The Summer of Internet Good Feeling

We’re certainly due for some.

An old friend of mine and I made our first Website in 1999. It was called Ironminds.com, and if I were trying to sound forward-thinking and like a Serious Thought Leader I’d call it “an early experiment in online journalism,” but it would be much more truthful to say we were just goofing around, basically just tossing occasional fishing lines into the deep recesses of the new Internet just to see if somebody, anybody, was out there to bite. We started it for no other reason than that we could. No one was reading it — we assumed, anyway; it’s not like we had any way of finding out — but we did not care. We weren’t worried about audience, or engagement, or “platform synergy.” We just, after years of the limitations and word counts of print, saw a big open space where we could do whatever we could fathom. I honestly remember my first thought, upon discovering the Internet in college, being, “Wow: I can write on that as long as I want.” We just wanted to meet people we didn’t know already. It felt like a magical portal to a land of infinite possibility, constrained only by the limits of our own imagination.

It is fair to say, 23 years later, that the Internet doesn’t exactly feel like a magical portal to a land of infinite possibility anymore. When’s the last time you heard anyone say, “boy, I was staring at my…