Teenage Me vs. the Technological Apocalypse

Going through old boxes of life’s accumulated detritus can uncover forgotten scraps of the past and send one down a rollercoaster of intense personal sentimentality, which is why I tend to put it off. It’s more than just the cringe of seeing one’s former-self, or worse, reading things this familiar stranger has written. These discoveries may cause pangs of embarrassment, especially when it is a collection of relics from one’s teenage years, but it is important to pardon oneself by remembering that the person so revealed, in form or thought, was subject not just to the zeitgeist of the era, but also existed without the benefit of a fully developed brain.

However, hindsight is an enthusiastic prosecutor gifted with limited omniscience afforded by the passage of time, and in its revelations is where the nostalgia can pierce most keenly. It’s like being a detective sorting through cases so cold as to be forgotten until some shred of evidence, seemingly insignificant at the time, opens the floodgates of realization and truths that you were inexplicably oblivious to coalesce and crash into focus with a significance and weightiness that can only be described as epiphany.

It may be these bittersweet associations that stay my hand when opportunities for personal archaeology enter my purview, but I am as driven by curiosity as any cat, and so, naturally, cannot long resist the urge to plumb the depths for artifacts or treasure. Such a relic was recently uncovered in a long undisturbed collection of papers from my high-school years. The significance was evident to me immediately when I pulled a black and white printout from the pile and found the first ever digital image taken of me. It is from the early 90’s, when cameras still used film, which is why my father, a graphic designer, had purchased the scanner with which I scanned my face.

In the image, I am perhaps sixteen years old, leaning over the flat glass plane of the scanner as its rainbow lights slide down its length, reflecting in my glasses. If the original, color image exists, it is lost somewhere on some obsolete media or backup tape, impossible to locate after so many years and so much family strife. All that is left is the black and white printout I made. I pity the boy in the image, not because he is clueless about how depression will soon sink its claws into his mind, causing him to mortgage his hopes and future, but rather, because when the decades of inner turmoil have passed, he will realize his dreams have come true.

I grew up in lockstep with the personal computer, part of the first generation of children to have such devices in the classroom and, eventually, at home. By my teenage years, dialup bulletin board systems began to give way to the proto-Internet. During this time, I had been consuming a steady diet of cyberpunk, a subgenre of science fiction encompassing such works as Neuromancer, by William Gibson, Hardwired, by Walter Jon Williams, and Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. The role-playing-game Cyberpunk had opened a conduit to these hopeless worlds when I was a tween, and I quickly fell in love with its tropes and antiheroes who always seemed to exist outside the technological, social, and economic frameworks that kept others in bondage

Tolkien’s The Hobbit introduced me to high fantasy in third grade. By sixth grade I was part of a regular Dungeons & Dragons group, but as a myopic, unathletic youth I struggled to picture my real self surviving in Middle Earth or The Forgotten Realms, places which necessitated brute strength or magic to accomplish any goals of significance, but cyberpunk was different. These tales took place in the not-too-distant future of the early 21st Century and I could quite easily see myself finding a place in the scenarios depicted, where lines between the real world and virtual worlds blur and governments have largely been replaced by megacorporations which control the lives of the populace.

At the time it was evident that a technological revolution was afoot, but still the mainstream media would run stories discounting the Internet as a fad. Even at a young age, I knew this was a misguided point of view based on misinformation and assumptions by people who had not yet crossed the digital threshold as I had. Back then, years before America Online would flood every mailbox with floppy disks emblazoned with “Free Trial Offer,” there were ways to get online, though this sometimes required borrowing the credentials to do so.

Perhaps it is a result of consuming so much science fiction as a child, filling my brain with matter-compilers, teleportation pods, and sentient artificial intelligence, but cutting-edge technology has often felt inadequate to me, and dealing with the early Internet was no different. Pre-world wide web computer connectivity required the use of various applications to navigate the sea of information. This text-only environment necessitated that any images be converted to impossibly long strings of letters and numbers which could then be recompiled into its original form. Social media existed as group emails dedicated to various topics and on a massive collection of arcane forums known as Usenet. It was clunky and frustrating, but I took to it with an enthusiasm that surpassed my interest in most other things. As far as I can tell, I was the first person in my high school to ever cite Internet sources for a research paper, which led to some head scratching among my teachers.

