Cybersquid
A little more than a decade ago, I was a young man in college despairing of what seemed to me like the injustice of living in uninteresting times. I mean, my parents spent their youth during the Swinging Sixties, by Jove. They were young and full of life and standing at the dawn of the moral and intellectual uprisings that would reshape the face of the globe in the coming generations. Never mind that my parents are generally of conservative temperaments and display none of the firebrand world-fuckery that the Sixties is known for. At least, none to my recollection. My parents are into Nat King Cole instead of the Beatles, Milo instead of LSD, Sunday mass instead of transcendental meditation, and the missionary position instead of clusterfornication. Of course, that last one was just an informed guess. The point is that they were there. Even if they did not really participate in it, they were bathed by the scouring fires of revolution.
I was born in the middle of the Seventies and can recall school kids in public schools singing the Martial Law Anthem. I can also recall Marcos’ televised speeches on our second-hand black and white television set. I can recall Voltez V, Daimos, Mazinger Z, and some other Japanese cartoons. I can recall some disco tunes. But the Seventies wasn’t my age. I was too young to have an opinion about it.
I spent the Eighties in school. EDSA happened and fizzled out; leaving the country worse off that it had been during the supposed dystopian Martial Law Era. I grew bigger and started listening to some New Wave and a lot of Bighair rock and roll. I was both attracted and repelled by the punk ethos. I was circumcised. Still, the Eighties wasn’t my age. I was too young to fuck around with it.
Then came the Nineties. This was the start of my time. I first fell in love in this decade. I grew hair in strange places within its handful of summers. I lost my virginity in its embrace. I met the woman who was to be my wife while jerking around in its electric currents. I bloodied my mind’s fists against the swirl of left-of-center ideas that marked the beginning of the end of the twentieth century. Yes, this was the genesis of my time. And it sucked.
It sucked because the only thing I can think of during college that marked the Nineties was the hideous amalgamation of fashion called retro. It sucked because there were no more revolutions and no more ideas worth dying– or killing– for. It sucked because the Nineties was the spiritual child of the Forgettable Fifties, trying to appear bigger and more meaningful than it really was by hyping up the fucking leftovers of the previous decades.
And then came the Internet.
Of course, the Internet had been there for years but it was merely a sophisticated toy for most of us back then. We had email addresses and used it occasionally. We surfed porn and shit, but that growing beast was not yet an integral part of our lives. Not yet, and not for long as it turned out.
I can forgive the Nineties its drollness for this reason alone. The first decade of the twenty-first century is quickly becoming as exciting, frightening, exhilarating, alarming, and electrifying as both the Industrial Age and the Hippie Sixties combined. Suddenly, there is a new frontier for people like us who are willing to cast aside our old school flesh and trade it for the ungodly robes of the cybernaut. We are barbarians walking over lawless lands, my friends. Our weapons are words and pictures and sounds and ideas and opinions made incandescent by the power of instant connection. We are among the six million mad prophets who make despots tremble. Ours is the tide that tyrants vainly attempt to hold back.
And so I go back to making retarded internet articles. I love teh intarnets!
