Selling my Soul to the Internet

Preface: This is a blog post from late December intended for the old site. Its short and kinda crap, so perfect for a first post. If you're a filthy outsider then this is pretty much what you're in for. (Also please leave.)

I was born in early 1999, and so was part of the first set of kids who grew up with easy and universal access to the internet from a young age. Growing up I would often spend time on the family PC and from the age of about 7 I would start accessing the internet. First it was purely for viewing images on Google, but soon I found my way onto flash game websites; followed by Youtube; followed by text forums. However, the history of my internet usage isn't really the point I was going to make so I'll stop, but I'll probably make a proper one in the future.

What I do want to talk about is how the internet broke my mind, or at least fundamentally altered the person I grew up into. The modern age of the 21st century is often referred to as the “Information Age”, where any and all information is freely available to anyone at anytime, as long as your not poor. And while this is all well and good, retrospectively I believe that my mind was completely overloaded with boundless information and ideas. In ages past parental guidance has always been the main source for a child's moral and cultural education, but with the turn of the internet, we all had other people to look up to, to admire and to copy. Now this is obviously completely fine because the internet is populated solely by upstanding and inspirational heroes. Except it isn't. And by the time I had worked this out I was in too deep and didn't want to pull out. Here I am mainly talking about the old-guard internet forums of pre 2010; namely Newgrounds and 4chan. I always knew it was all meaningless and dumb, but I carried on despite it. Despite knowing full well that this was a waste of my time, I was drawn in by just how cool it all seemed to me. And this is the crux of the problem. Its fun dicking around on the internet, or at least it looks fun. When you hear of these guys its almost like some kind of myth. A cool club full of the best people. And you instantly want to be a part of it. At a time when nothing was happening in my life, aged around 13, I saw this as an opportunity to ignore the real world and just fanny around online with a bunch of douchebags. And here's the thing. I don't regret it at all. I had just as much fun as anyone else was having, probably, and I doubt I'd change much if I could. So I, completely purposefully, went deeper and kept going on my quest to be an oldfag. This is why the title of this post is “selling my soul”; my soul wasn't taken, I knew very clearly what I was doing and I thought it was good. I still do.

It boils down to my fundamental ethos behind what I do with my time: Fun things are good. If I like a thing then that thing is good, and I will carry on that thing, despite what other people lead me to believe. To this day I visit virtually all the same sites, and I'm realising that everyone around me (in a virtual sense) is just as, if not more, degenerate as me, and my choosing of what I do with my life is A-OK. I'm telling you that you should give up your soul to the internet, or anything else for that matter. Humility and restraint are two important qualities. But you should also take any opinions people have about things with a handful of salt, they're probably wrong. While you shouldn't break norms for the sake of breaking norms, do whatever you want and you'll be a cooler person for it.