I just helped my mom with fixing a small problem with the display colours on her iPhone. I couldn’t figure out what was happening, so I asked ChatGPT. It couldn’t tell me anything I hadn’t already tried, so I searched online, and found someone had had the same problem and they had shared the solution on the Apple Community forum. This person wasn’t even asking for a solution: they had found a solution by themselves and they were sharing it online in case it was useful to anyone else.
Can you imagine the amount of generosity in that person? I will never meet them, yet they went through the effort of getting online, logging into a forum that is owned by someone else and sharing their solution just so people like me could find it. If this was Reddit, you may have thought they did it for the upvotes, but I very much doubt anyone cares about their upvotes in the Apple Community forum. I’m sure there are many factors that influenced their decision to get online and share, but the fact of the matter is that they shared, and I for one can’t help but see the generosity in that as the most important thing.
Before my mom asked for help, before I found out this person existed, I was already considering writing a post about this. A post about my feelings about the Internet, and why I have always wanted to publish things on it. I was even already thinking about this generosity as the main thing, even if I hadn’t run into this person yet, simply because I already knew that this is the best thing about the Internet.
I can still remember the day I found out what the Internet was. We were in primary school, attending a technology class, and our teacher showed us how to go to Google Images and find images for anything we could imagine. There was no generative AI or anything of the like, yet you typed into that box whatever you wanted to see and you could most likely find it. No matter how obscure it was. Any pokemon I wanted? It was there. Images of my favourite pokemon, Mewtwo? It was there. A pokemon hybrid between Mewtwo, Dioxys and Mew? It. Was. There.1
After that I remember I could easily spend entire afternoons just thinking of stuff to look up and searching at the images. I was pretty young at the time, so long texts didn’t seem interesting yet, and I don’t think Youtube was ready for kids my age (if it has ever been). So, I would just try to find images for anything I could imagine, and more often than not I would find them, not because there was any miraculous algorithms generating them, but because of the even more miraculous force of millions of humans making use of the chance to share stuff.
Shortly after that, I did start to get interested in other kinds of media: mostly text, and later on videos. I learned about coding, cybersecurity, design, Photoshop and After Effects, all from blog posts and youtube videos from people who simply shared. There are always many reasons to do something: status, ego, generosity, passion. But the main thing here, the only thing I know about these people, is that they shared, and I received.
Writing about this, I notice that I owe so much of who I am today to all the people who shared on the Internet, even to a greater extent than I thought when I started writing this post. I feel so much gratitude for all of them.
It’s easy to take all this for granted. After all, all that content was already online when I found it, no one put it there specifically for me. The same could be said about books: the book was already written when you read it, no one wrote it for you, you just took advantage of something that was already there. It is easy to just look at the book, or the content, by itself, as an object, and forget that there was a person who put it there. That’s why social interactions on the internet can get so ugly: we tend to react to the content directly, forgetting that behind it there is someone else, an entire person with emotions, motivations, biases and their own story.
But if you think about all those people who shared something with the world, and you try to put yourself in their shoes, you can begin to wonder at how amazing it is that there is so much content out there. The difference between all these people and you isn’t knowledge, intelligence, class or any other kind of status. Very often, all those people have been considered misfits in their own offline communities. The difference between them and you is that they are proactively taking part in the online ecosystem of content.
Again, I don’t know how to put into words how grateful I feel for all these people. How grateful I am to the very loose communities that we are part of. So, if I ask myself, why do I want so badly to be able to post stuff online? Why do I care so much about publishing things? My answer always comes out as: how could I not?
Knowing how much I have learned and grown thanks to the Internet, even if it’s just a loose group of communities, even if a big part of it is ego and status, even if an increasingly amount of it is owned by four companies, if you consider the people who have shared, freely, just because they could, how could I not want to give back and be among them? This place is so full of the coolest, most interesting people on Earth, and they are happy to share that with me, how can I not want to be a part of them?
This is why I have tried so many times to do things in public. This is why I have made blogs, YouTube channels and Twitter accounts. This is why I’m currently working on this blog, yet again, and trying to write 100 posts even if I struggle with finding the motivation to stay constant or think of things to write about. Because I don’t want to just be a consumer in this community, in this ecosystem. I want to take an active part in it. I want to give back, and I want to belong to the people I feel so much gratitude and admiration for.
Footnotes
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As you can see, I was really into Pokemon at the time. ↩