One of the things that comes from being a gen-x person is that you were more often than not front and center to the crossover point in how the world has changed with the introduction of the Internet. While for some of us it goes back to the usenet groups or our first exploratory moments through FIDO or WildCat! and other BBS systems of interconnected online dialogue and games, the modern web is what most associate with all of it.

I’ve been a Very Online person since my old 300baud dialup moment so it was no surprise that I was doing things with places in the early 90s. When I ended up working at Fidelity in the late 90s, it gave me my first access to broadband. And it was a day job in systems monitoring that was painfully dull, so it exposed me to the world of online journalism as you scoured the very limited Internet for things to read. American Politics Journal, the early days of Salon and The Nation online, and several other sources. You had the “citizen journalists” doing things and the laughter about things like the Clinton Body Count, Vince Foster, Travelgate, and on and on and on. The hypocrisy has always been there.

But on January 17th, 1998, another huge domino fell as part of what Reagan ushered in and the changes that came with Fox News and other low-rent cheap productions on the expanding cable services for newsinfotainment. The Drudge Report, already considered a terrible source of anything, broke the story on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. It set a good chunk of the tone for several years in the antagonistic nature of “citizen journalism” and went harder and deeper for years to come. It’s a huge evolution point where things online started to be taken more seriously by mainstream outfits, though at that time still with some serious checking rather than breathlessly reporting whatever anyone said online, factual or not.

The scandal itself was fascinating as time played out as Clinton only seemed to get more popular as it went on, but it hardened a lot of partisanship as well as the impeachment and the Starr Report were seen as ways to punish Democrats over what Republicans went through with Nixon. It was a fascinating time to be online and it lead to a lot of my political education in understanding how the processes worked, the players involved, and the unfortunate part that so many are still very active today. The whole event itself is a dark day in American political history for a lot of reasons but one of the things that we’ve been really glad to see is the way Lewinsky has been able to reassert herself in the public sphere in the time since. It took too long and too much was gotten away by too many back in the day, but she may be the one who has the last laugh in the end, outliving almost all of those involved and being able to write the final chapter in that story someday.

Looking back at what once was and what is, and the naive belief so many of us had about how the Internet would power information and knowledge to the betterment of all, it saddens me that so much potential was lost and that it opened us all up to what the Trump era seized upon so hard.