As impossible as it may seem now, back in those days people were more polite online than in real life. Arguments could devolve into what were called “flame wars,” but by and large, a certain amount of decorum was expected in one’s interactions. Part of this is likely due to the relative lack of anonymity, but the fact that the technical savvy required to join these discussions was a bottleneck to all but the most dedicated certainly played a part as well. Regardless, I soon came to see the Internet as a path to a techno-utopia and the betterment of all humankind. This remains the most naive sentiment I have ever embraced in my life.

Somewhere along the line I grew angry. Looking back it was the insidious effect of clinical depression warping my outlook in unnatural ways. As my internal suffering grew, I could only conceive of my personal future as bleak and hopeless, and when lost in such dark forecasting it becomes natural to crave an environment where one’s own turmoil is drowned out by the critical mass of larger strife to lessen its magnitude. Schadenfreude is the currency of the self-loathing.

I began to long for the grimdark worlds I had read about and then I went blank. It is not that I do not recall the years between 1995 and 2019, but the near quarter-century interlude, for lack of a better description, feels like it happened to someone else. After years of existing as if I was a robot living at the behest of forces beyond my control, ketamine flushed the negativity out of my system and allowed me to wake up from my personal nightmare. When this happened, I realized that the cyberpunk dystopia of my childhood fantasies had become reality.

Now, in 2025, the courses of our lives are largely dictated by massive corporations that operate beyond the scope of governmental regulation, relegating our elected leaders to being little more than pawns in the zero-sum game of late-stage capitalism being played by wealthy elites who have never had our best interests in mind. My old friend, the Internet has become not just an addiction that threatens the mental wellbeing of many who engage with it, but also a vector of discord and divisiveness that attacks our cohesiveness as a society because conflict and visceral negative emotional reactions drive engagement, and the longer our attention is directed at the black mirror of our phones, the more money our corporate overlords make.

The rapid onset of technology outpaced the human consciousness’ ability to adapt, resulting in the obscene media landscape of the current age, as well as several mental health crises and a “loneliness epidemic” during a time of unprecedented connectivity. As I write this, a ban of the popular video-sharing app TikTok is being discussed, citing very valid security concerns. Internal documents reveal that TikTok knows their product is addictive, and so it is no surprise that many of those decrying this decision exhibit the mannerisms, tone, and affect of addicts. The first place I recall hearing about TikTok’s potential as a threat was in 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Questions were asked about why a seemingly innocuous app was collecting so much data that seemingly had no relevance to its purported purpose.

Perhaps the average TikTok user does not care about their data, but they may not be fully aware of just how much information can be extrapolated from large data sets. China has raised datamining to an art form, to the point that a Chinese citizen seeking a loan may find that their diligence in charging their phone battery will be factored into the bank’s decision. Whether or not this is a reliable indicator of personal responsibility, an algorithm has decided that it is important enough to consider while approving or denying a loan.

Make no mistake, this is about control, and the idea that our domestic tech giants are somehow better or safer than foreign ones misses the point. While some of their assertions are valid, TikTok, itself, is aware of the dangers it poses, and therein lies the terrible truth of the matter: they all know. We have mortgaged our hearts and minds to entities that see us only as commodities, and care not one whit for our wellbeing as long as they maintain control, an effort that we have become deeply complicit in.

So, where does this leave us, and what role does that naive teenager staring into the multicolored lights of the scanner play? In retrospect, it was not a diseased world that I desired during those dark years, but rather an adversary I could identify and work against, even if it were an antagonist so vague as to merely exist as “The System.” After being lost for so long, I am awake in a world where the dangers are not indistinct, merely so omnipresent that they have become such a part of our social/mental/emotional/economic/environmental landscape that we cannot, or choose not, to see them.

“Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it,” scratches at me like the monkey’s paw as I examine the scanned face of my former self. Though it may have manifested in a mundane and stupid manner, I find myself navigating a version of his dream come true, and with that understanding comes the question of: what do I owe him, this youthful specter who, though diluted by time and experience, still dwells in the core of my being?

Anything other than using the tools at my disposal to fight the insidious systems wreaking havoc on the social/mental/emotional/economic/environmental landscape all of us must exist in would be letting him down, but to truly succeed in this endeavor necessitates being more than an observer lurking in the shadow of evil, but using those tools to craft some awareness that, despite the bleak grimdarkness of the current setting, and the inescapable fact that we are played daily like dopamine slot machines by nefarious entities, that the techno-utopia which he innocently dreamed of is still within our grasp if we can wrest power from where it has been consolidated and return it to where it belongs: with us.