I fell in love with the web as kid in the 90s, it was such a amazing world to explore and also help to grow (even if... some was just a page with no other information than that the page in question was under construction together with appropriate gifs to make sure there was no misunderstandings).

It was so cool to go from my mom being worried about the phone bill when calling relatives within the country to chatting with people from all over the world and how that world just kept opening up, in so many ways. I really thought it would lead to some Star Trek future where the collective knowledge of mankind ends all conflicts and make fantastic things happen.

Maybe it was me growing up and understand that people for some reason generally don't want that in favor of cats and porn but it feels like something clearly changed after 9/11, the web became less cozy, but then I experienced something similar after Snowden, the feel of the web changed again. Guess new tools,techniques and tactics had to be developed?

But like...

How did we go from saving chat-logs from #channel online to a reality where a dedicated group generating could-be-true videos aimed at the circle of a leader or demographic, armed with some web agents and tokens, might be able to troll a country into war?

This is such a strange timeline to experience.