When I was a kid, I loved BBSs and the technicality of building a computer and the wild west that was the internet. Now that I have kids of my own, I won’t let them go near some of this stuff. It’s not because I’m worried they will do something dumb on their own but because I think tech has become predatory of all users and society in general.
The BBS scene was much more accountable. I mean, I met some weird dudes on there and consumed some weird stuff, but at the end of the day it was a local community, and everything was traced back to real people.
I tried to sign up as “Roger Rabbit”, who was 21, and therefore gain some access to a particular mov that was popular at the time. It was then that I learned two things:
- The sysop can talk to you directly!
- The sysop can see your phone number and knows Roger is that kid that signed up ages ago…
Met the sysop in real life some years later and he had thought the whole thing was pretty funny.
The point is that this was a local community; and the internet just doesn’t work like that.
