Many years ago, when I started writing a blog on the internet, the “blogosphere” was filled with larger than life characters, breathless stories, and exuberant explosions of life in every direction you looked.
People weren’t so much interested in attracting attention, as projecting themselves into the cacophonous stream of noise. Being a part of something new and intoxicating.
The most unlikely friendships were forged between geographically, culturally, and ideologically displaced constellations of people - all finding their way, figuring out the rules, and for the most part making it up as they went along.
It was exciting and terrifying in equal measure.
Some of us are still out here - although drowned out by the generations that followed - the influencers, the marketers, and the legions of robots. We share versions of our truth with an unknown audience - casting a net of thoughts, ideas, hopes and dreams - perhaps attracting kindred spirits.
We sit late at night, scrolling the algorithmic timeline - wondering if the universe might intervene from time to time, and deliver at least a little of the world we once knew - when the internet was human, and raw, and painfully honest.
Nothing stays the same though. The world changes. It evolves. It’s not better or worse - just different.
Many of the voices I once knew are now silent. The endless game of sliding doors we all play chose different paths for them.
A few of us are still out here. Sometimes late at night we lift our eyes to the firmament, and search out the twinkling stars we once knew - those that burned most brightly.
Sometimes we find them, sometimes we do not - and the world seems poorer for their absence.
Ulysses comes to mind:
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down,
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are.
Ulysses, by Alfred Lord Tennyson