when I was in middle school (2004-ish?), I collaborated on a video game development project with four other dudes I met online, two of whom I became close friends with. we all knew the project leader was Australian because he told us as much, because he insisted we spell "armour" with a "u", and because of the times of day he was online. it was easy to infer that the rest of us were North American, but it wasn't until months and months of IMing back and forth that I came to learn that one of the other guys, the one whom I was closest with, was black. it just never came up in conversation, until he was explaining some personal anecdote to me in private and it was contextually appropriate. why would it? we were five dorky middle/high schoolers who enjoyed video games and learning to create them together, and we only knew each other by our handles, and, later, our given names. why would we talk about what color of skin we had? nothing could be less relevant to a bunch of kids who were eagerly doing collaborative creative work together, across the globe, through the magic of the Internet.

this is not to say that one shouldn't be open with who they are in real life, when projecting themselves on the Internet, but, rather, to show that, just a couple short decades ago, it was far less popular to do this than it is now. Internet users were usernames, avatars, and forum sigs, and perhaps a personal webpage (which was highly unlikely to reveal much about one's real-life identity, either). that's all you had to go on at the base level, and then, from there, it was one's actions that influenced others' opinions of them, as opposed to anything having to do with one's real-life physical or demographic characteristics.

it was so cool, man, let me tell you. it felt like being on the brink of a glorious cyber-libertarian future, where all manner of real-life bigotry could be nonexistent, because it was useless, because nobody knew anything about anyone else, because we were interacting with cyber-avatars of each other first and foremost, only getting to know the real meatspace people behind the cyber-avatar after becoming friends with them, through shared purpose and/or interest. especially after learning that this dude I was interacting with, teaching, learning from, making stuff with, for months, online, was black, it was just so exciting, because one got the feeling that perhaps this Internet thing could truly be a force of good in the world—if everyone became used to interacting with these raceless sexless ideology-less cyber-avatars on this Internet thing, then perhaps, gradually, real-world bigotry would be phased out, as it would largely be useless in this new realm of cyberspace.

but then Facebook, Twitter, etc. came to be, the iPhone was released, and normies became connected to the Internet 24/7. then, as if that wasn't bad enough, the modern idea of identity politics cropped up mysteriously right around the time the #Occupy was gaining steam. then in 2013—a decade ago now—Donglegate happened, and it became clear to me that the cyber-libertarian dream of an utterly meritocratic, bigotry-free Internet, full of all kinds of weird and cool people coming together to share interests and make weird and cool stuff together and share said weird and cool stuff with the rest of the world, was most certainly long since dead.