I began, many moons ago, as a traveler in a strange new world. I found the internet through a college roommate and it was a fresh promise of decentralized interaction and connection. It was to be a conduit to worlds as yet unexplored. And… it was. For a while, that is.
Forest, Surfers, and the Vineyard were three telnet EW-Too “talkers” I was on and those were nice, chill, atmospheric text based chats with fun people. There were no political ideologs. Just young and enthusiastic explorers on the new and vast sea of information. We shared; Thoughts and ideas. Feelings and hopes. Possibilities were open and the internet was, as my wife puts it, the wild west.
I look back on this time as a newly minted nomad seeking human connection in a digital desert, hopping from one oasis to another, sailing the sea of information from one harbor to the next, and I think what must I have been imaging the next steps to be? What did I think the future would hold for this new thing called “the internet”? Not this, I can tell you that.
I look around me now and see a dystopia worthy of Gibson, Dick, or Sterling. The world is run by corporation and oligarchs and there is no America, but a conglomerate. Realistically, I see now that “America” as I had envisioned it in a youthful haze of apathy if I bothered to think of it at all, never really existed. It’s just one person’s story verses another’s. Oh, how I wish that apathy had stuck around into adulthood, but here we are.
As of the writing of this post, I am on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, ad infinitum. I had a website once, back in the before times, and it was a fun place to share stories, poetry, etc. I let it lapse in favor of the ready made boxes we all like to put ourselves in. There was a resurgence and I got another, but it went by the wayside too. It’s too easy to click a button to share a link rather than to actually take a minute and write something down. I’m not saying sharing a meme with someone you care about it meaningless. You’re still sharing and you’re still communicating. I just think social media is more too easy… so easy in fact it’s become antisocial media.
When Lindsay decided to get off centralized social media, I decided to use this as an excuse to do the same though I’ll be sticking with YouTube. I got a site back up and running, far from the “flare” of my original Angelfire and Geocities websites and less directional than my old Island on the web or my dot com site. This is going to be my own slice of social media. I’ll share links, posts, musings, etc. This is what the internet was supposed to be; Ports of call on a sea of information. Rest stops on the information superhighway. Real people, real ideas, no algorithm, and no bots.
My name is Boompoet… I am a human. Welcome to my slice of the Big Empty.
“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, there is a rapture on the lonely shore, there is society, where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more.”
— Lord Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”