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Nothing he revealed was a shock, I was joking with my friends about them listening in on 2009 if not earlier.
Yeah, but you didn’t have proof.
The real world impact of the leak was a net negative for Americans.
Absolutely ridiculous. You just can’t distinguish between the state’s interests and the people’s interests. So what if the US’s global image is damaged? That doesn’t affect me. If anything, I’m glad, when the US’s global image was better it meant it could get away with getting involved in stupid imperialist wars that made life worse for everyone but the ruling class. Their interests are directly opposed to mine and hurting them helps me.
Had he been willing to go to jail for it the issue would have stayed in the for front and people would have put a lot of effort into getting him released, and I would have been a supporter of that initiative.
Again, this is literally the only reason you’ve given for why he should’ve done that, that you personally would’ve liked him more, which I don’t believe for a second. Nobody gives a shit what you think, certainly not enough to do something stupid and self-destructive. Snowden would’ve been an idiot not to protect himself.
There were lots of little niche forums where you could find a lot of different perspectives. I remember as a kid going to nuklearpower.com, the home of the 8-Bit theater webcomic, and I found a thread in the forums about religion and it was kind of my first real exposure to ideas about it outside of what I’d been raised to believe.
Most early memes were lolcats or epic fails, and I remember going through pages and pages on cheezburger.com with my friends. There were also “demotivational posters,” like this was the height of comedy.
4chan existed and was pretty bad even then but it was more common for somewhat normal people to go there, they loved their slurs and gross out humor but it wasn’t full nazi, it was edgy teens. In general slurs and homophobia were a lot more common, but a lot of the edgy, “you can’t tell me what to do” energy was directed at the religious right, the “moral guardians” who wanted to take away your violent video games. The left was very weak and didn’t have the sort of cultural presence it has today, instead you had a lot of energy directed towards libertarianism, with Ron Paul being the anti-war, pro-weed candidate, and you had liberals with ACLU type values. Things weren’t cut as neatly along party lines back then.
Fewer people were on the internet back then. Lots of young people used it but not as many boomers. There weren’t as many big pillars like Facebook/Twitter/Reddit, there were more subcultures and you never quite knew what you’d find (for better or worse). Algorithms were a lot less polished and you didn’t have as much SEO, Youtube looked and felt radically different.
The indie game Secret Little Haven captures some of the feel of that time period of the internet, from the perspective of a transfem, it gets heavy but it’s good.