reverse september
So … why am I still mad about the internet, thirty years on? Always, needlessly, and I'm still kinda shocked when it does it again.
(My wife says "thirty years of complaining about the internet" is, TBH, a joke.)
the quiet before the storm
Before 1993, Usenet was a library, not a party. Dominated by introverts: academics, hobbyists, people who read the FAQ before posting because not reading it was a minor social crime. The whole thing ran on netiquette. Lurk first. Stay on topic. Respect the room you walked into.
Then AOL handed Usenet access to millions of new subscribers, and the culture clash hit like a pressure front. People raised on folder-based interfaces treated discussion groups like directories. "I would like this folder to be about cats," posted earnestly into a twelve-year-old astrophysics newsgroup. The old guard wrote increasingly cranky dispatches about netiquette and/or excommunication. None of it mattered. You cannot out-argue a thousand-to-one numbers disadvantage. Not through any argument. Through sheer volume.
September just wouldn't end. They called it "Eternal September," and the introverts lost their library to the party.
the extrovert ascendancy
Then MySpace, then Facebook, and the computer became a stage. Profile, friends, face, relationship status, all on display, all the time. "me.com" wasn't just an Apple email service, it was the whole ethos: every meal a photo op, every thought a status update.
If you were an extrovert, paradise. If you were an introvert, exhausting, and I say this as someone who, for a few mortifying years, maintained a Facebook presence charitably described as "a man performing the idea of having a personality."
the introvert retreat
Introverts are resourceful, though. While everyone else performed on Facebook, a migration was underway toward Digg and then Reddit: pseudonymous, topic-focused, meritocratic. No face required. Good links and decent judgment about what was interesting. About what people were sharing, not who they were.
The pendulum swinging back around.
the ai mirror
And now the next stop, which might be the most introverted yet: AI tools. Chatbots, local models, writing assistants. No audience. No likes, no followers, nothing to perform for.
Running a local LLM over years of my own data, chat logs, journals, the digital exhaust of an ordinary life, asking it questions I would not post anywhere. "Why do I think this?" "What am I missing?" "Why does this keep happening?" The model does not judge, does not need me to be interesting, and critically, does not need me to be seen. The computer became a mirror instead of a stage, and after two decades of stage, the mirror is a relief.
That irony lands somewhere uncomfortable. "me.com" sold as a tool for broadcasting yourself, and now the tools that are actually about "me," the thinking me, not the performing me, are the ones nobody else watches.
reverse september
Except.
The extroverts built their stages, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube comment sections, all of it, for one purpose: being seen. Bot replies now. Synthetic personas, AI-generated engagement farming. Content no human wrote and nobody reads, talking to other content no one wrote, in front of an audience increasingly not human either.
Reverse September. In 1993, the newcomers were extroverts who did not understand introvert spaces, and they flooded in because there were a lot of them. Now the newcomers are machines that do not understand anyone, flooding in because there are infinitely many of them. The old guard, the extroverts this time, stuck on their stages watching the audience get replaced, and no thousand-to-one argument coming to save them. No argument of any kind.
Meanwhile the introverts are over here with local models and self-hosted chat apps. Our houses were never built to have an audience, so nothing for the bots to crash. Not smug about it. Just fine.
The DIY Trinity, easy, frugal, better, was never really about saving money on vinegar. Apparently it was a bunker. Still not sure if a bunker counts as winning.
Trust me, I'm a software engineer.