Reflections on Technology, Humanity, and the Absurd Journey from 1990 to 2025
I was there when the modem screamed.
It wasn’t a sound; it was a ritual — a metallic cry that meant: I am connecting. And I remember sitting before that glowing square in the early 1990s, watching the world dissolve into code — slow, beautiful code. We called it progress. It felt like salvation.
Act I — The Age of Curiosity
Back then, everything was discovery. Computers were clumsy; humans were patient. You typed, you waited, and you wondered.
The Internet was a whisper between continents. You could send an email to someone in Japan, and it felt like magic — because it was magic. But every spell carries its curse. The first data centers were temples of quiet power. We thought we were free because we could connect — not realizing we had also begun to depend. Freedom, it seems, always begins with a password.
Act II — The Great Acceleration
The 2000s came running — faster, brighter, louder. We stopped waiting. The page loaded instantly; the message arrived before we finished the thought. We invented smartphones, and they invented us. Every silence became suspicious; every moment, measurable.
Politics joined the spectacle. Power no longer spoke from balconies; it whispered through algorithms. Wars were fought with information; revolutions were planned in 140 characters. They told us technology would unite the world. And it did — the way lightning unites the sky and ground: briefly, violently, leaving the air darker afterward.
Act III — When the Algorithm Became God
Then came the decade when machines learned to guess. They finished our sentences, predicted our desires, and corrected our grammar — but not our mistakes. Social media, once a playground, became a mirror maze. Everyone shouted “look at me,” while no one looked at anyone. We called it community. It was isolation with better lighting. Democracy transformed into a theatre of clicks.
We scrolled, we liked, we obeyed. And somewhere, a programmer whispered, “We’re improving human experience.” But whose humanity was being improved?
Act IV — The Digital Pandemic
Then the world stopped. The year was 2020. The streets emptied, the screens filled. We called it remote work, online learning, virtual connection. We watched our friends’ faces in little rectangles — smiling, buffering, disappearing. Technology saved us, they said. Perhaps. But it also revealed how fragile we had become.
We learned we could live without touching, without leaving, without breathing fresh air — but not without Wi-Fi. The machine had not just entered our homes. It had entered our hearts.
Act V — 2025: The Age of Knowing Too Much and Understanding Too Little
Now, in 2025, intelligence surrounds us — artificial, efficient, tireless. Our cities are smart, our fridges are smart, even our loneliness is “smart.” And yet wisdom remains offline.
AI paints, writes, and debates, but feels nothing. We have mastered brilliance without depth, connection without intimacy. Governments preach privacy while practicing surveillance. Corporations fund ethics panels while monetizing secrets. And we — the users — talk about freedom while clicking I agree. It’s not dystopia; it’s Tuesday.
Act VI — The Paradox of Light
Sometimes, late at night, I turn everything off. The silence feels ancient. The walls seem to breathe again. For a moment, I remember what it was like to exist without being observed. And I realize something: technology was never the enemy.
It only amplifies what already lives inside us — our hunger to connect, our fear of solitude, our need to be seen. The machine doesn’t want to rule us. It wants to be us. It wants to feel, to dream, to fail — the one thing it cannot do. And we, paradoxically, have become the ones who forget how.
Perhaps that is the final absurdity: We built machines to escape ourselves and found ourselves everywhere we look.
Epilogue — Toward a Human Reboot
From 1990 to 2025, humanity has walked not a straight line but a spiral. We have conquered distance and lost presence. We have created intelligence but neglected wisdom. We have connected billions of people and forgotten how to listen. Technology didn’t divide us; it simply revealed the fractures already within. Maybe the next great invention won’t be digital at all. Maybe it will be the rediscovery of silence — the reboot of the human soul.
Until then, we will keep updating, upgrading, uploading — searching for something that was never online in the first place.