> At some point between, say, 2000 and 2012, everyone forgot that.

September.

I remember when the Internet wasn't real.

You could take a screenshot, but not a photo, you couldn't have a real photo inside the computer without a scanner.

You could plug into the phone line if you had dial-up, but you didn't make calls over the Internet. If you did call someone, you had to both install Skype or something.

You could "watch TV" on the computer if you used a cable tuner, but there wasn't TV online.

Reality stayed in reality, and although the Internet has always supervened on reality, the Internet stayed inside the Internet.

Somewhere around "computer phone times" this stopped being the case.

Now politics happens on Twitter, you can order a pizza online and it's not a credit card scam, it actually arrives. You can place a call and with the right aeons it may even connect to a POTS telephone.

At some point it shifted from "The Internet is where a bunch of nerds who like The Internet talk about The Internet" to "The Internet is plugged into real life and is part of real life" to even "Real life is part of the Internet"

YES!

I remember. We took a deep breath and said "here we go again"... ...I finally released that breath, but it hurt. The Dumb! So much dumb....