XVI. The Internet Opens the Floodgates of Pure Goblin BehaviorURL copied

Once computers could talk to each other, civilization should have calmly exchanged knowledge and built a better world.

It did exchange knowledge.

It also exchanged chain mail, badly compressed mp3s, conspiracy forums, fan fiction, cursed GIFs, and a quantity of pornography best described as geologically significant.

The early web was a kingdom of blinking text, neon backgrounds, guestbooks, webrings, counters, and websites built by one manic person at 2 a.m.

Everybody's homepage looked like a haunted arcade cabinet had learned HTML.

This was arguably the internet at its most honest.

No algorithm was curating your feed.

Some lunatic had simply decided their favorite dragon, synthwave gradient, and dancing baby all belonged on one page.

They were right.

The soul of humanity, it turned out, was a GIF with too many stars around it.

And in the center of that GIF sat a smug overlord cat, moderating history one slap at a time.