I remember watching a picture of a Honda dirt bike load pixel by pixel on my dad’s computer in Mississippi. Probably 1995. We had just gotten the internet and I sat there watching this image crawl down the screen. I thought it was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen. I mean it was.

I eventually got my own computer and did what every kid with too much time and dial-up did. StarCraft. Diablo. AOL chat rooms way too late at night that got my dad’s AOL account banned a few times at least. But I also started building stuff. I made websites. Terrible ones. Hit counters, guestbooks, animated GIFs that would make your eyes bleed. I sold Pokémon cards on eBay. I had T-shirts made at a local shop. Some with the logo of Hoover vacuum cleaner, but instead of Hoover it said Houser the name of my favorite band’s Widespread Panic lead guitarist and sold them on ebay.

I was maybe 15 and I had a whole business going. Nobody asked for a license. Nobody asked me to verify my identity. I just did it.

That was the internet I grew up on. You showed up, figured it out, made something. If it worked, cool. If not, try again. No gatekeepers. No 45-page terms of service. Just people and their weird little corners of the web doing whatever they wanted.

GeoCities was pretty peak internet for someone of my age. Every site was somebody’s personality thrown across a screen. Bad fonts, tiled backgrounds, MIDI files blasting on page load. It was chaos and it was beautiful and it was yours. It was freedom to express yourself.

Then Facebook came along and killed it.

People don’t talk enough about what Facebook actually did. It didn’t just replace geocities and myspace. It changed what being online meant entirely. You weren’t building a space that reflected who you were anymore. You were filling out a form. Real name. Real face. Where you went to school. Where you work. Who you’re dating. Where you live. It wasn’t about your personality anymore. It was about your status. Basically a social credit score before anyone called it that.

And the worst part? Facebook trained a whole generation to just hand over their identity like it was nothing. That’s the real damage. Not the data breaches, not the ads. The fact that people stopped even questioning it. Upload your passport to buy something? Sure, already gave Facebook my whole life story. What’s one more form?

That’s how KYC became normal. The surveillance infrastructure wasn’t built by governments. Social media companies built it. And people walked right into it because the alternative was not existing online. The internet went from “who do you want to be?” to “prove who you are.”

I work on Vexl, I’ve made privacy my mission now. I think about protecting people’s identities and financial information every day. I watch exchanges ask for passports, selfies, utility bills, bank statements just so someone can buy fifty bucks worth of Bitcoin. People hand it all over without thinking twice. They were trained to. We all were.

The internet felt dead for a long time. Like a shopping mall. Clean, corporate, surveilled. You could buy things but you couldn’t build things. Everything locked behind subscriptions and walled gardens and app store approvals. The tinkering was gone. That kid in Mississippi selling Pokémon cards? Today he’d need an LLC, a tax ID, a verified PayPal, and three forms of ID to do the same thing. Digital ID Verification at the OS level.

Then around 2021 something shifted.

I was messing around with one of those early AI chatbots and it just hit me. It felt like 1995 again. Like watching that dirt bike load on my dad’s screen. Holy shit. This is new. Not new like a new phone or another app. New like the internet was new. A whole frontier nobody had figured out yet. It allowed you to dream, with speed!

Yeah, everyone’s worried about AI taking jobs. That’s a real fear and I feel it too. I see what these tools actually do. And what I see isn’t just disruption. I see the wild west coming back. I see people being able to create again. Build things. Tinker. Without asking anyone for permission. I understand why people are naming their bots because they’re creating pseudonyms. They’re creating bots to do things for them. There is a freedom to create.

So I bought a dedicated PC.

I started running AI locally. Learning the tools learning what was possible and it’s limitations, but also on my hardware in my home. I got deep into Nostr, running relays, actually understanding the protocol by getting my hands dirty instead of reading about it. Trial and error. It was fun to play again! Oh? You want your own self hosted Discord? Gimme 3 days and I’ll have a working build that makes discord obsolete everything always wanted it to be.

I built a music streaming app because nothing out there did what I wanted. I wanted to stream my self-hosted large live music library from my apple watch over cellular while on runs without taking my phone. So I built it, it works, I use it every run. I’ve always self-hosted my own music I have a large collection of live music. Most of the bands I listen to never play the same show twice. There just wasn’t anything out there that solved my problem until now.

I started self-hosting tools for my own problems instead of paying some company to solve them for me while skimming my data on the side. Dog walks turned into brainstorming sessions. Voice notes about ideas on the way out, the agent already working on it before I get back inside. The question went from “is there an app for this?” to “can I build this myself?” And the answer kept being yes.

This is why open-source is so damn important. It is human creativity at work, its people saying what if i…. And if someone comes along and improves on your idea your code your experience, or if your idea helps others, well.. mission accomplished. I can move on to other things, and keep that tool forever.

It’s amazing that regular people can build things again for the first time in fifteen years. No CS degree needed. No VC funding. No engineering team. Just curiosity, a real problem, and a box on your desk.

The dot com boom was the first gold rush. Build anything, permission not required. Anyone could be an entrepreneur. Then corporate internet took over. Facebook became meta. Google became alphabet. App stores. KYC everything. They consumed all the data, they destroyed the little guy. Prove who you are or you don’t exist. Well creativity died all the tinkering died. We went from builders in command line MSDOS days to consumers trapped in GUI hell. A Candy Crush world with a boot on your face.

Right now it feels like the old times again. I walk in a cafe and see terminal open on more than one computer, I see social media influencers teaching people how to install homebrew. I’m not 15 anymore. I’m not playing diablo at 3 am, but I am probably awake at 2 am building some tool that probably already exists, but isn’t good enough for me.

That’s freedom. The freedom to dream your idea into reality. Amazing. Yet, I know what’s at stake. These tools come with real costs to privacy, to identity, to everything I spend my days trying to protect. I’m not naive about that. These tools are scary for all the right and all the wrong reasons, but you also can’t help but be excited.

Im literally writing this article from an app I made to help draft and create long from content on nostr beautifully. It’s called Samizdat.press I don’t care if anyone else uses it. It’s a tool for me. and anyone else who might benefit. All the people calling vibecoded stuff slop yeah it is, but its also my slop, and my tools, and I really DGAF if you use it or not. I am having a really good time.

Because freedom is a fucking beautiful thing. The freedom to not ask permission. To build things, break things, fix things. To be that kid again who just had an idea and went and did it. That’s why people like me can’t stop messing with this stuff. Not because AI is going to change the world, but because it already did.