Musings

I made my reddit account on January 11th, 2011. It was no coincidence. I wish it were.

I thought it would be cute for my cake day. I'd been lurking reddit since I started doing website stuff, formally in 2006, but casually since I joined myspace the year before.

I never met you. I knew you, but I never met you. We never shared the same air or peered the same packets.

But you cared. And I fucking cared too.

And on January 11th, 2013 you died. And I was bound to join the CIA, but I luckily postponed my interview a month after landing a job at Jerry Falwell's school for imaginary children.

And that was when the Snowden revelations happened and I cancelled on the CIA.

And I heard from the White Christian Nationalists that ruled the society I was in how they really felt about the three of us. And I left that world behind.

And 2016 appeared and I hacked a third party primary voting system together as a facebook app in a weekend.

And it was rejected. And I had no agency. And no one I knew cared about it any one way or another.

Or was vocally upset I did not suck the toes of their candidate.

And in 2020 I was on-call for Netflix when the pandemic happened. And it was called fake news. And I had all the data it was not, but none of that was public.

So I retreated deep within myself. And I wondered if you were here, alone, in isolation, where you'd be and what you'd be doing.

In my journal on September 21st, 2020, I wrote:

You're mentally pairing down on everything. Trying to forget more than you've learned. I think you're actually doing pretty good to be honest.

Well, you just had the realization that you live at the exact same moment in history as statistically everyone that has worked on the internet or learned from the original computer masters, or whatever their technical terminology is.

And you're off exploring trying to find new friends. And you're thinking maybe you can be friends with The Old Guard.

As I've learned about you from the people you worked with, you were always collaborating.

People, even the digital ones like you and me, cannot be bought or sold. The new friends I've made on the internet was by using a protocol that has exploded in popularity since Elon Twitter.

What you started is finally beginning to take hold. As I've spent more time at the Archive, I can see why you liked it here so much.

There is urgency with an undertone that knows time will tell all truths.

What happened to you set America back far enough that it will only endure if it can embrace what you embodied.

We're all here because of you. At least I am.

Thank you for spreading knowledge beyond the borders that control the flow of information.