tenoI know it’s been said before and more substantively, but there is something really weird, and strangely shattering, about being of the last generation to form language in a (mostly) analog world.
I was 9 when we got the first family computer, and 11 when I went online. Like many people I went up from 300, 1200, 9600, 14400 baud and up and up and never stopped.
Somewhere in storage in the US Is that 300 baud #commodore modem.
I don’t know what it means, but it’s something.
On the other hand, I don’t really remember life before video games.
Sometimes I think that I went through the looking glass enough times before turning 20 that I forget that people are still doing it all the time. Tuning into strange frequencies, finding new, different realities
Sometimes I like to think that the crazy in the world is mainly due to that critical mass of collective rabbit-holing, sparked by a continual influx of internet noobs
I think I was lucky, in that I was drawn enough times to virtual communities that also centered meeting, in the flesh
And perhaps because of that I always went through, across, and beyond the rabbit holes
But it is evident that many people became lost along their way, or forgotten, or worse, radicalised
But it also seems that I have a particular kind of brain that became immediately native to the internet, and I wanted to learn its ways, and how it was made, and how to build it myself
And in a way I wandered into my career as a kind of rabbit hole, that I emerged from in the past few years, and now I am without bearings.
But by now I am extremely fluent in *something* - that I do not know the name of - more so than is the norm even of my generation
There feels to me something incredibly precious, about discovering the online, and teaching myself the online, when my brain was still forming
There is something unique in the digital native, never knowing anything different, the interface language commingling with pre verbal neurons
But that repeats itself in each new generation now, and when mine is dead and gone what was lost in our language may not be known.
Anyway, I’m thinking of ditching my smartphone and getting a Nokia candy bar.