My generation is going to be the last in the West to remember life before the internet. I don't think anyone yet appreciates the scale of this psychological rift, or how jarring it really is.

Virtually everyone I have met in the last decade has an online presence. I can follow a lot of what they do in life, and could reach out and speak to them instantly, if I chose.
By contrast, if I think of someone I remember from my childhood - my early teachers, the dinner ladies, the friendly old man at the post office - and look them up, there will be simply no trace of them online. The same even goes for places I visited, which no longer exist.
I came to maturity with the internet, so am unfamiliar with most of the old archival ways of finding information, parish records, birth certificates, and so on. I would struggle to produce evidence that many of the people I knew as a child ever existed at all.
This is true, despite the fact that a fair number of them will obviously still be alive. But now it feels, sometimes, as if they only ever existed in my head, because they never existed on the internet. This is genuinely psychologically distressing to me at times.
Increasingly, all these people, places and events seem to drift into a ghostly pre-internet world, wholly disconnected from the present, where there weren't many photographs taken, and where anything recorded was done so on paper.
I lived in that world, and yet it already feels impossibly distant. It feels as if I lived the first dozen years of my life in an alternate dimension, where the world was smaller, where the only connection with the world beyond your physical surroundings was television or books.
Talk of hyperreality is overdone these days, but there has been a shift in the average person's epistemology, of how we know what we know. I still have enough libertarian in me to resent the way everything we do now is recorded somewhere, and yet...
... when I think back to a world where relatively little was recorded, I'm filled with a huge sense of loss for all the little things and people that will go unremembered, and, strangely, even a kind of faint horror.
This is because, despite knowing better, and despite having absorbed Kaczynski and @0x49fa98 on the horrors of modernity, I still now have the eerie and nagging sense that if something isn't on the internet, it didn't really happen.
I'm equally fascinated and disturbed by the cut-off going the other way. We're mostly already too lazy to go back and find and read anything in historical archives that aren't digitised. The internet has been a kind of cultural Year Zero.

https://t.co/dDDvoQpFAJ
This is important, of course. Just because your facebook photos might still be easily available in 200 years, it doesn't mean anyone is ever going to look at them - and yet, to our monke brains, any evidence that you ever existed is a kind of immortality.

https://t.co/gIaAyB5kpV

More from All

APIs in general are so powerful.

Best 5 public APIs you can use to build your next project:

1. Number Verification API

A RESTful JSON API for national and international phone number validation.

🔗
https://t.co/fzBmCMFdIj


2. OpenAI API

ChatGPT is an outstanding tool. Build your own API applications with OpenAI API.

🔗 https://t.co/TVnTciMpML


3. Currency Data API

Currency Data API provides a simple REST API with real-time and historical exchange rates for 168 world currencies

🔗 https://t.co/TRj35IUUec


4. Weather API

Real-Time & historical world weather data API.

Retrieve instant, accurate weather information for
any location in the world in lightweight JSON format.

🔗 https://t.co/DCY8kXqVIK

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**Thread on Bravery of Sikhs**
(I am forced to do this due to continuous hounding of Sikh Extremists since yesterday)

Rani Jindan Kaur, wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh had illegitimate relations with Lal Singh (PM of Ranjit Singh). Along with Lal Singh, she attacked Jammu, burnt - https://t.co/EfjAq59AyI


Hindu villages of Jasrota, caused rebellion in Jammu, attacked Kishtwar.

Ancestors of Raja Ranjit Singh, The Sansi Tribe used to give daughters as concubines to Jahangir.


The Ludhiana Political Agency (Later NW Fronties Prov) was formed by less than 4000 British soldiers who advanced from Delhi and reached Ludhiana, receiving submissions of all sikh chiefs along the way. The submission of the troops of Raja of Lahore (Ranjit Singh) at Ambala.

Dabistan a contemporary book on Sikh History tells us that Guru Hargobind broke Naina devi Idol Same source describes Guru Hargobind serving a eunuch
YarKhan. (ref was proudly shared by a sikh on twitter)
Gobind Singh followed Bahadur Shah to Deccan to fight for him.


In Zafarnama, Guru Gobind Singh states that the reason he was in conflict with the Hill Rajas was that while they were worshiping idols, while he was an idol-breaker.

And idiot Hindus place him along Maharana, Prithviraj and Shivaji as saviours of Dharma.