Do you ever find yourself checking your e-mail, only, you're not checking it to see if anyone's trying to speak to you, or if someone you know has sent something. You're checking it because the bubble on your phone says, "10,374" and you just heard the notification go off for the forty-seventh time in the day. And, just like all of the other times, it's a credit card offer, it's an unsolicited e-mail from Donald Trump, it's ninety three different companies trying to sell you something, and below that, it's a user in a country three thousand miles away trying to authenticate your dead Microsoft account.
Innovation is over, the old internet is hanging on by a thread. The ways we used to communicate online feel like relics of the past, but it was barely thirty years ago. Heck, I think it was more like twenty?
Twenty years sounds like a long time, huh?
I remember when I was just a kid, discovering what e-mail was for the first time. I'm not sure how I met someone from England, but I think it was through some chatroom. Through whatever compulsion I had at the time, I was e-mailing someone. I was writing and wording it the way a nine year old would write a pen-pal letter. And like everything else in the nineties that involved surfing the net, it was mesmerizing.
I had an actual pen-pal in the fourth grade, though. I think he lived in Germany? But I lost interest after the first couple of letters and moved onto the next shiny thing. Kind of sad when I think about it. I wonder where he is now?
But, like the old-net, e-mail used to be something that was for, like ... you know, writing people letters. Checking in on someone digitally, because it was just about the only way you could. And getting new mail? That was pretty cool, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dudJjUU9Nhs
I find myself thinking about these things at random. Like now, I'm looking at my Thunderbird client and the thousands of adverts. Like so many other protocols and avenues of human connection online, companies, at one point, decided that these were receptacles for spam. Their own personal bank accounts that sometimes yields money, because some less-than-technical user has clicked their links, and given up their card info. They bought into your 30% APR auto-approved credit card, and then they bought a new stove.
Now they're in debt for the next twenty years.
Ah, e-mail.
If you have an e-mail address, now, it's more than likely you use it for logging into a website, or receiving authentication codes. And, well, that's probably it.
I just wanted to write this, because there are so many things I miss about the old-age, old-net. Sure, we have Discord, social media. But maybe the writer in me just wants to write some kind of longform digital letter to someone, and feel excited about it again.
Source: https://mkultra.monster/thoughts/2025/0 ... -got-mail/
