I was gonna bring up Space Jam.

The first computer I ever touched was a VT100 connected to a Cray YMP. It was normally used for nuclear yield simulations but that day, it ran a golf simulator. The next computer I touched was a Wyse teletouch connected to a server at UC Boulder (probably a DEC something-or-other). Its only output was a daisy-wheel printer that used continuous stationary and it communicated via acoustic coupler. Right now? Right now I can touch twelve devices with IP addresses without leaving my chair. I watched this being built; my father built the first computer network at DOE so that he didn't have to write the output of Nixie tubes using paper and pencil. It grew up around me as I grew up. That refines my experience.

I think something most people don't understand is that the early computer visionaries were convinced that if computing was easier, people would use it for the erudite, scholarly things they intended to use it for. And while that happened - Larry Page built a printer out of Lego Mindstorms before he built Google. Educational computing went from "nothing" to HERO 1 to I mean, I've got three Raspberry Pis that I use for truly mundane shit.

But some people are never going to be erudite. They're never going to be scholarly. And by "some people" I mean the preponderance of bipeds walking the earth.

There was this beautiful dream that technology would make nerd culture ascendant. It didn't. It made nerds ascendant and out of their bitterness they buy and sell the rest of us while reading Ayn Rand, prepping their disaster islands and arguing that wealth makes right. If you can't join 'em, buy'em.