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SamBam 2 days ago

I'm more than old enough to remember the birth of the internet.

Back when I had a GeoCities website about aliens (seriously) it was still mine. I had a comments section and I hoped people would comment on it (no one did). I had a counter. I commented on other people's sites in the Area 51 subsection I was listed under.

The aim wasn't just to put out my same-ol' unoriginal thoughts into the distributed global consciousness, it was to actually talk to other people. The fact that I wrote it under a dumb handle (a variant of the one I still use everywhere) didn't make me feel less like it was my own individual communication.

It's the same for everything else, even the stuff that was completely unattributed. If you put a hilarious animation on YTMND, you know that other people will be referencing that specific one, and linking to it, and saying "did you see that funny thing on YTMND?" It wouldn't have been enough for the audience to just get some diluted, average version of that animation spread out into some global meme-generating AI.

So no, "Google Zero" where no one sees the original content and is just "happy that their thoughts are getting out there, somehow" is not something that anyone should wish for.