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The mistake of yearning for the 'friendly' online world of 20 years ago
Some artists and movements are claiming back the innocent world wide web of 25 years ago, but other experts note that all the current errors already existed back then, and that this nostalgia is preventing us from focusing on finding solutions
Millennials have been adults for years, and they might now be making up for lost time by evoking hours spent chatting on MSN Messenger (they weren’t all that exciting: you used to talk to your classmates right after you’d been with them) and looking up movies and songs by Evanescence, Green Day and Eminem on eMule (they often sounded bad and the noise of the computer, running all night, caused nightmares). As such, this entire movement of vindication and archaeology (which dusts off material from the golden days of IRC and Habbo Hotel all the way to the early years of Facebook, just before the Cambridge Analytica scandal) is a perfect excuse to relaunch products or produce viral content without too much effort. This group of philosophers, programmers and YouTubers does not tolerate well the fatalistic, technophobic messages claiming that, given the bad situation of many online spaces, this means that all technology (especially since the popularization of Artificial Intelligence) is governed by unclear rules that cannot be altered.
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