and el Che knew them too, and none of them could relate anything in their own personal memories to the accepted history, sadly I myself was too drunk to remember what they remembered, for all I know know the Che they remember might have liked Frank Sinatra songs, BSA motorcycles and Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes, but I do remember them saying he was a bit of a dweeb, not too smart, easily manipulated and easily offended.
I remember that night because only a week or so before I’d spent the night with some guys who had the same sort of connection to Franco, and they described him as just some guy who tried to do what he saw as the right thing, constantly surrounded by people who told him air was wet and water was dry one day, and the opposite the next day, a guy drowning in angst and indecision who now and again indulged in fits of rage because doing something was better than doing nothing or doing things in the dark for reasons that turned out not to be true.
We live in a world where girls are quite happy to enter into a sexual relationship with a man, AT THE TIME, until someone else changes their mind and convinces them that whatever they did back then was wrong, but it wasn’t their fault, because they are a victim, so the evil man must be punished, and it really doesn’t matter if you tell lies and invent stuff out of thin air and utterly re-write history, the new narrative is all that matters, and while we will decry specific examples of this, the fact is that everyone in western society, both male and female, has become those girls.
The rich irony for me is that no matter how brutal and ice cold and clinical I like to portray myself, without exception every single time I had the opportunity to fuck something really young or con someone really stupid or take from someone really weak or oppress someone really powerless, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
At those moments of action and potential I always found myself to be in contemplation and thought, fraught with empathy… don’t get me wrong, face me down and start screaming at me what a worthless cunt I am and I will slaughter you and everyone you even knew (for the crime of not killing you when they could have) and it will feed my soul to do so, because basically you didn’t just fucking ask for it, you dared me to do it, which is quite the different thing from stealing candy from a baby.
But such things are not permitted, I must either be Saint Stuffus, protector of young girls and babies and retards, or I must be El Feo, raper and killer of small babies, puppies and other cute furry animals.
Schism is coming of age, and if you thought racism or sexism or religious fanaticism was bad, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
