Time Starts Again

For the first time in years, the world feels new again.

I still remember the first time I touched a computer. I wasn’t even old enough to be in primary school. It was in my dad’s office.

Back then, computers were still very new to a lot of people. One of my dad’s colleagues showed me a video game on that computer. Even after all these years, I can still remember that moment and the image on the screen: a man jumping across a stage.

When I was in primary school, I started playing StarCraft, Army Men, C&C: Red Alert, Counter-Strike, Diablo II, Age of Empires, Virtual Life 2, and, you know, a lot of other video games. During those primary school years, I learned Flash. There was a famous website called 闪客帝国 (Shanke Diguo, literally “Flash Empire”) back then, and at school we used Logo to learn programming.

The Matrix — yes, you guessed it, the famous movie. I first watched it when I was still in primary school. I watched that movie again and again. How many times? Want to guess? You know what? I don’t know either.

When I was in junior high school, I joined the computer club at our school and continued using Flash to build little Flash projects, haha. We were still playing computer games like StarCraft, Diablo II, Counter-Strike, and Virtual Life 2, but the world was beginning to change. New kinds of games were being created, like The Legend of Mir 2, and platforms like HF Gaming Platform were appearing. We started using the Internet, instead of just LANs, to play video games with our friends.

In high school, I started using the Visual Basic programming language to write some software. And speaking of games — something huge appeared and suddenly became popular all over the world. That game was called World of Warcraft. You can’t imagine how popular WoW was. Almost every cybercafe I went to was full of WoW players. Then Dota came out, and it became popular around the world too.

At university, I studied C/C++, Java, PowerScript, JavaScript, C#, Brainfuck, and more. I used IRC for secure chats with friends from all over the world. We had a computer club there too, where we used Silverlight — a technology from the past, a little like Flash, using C# and XAML — to build a game. That is still the only game I have ever built. I joined ACM programming competitions and some programming competitions held by companies. I used LabWindows/LabVIEW and C/C++ to develop a missile guidance system. During university, we even developed an online storage system similar to Dropbox.

Looking back at those early years of my life, I still remember what the Internet felt like when I was a child, as it became more and more popular around the world. People speaking all kinds of languages were building their own websites. It was a freer age. Even under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), you didn’t need government approval just to build a website. You could simply build one yourself. There were also many websites that told you things the CCP didn’t want to talk about, and you could find them through Baidu or other Chinese search engines. We could even discover good games that the CCP didn’t want us to play, like Command & Conquer: Generals. A classmate could tell you about the game, and then you could find it on the Internet yourself.

Because China had such a large population when the Internet became popular around the world, there were a huge number of Simplified Chinese websites, and Simplified Chinese content made up a significant part of the Web.

It was a good time for everybody.

When I was a student, we could use Wikipedia, YouTube, Instagram, Telegram, Facebook, Google, LINE, WhatsApp, Gmail, Google Maps, and so many other websites and applications.

I still remember the first time I used Google Maps with my older siblings. We tried to find our school and our home on the map.

That was amazing.

But you know, there are always some bad guys who don’t want the good times to last.

In 2010, Google left China after a cyberattack originating from China and amid its conflict with the Chinese government’s censorship requirements. I saw the news while I was using iGoogle and its drag-and-drop gadgets, so I remember that day clearly.

Later, we couldn’t access Google anymore.

To me, the reason was clear: the remnants of the Soviet Union had refused to abandon their evil plans and had begun putting them into action…

They used so-called “Internet sovereignty” to dismantle the various organizations and communities people had formed through the Internet. Everything changed. Over the years, Simplified Chinese content became a smaller and smaller part of the Web. Even the Internet itself became boring. Information accumulated on the Simplified Chinese Internet over the past ten or twenty years has been wiped away — as if it had never existed at all, just like in 1984. A lot of Chinese websites disappeared, while others deleted huge numbers of old Chinese posts.

In China, even buying a SIM card requires real-name registration, and when people post something on major Internet platforms, their IP location is displayed. The Chinese Internet has become increasingly separated from the global Internet.

But the new Axis continued to move. We could no longer freely use many foreign websites and applications. Even foreign-made games became harder or impossible to access officially. If people wanted to create a website, they needed to register it with the government. The same eventually became true for mobile apps. And in the Simplified Chinese world, if you wanted to publish a game for Chinese players, you also needed government approval.

It felt as if the Internet had stopped moving and had become so boring for everyone.

Then, in 2022, Russia and its friends put their plans into action with the invasion of Ukraine. A new era seemed to begin.

A new Cold War was beginning.

But suddenly, AI began showing us the future.

The regimes of the new “Axis” this time are all very weak. AI will be the protagonist, just as “Star Wars” — the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) — became a symbol of technological competition during the last Cold War.

The AI war has already begun.

Everybody is building their own AI products or using AI to do something.

Everybody is talking about AI, just as people talked about computers and the Internet many years ago.

The future is rhyming with the past.

A different world is coming.

When the Internet began, I was a child. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t build anything of my own.

But now, I know AI will become boring one day too. Maybe in 30 years. But I don’t want to find myself writing another retrospective article like this one.

This time, I will be part of it, not just enjoy it. I will build something of my own.

It feels as if I am back in the past, once again watching that man jump across a stage on a computer screen.

Time starts again.

And the gears of fate begin to turn.