Comments on the History of Internet Security from 2076

Well, it makes a lot more sense when you think of the amount of change that occurred in such a short time. When you’re caught up in it, say, back in the early 2000’s, going all the way through around 2030, it was basically a Wild West scenario.

People forget that prior to the mid 1990s there just wasn’t an internet. They used to write messages on paper, and send them via courier. (laughing)

So if you look at the comments from security experts of the time, they were completely convinced that everything was doomed forever. They weren’t realizing that they had just transitioned—moments earlier—from hand-carried notes and giant rooms full of paper records in metal boxes.

I mean, the mid-1990s was the most transformative period in human history. We know that now. We get that now. But back then the security experts of the time just saw the technology as unfixable. And they spent all this time “online” together to complain about how hopeless everything was, and how it was all going to hell, how it was completely hopeless. (laughs)

It’s easy to throw stones from our vantage point. But if you lived through the most disruptive event in human history (early Chaos), and you worked in infogration—information technology—at the time, most people listening to this would have been pretty nihilistic as well.

It’s human nature, and it’s happened during every major human change before it as well. The initial internet, and the Chaos Period that followed, was simply the most significant one of them all.