Sometime this month I will be 2 decades old. I was born in September 2003, 2 years after the twin towers fell, and around a month or two before Moot invented 4chan. Considering the average lifetime for a man is around 73 years old in the USA, I am a little more than 25% done with my life. But despite 20 years gone with what felt like a simple snap of a finger, I can't help but think how much the Internet has changed around this time. When I was born, the Internet was still in its "wild west" days, where websites were much more amateur (even the corporate ones), Where social media wasn't even really a thing yet, (Myspace launched in August 1, 2003) and for the people who did interact with each other on a daily basis, it was mostly on IRCs and/or forums relating to certain topics that they were interested in. The Internet was more of a gimmick when I was born, it had yet to perturb every single aspect of our lives, and most "normal people" (normalfags) didn't give much of a shit about it, as it was mainly a nerdy thing. I mean come on, a football jock wouldn't spend hours of their day working on a program on how to make a nude mod for Half-life or build their own funny-looking website. They'd kick the asses of whoever did such things. Now I won't bother explaining the Internet nowadays, because I mean come on, it's wrapped around our daily lives to the point where a magic rectangular box with an Apple logo on it is, at this point, an extension of our body. Compared to now, buying shit online was spooky back then because there really wasn't any verifiable means to make sure what you bought came to you. Blockbuster was still very much a thing back then, and I remember when I was young there was one in the local shopping district. Yahoo! and AOL were still the big companies that they no longer are now, and Google was but one of many search engines competing to have the best search results. There were no smartphones and mobile internet, only way to send data to each other was using these giant boxes which took longer to compute and translate 0s and 1s to something readable. Privacy was also much less of an issue 20 years ago. The scripts that track your digital footprint and the algorithms which send you videos based on past watch history weren't even thought of, which also meant no "personalization", and no advertisements directly catered to you. If you wanted to find your niche you really had to go search for it. Considering social media wasn't a thing yet, if you wanted to have your spot on the Internet you most likely had to build your own website, so that you can finally update and blog about your (unremarkable) life. The cultural and memetical aspects back then were also very much different. Memes were a lot more basic if anything, and was usually just something people found stupidly funny and decided to share with each other. Up and coming musicians were either performing in bars and local restaurants or selling (or straight up just giving) their mixtapes/CDs to people on the streets instead of posting their music online where fans could share it. The list could go on and on.

But what I think what has changed the Internet the most in 20 years are the people who use it. Back then, the Internet was kinda just something people kind of browsed from time to time, when they were super bored, and otherwise they would shut off the PC and continue about their daily lives. In other words, the Internet had not nearly as much of an impact to their lives as they do to us now. The Internet has, in 20 years, transformed from this relatively new thing that people didn't care much about to a giant behemoth which hosts our personal information, bank accounts, private data, jobs, and more. If some random solar flare whipped the Earth and shut down the Internet back then, no one would really care as much and be like "Damn, guess I can't talk about Sailor Moon to saturnfan227 anymore." If this happened nowadays, lives could be potentially ruined, the economy would fucking shut down, and people would start rioting on the streets and our entire (first) world would be turned upside down.

But turning 20, I also want to look back on how much I changed (and did not change) in the last 7 years. In 2016, when I turned 13, I was still in middle school. Old elementary school friend groups broke down, new friend groups formed, and teenagers like me were trying to identify with.... something. The "popular kid", "nerd", "teacher's pet", and "quiet kid" stereotypes were all being developed, and unfortunately at that time I fell into the "quiet kid" stereotype as my friends were mostly a grade ahead of me. I had contact with several friendgroups but never really stuck to any of them. Turning into high school, I finally met my "permanent" friendgroup, and things started to look up. But, I was still very immature, and I generally had no goals or directions in life, and I believe I developed some bad habits around this time, some of which I still am fighting to this day. This period in high school was where the Internet impacted me the most. As I was trying to figure out what the hell was happening with me, the world around me, and the world not around me, what strangers had to say about it influenced me in both positive and negative ways. I was not only taught to be skeptical of everything online, but to assume that everyone who posts online are mouth-drooling neanderthal retards who think their opinions matter most. I swayed from one political faction to another. The internet made me both cynical and proud of humanity. It really, REALLY fucked up my sense of humor. But, I also learned valuable lessons about what you say online, how you use the Internet, and issues concerning privacy and how much you SHOULD use the internet in general. Maybe I had caught on early, but my cynicism at the time barred me from extensively using apps such as Twitter, Instagaram, Tumblr, Reddit, and goodness forbid Tik Tok (I never even downloaded it on my phone, not even ONCE.) Nowadays, they happen to be by far the most popular social medias of the Internet, and by far the most toxic and pervasive. But again, just like the Internet of 20 years ago, each of these social media probably has a little niche fit for everybody, as they have become so big that they inevitably would host multiple cultures and different types of memes to be consumed.

But what about the future? Since like last year, AI and shit like ChatGPT became a new thing, with AI bots also """drawing""" art (or porn, if you're a coomer) designing code, websites, advertisements, giving you advice on how to do certain things, and even gimmick AI chatbots (which may or may not be in character.) But considering that AI has been developed for a while, this is a big breakthrough. But what will AI be like in 20 years? Will it impact future generations just as how the Internet impacted my generation? Considering that AI is still in it's stupid-yet-somewhat-helpful stage (Similar to how the Internet was back then), will AI be as advanced, hard-to-understand, and pervasive in 20 years? How much will it impact our lives, for better or for worse? Is there a limit to how much technology we should use in our lives? I'm no philosopher or intellectual of any kind, but I believe we sacrificed a bit of our own humanity and integrity to the Internet, and we will sacrifice some more to AI.