Joshua Topolsky, from Thank god for the Internet:

But thank god for the internet. What the hell would we do right now without the internet? How would so many of us work, stay connected, stay informed, stay entertained? For all of its failings and flops, all of its breeches and blunders, the internet has become the digital town square that we always believed it could and should be. At a time when politicians and many corporations have exhibited the worst instincts, we’re seeing some of the best of what humanity has to offer — and we’re seeing it because the internet exists.
Now, I’m not letting Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos off the hook, but we also can’t deny that there is still good, still utility, still humanity present here — and it’s saving us in huge ways and little ones, too. In the shadow of the coronavirus, the sum of the “good” internet has dwarfed its bad parts. The din of a connected humanity that needs the internet has all but drowned out its worst parts. Oh, they’re still there, but it’s clear they aren’t what the internet is; they’re merely the runoff, the waste product. 

John Gruber, quoting this passage above, remarks:

So true. Feeling isolated? Cooped up? Me too. But imagine what this would’ve been like 30 years ago. This sort of crisis is what the internet was designed for, and it’s working. 

These two posts have inspired me to make a sort of thought experiment. Considering I’ve been self-isolating a bit earlier than when the quarantine became mandatory in my country (Spain), I’m now on Day 33 of my stay-at-home life. So I’ve started wondering, What would I do if this was 1990 instead of 2020? How would my ‘quarantine lifestyle’ be like?

It’s easy and natural to say, Oh, it would be horrible without the Internet, but that’s because in our time-travelling musings, we approach 1990 with a 2020 mindset. It’s the same thing as when we try to imagine/remember how life before mobile phones was like. And I wrote a piece about this very subject back in 2011. Here’s a relevant quote, with emphasis added:

People who have never really lived in a world without mobile phones […] might think that daily life at that time was unnecessarily complicated and ‘harder’. Organising meetings, finding people, finding places around you, having to use paper maps instead of having a portable device with GPS functionalities built in, not being able to look things up in Google or Wikipedia at any time. The truth is, people knew how to organise themselves with the tools they had available. Daily life had a completely different pace and style, built around the tools available at that time. It really isn’t a matter of ‘worse’ or ‘better’ — life was just different. People were equally able to organise their meetings, to communicate with one another, to go to places never before visited by using a map or tourist guide, to search for information at public libraries, and so on and so forth. 

In 1990 I was still living in Italy, finishing high school. I already had a room full of books (I developed a passion for reading at a very early age, mostly thanks to my grandfather, an erudite with a vast personal library). I already was fascinated by computers and technology, already keeping up with the news by devouring several computer magazines (my dad had subscribed me to one of the best at the time — it was called Bit^[1]).

In 1990 my home computer was a Commodore 64; by that time it was a pretty souped-up setup, with its dedicated monitor, tape drive, disk drive, and printer, and I even expanded the C64’s RAM. I mostly used it for gaming, but also more ‘serious’ stuff thanks to GEOS — an operating system with a graphical user interface which turned the humble C64 into a ‘poor man’s Macintosh’, at least visually. 

But my dad had also started bringing home discarded IBM and IBM-compatible PCs from the company where he worked, so I was using old word processors like WordStar to write school assignments and also my first short stories, which I would print using a loud IBM dot-matrix printer my dad had also procured.

If this was 1990, and a pandemic had struck and forced people to stay at home, the only thing I would miss would be going to the studio I was apprenticed to, where I was learning desktop publishing on a Macintosh SE + LaserWriter workstation. But for the rest, I’d say I would have a lot to keep myself entertained:

• I’d have lots of books to read (or finish reading) at my disposal.
• I’d have tools and materials I could use to write my fiction, from an Olivetti electric typewriter, to a old IBM PC AT connected to a printer.
• I could keep in touch with friends and relatives via landline telephone.
• I could get the news and a bit of entertainment from TV, radio, and papers.
• I could listen to vinyl records, CDs, and cassettes on the home Hi-Fi stereo, or in my room with my old Walkman. My parents owned a fair amount of records, there was always music in our home.
• In 1990 I was still living with my parents, so if we wanted to spend time playing together, we would take out our boxes of board games and cards.

These are just a few things off the top of my head. The Internet has brought a lot of good and bad things into our lives, but it’s not that the world was hopelessly boring and grim before the Internet and social media as we know them today even existed. As for the distractions, thirty years ago they felt — how can I put it? — less wasteful. 

At least in my case, sometimes today there’s a certain depressing aftertaste after, say, spending a couple of hours deep down some rabbit hole in YouTube. The entertainment I may have felt during those two hours, or whatever I may have learnt during those two hours, quickly evaporates afterwards, and I’m left with the sinking feeling of having wasted two hours of my life, of having burnt a precious resource — time — that I’ll never get back. 

In 1990, an hour spent on the phone talking with my best friend felt enriching. An hour spent playing some games on the Commodore 64 felt good because it was usually followed by several attempts at understanding how the game’s BASIC program worked. Music was less of a background, and it used to inspire a lot of my writings; often it immersed me in the perfect mood to jot down ideas for a story. Same with films. Perhaps the fact that in 1990 I didn’t have access to the staggering amount of information and choices I have today, made me more focused on what was available to me. And while more limited in scope, I had a deeper knowledge in those selected areas/subjects. In contrast, today I’m faced with such an amount of information and choices that I often feel like a lot of my time is spent ‘just browsing’, gathering crumbs of information, rather than forming deeper nodes of knowledge, if you know what I mean.

In case this is starting to feel like a nostalgia trip to you, the gist of this, in the end, is what I wrote in that 2011 piece I quoted above: It really isn’t a matter of ‘worse’ or ‘better’ — life was just different. If this was 1990, I don’t think we’d feel much more isolated than we’re feeling now. It’s all in what I call the ‘time-travelling bias’ — if we were transported back in 1990 with all our current baggage of habits and conveniences, then yes, it probably would be a dreadful experience for many. But if you, like me, were already alive in 1990 and remember how life and your life was back then, then you probably realise we would have found plenty of ways to spend our time in isolation.