One of the most fucked up realizations I've had is that it's been about a decade since the censoring of the public internet, and there's now an entire generation of people who never knew what actual freedom of speech looked like. Like, you could go around, and find a group of people who thought like you, all across the country, consisting of hundreds of thousands of people, and now it's just implicitly understood everywhere that about three quarters of the Overton Window are now verboten everywhere normal people go, and everywhere else will be spammed with federal agents and actual retards to prevent any kind of community spirit from emerging. The idea that Youtube was once a haven for every kind of OC imaginable, and comments sections were pictures of the collective unconscious (however boorish) is now lost to a lot of people. Even on things that aren't political, the idea that anything can be banned from everywhere at any time has had a chilling effect - even with anonymity being considered less vital nowadays, I see fewer people speaking from the heart, and more and more detachment.

When all is said and done, I hope there's some kind of documentary on the censorship of the internet, what that process looked like, and what it was beforehand. I do have faith that it'll come back when the resources to sustain this kind of censorship can no longer be brought to bear.