good morning tickets Tuesday when the
internet first came to our house in the
early 1990s so far as I could tell the
internet was inside of a box the box
required a bunch of technical skill to
install and then once my dad got the
internet working the Internet was green
letters on a black screen I remember my
dad showing me the things the Internet
could do like look the Internet can show
you what the weather is like right now
in Beijing or with the internet you can
download the apology of Socrates for
free and now I understand why all that
stuff must have been so cool to my dad
like one of the weird salsas um's of us
life is that the news almost never talks
about the weather outside of the United
States unless there's some natural
disaster unfolding and it is pretty cool
that the apology of Socrates is
available to anyone with an internet
connection but of course to 13-year old
me all of that stuff was just stupid but
then dad showed me that on the Internet
you could talk to people he wanted me to
practice my French so he showed me a
French forum and I was like this is
pretty cool and I started asking people
como Silva and who a lot bibliothèque
and then pretty quickly I started to
wonder if there was an English language
version of that service and it turned
out there was and that changed my life I
made friends including many of the most
important friendships of my childhood
and I met a girl who I eventually fell
in love with and dated for most of
college even though when we first met in
real life and this is still astonishing
to me neither of us had ever seen a
picture of the other because the
internet was still green letters on a
black screen
I even got something called an email
address which was a series of random
digits at CompuServe com
back then the internet charged by the
hour which became a real issue because I
wanted to spend many many hours on it my
parents wanted to be supportive but they
also needed to like pay the mortgage but
just as they were telling me that I was
going to need to decrease my internet
usage a lifeline appeared CompuServe
figured out that their student forum
needed moderating and because I was
always in that forum I was hired as one
of the moderators and by hired I mean
given free internet that moderating
experience did teach me a little bit
about online community building but
mostly it just gave me all the internet
I could want and I wanted a lot of it I
still think of that first summer as the
summer of CompuServe like if a single
event in my life occurred outdoors that
summer I do not recall it like I don't
have the physical vigor required for
proper exploration but
that summer I felt all that magic of
discovery as I uncovered every wonder
and terror on the Internet
now I don't want to wax nostalgic about
that Internet it had all the problems
the current Internet does albeit on a
smaller scale my point is only that I
loved it
and that it gave me friends when I
really needed them and that I fell in
love and that I found out Beijing had
weather these days after drinking from
the Internet's firehose for more than 25
years I've begun to feel more of its
negative side effects I don't know if
it's my age or the fact that the
Internet is no longer plugged into the
wall but now can travel with me
everywhere I go but more and more I find
myself reading that Wordsworth poem that
begins the world is too much with us
late and soon but this weekend Hank the
project for awesome reminded me how the
best of the Internet feels this year's
project for awesome has raised more than
1.5 million dollars for charity and the
fundraiser is still up you can go to
projectforawesome.com slash donate until
midnight tonight and get great perks but
money aside I felt so grateful this
weekend to be part of a vibrant and
joyous community that is working
together to try to make the world suck
less in the end what I love about the
Internet is also what I fear about the
Internet we can do so much more together
than we can do alone Hank I'll see you
on Friday