01 Echoes

When I was around 10 years old, my father bought us our first computer. It was hard to imagine how it would affect my life then.

The computer itself could have impressed me more. I wasn't inspired by all the possibilities of the MS-DOS and didn't want to learn any programming languages. There was another thing that came later that consumed me completely. That thing was called Windows.

Just kidding. It was the Internet.

The World Wide Web allowed us all to become a part of something bigger, to participate in the conversations we would never have had without it. And it was particularly important to me, a person born in a small town in the middle of nowhere.

Fast-forward to 2012-2013, I'm on my daily commute to my first customer support job in Saint-Petersburg, reading about the fascinating concepts of remote work in “Remote” and “Rework” books. I also just installed 1Password 4 on my work computer and couldn't wait to organize my passwords there. That computer in the late 90s did turn me into a geek, after all.

Could I entertain the idea of working for 1Password and 37signals back then? No, of course not. However, the Internet made it all possible. It was Twitter, where I saw a job listing retweeted by Dave. It was a newsletter where I found out about David and Jason. It was the Internet that connected me to the rest of the world.

That's why it saddens me to see the ongoing balkanization of the Internet. To paraphrase Obi-Wan, one of the greatest philosophers of our time, “the Internet was supposed to be the Chosen One. It was said that it would unite the world, not divide it.”

We are all left in the darkness without any balance. But at least we have memes now, right?