Remembering the good old days of eSheep.exe and my dad freaking out that “It’s a virus!” because he saw “a black sheep come running up to the other one and hit it! It started bleeding!”

Dad, that’s a ram… The other sheep’s not bleeding. It’s blushing!

I remember I used to be subscribed to a mailing list for a programming language. A friend of the lead developer set the mailing list up for them at his university, and then went off and did his own thing. It was completely unmoderated. Some kid sent a “neat little proggy” his friend Dieter wrote. If the extent of my Internet usage wasn’t limited to free email through Juno, my entire hard drive probably would have gotten deleted that day lol

We were not prepared, as a species, for a device that let us come up with any opinion at all and find validation for it.

It used to be that when you had an opinion that was wrong, you’d say it out loud a number of times, and you’d notice that everyone around you would call you an imbecile and ridicule you. It would make you reassess yourself and grow as a person.

Now that societal failsafe is gone. Now people just aren’t challenged for holding the wrong opinion.

That was an integral part of growing up and maturing. We don’t have a solution for it.