First machine.
Already more interested in how it worked than what it did.

Every constraint was visible: processor speed, RAM limits, the bus. Starting there meant approaching computing as machine, not magic. Learning without abstraction layers changes how you reason about systems later.
The habit of looking underneath stuck.

Watched Apache, then MySQL, then the entire LAMP stack displace commercial Unix on production servers. Pre-mainstream, all of it.

The idea that free software would run the internet was not obvious at the time. Corporations were still paying per-seat for Solaris licences.
The idea that a Finnish student's kernel would underpin global infrastructure sounded absurd.
It wasn't.

PHP, sysadmin work, first professional projects at ISDnet: ISP-scale web, mail, and usenet clusters. HTTP + HTML + PHP turned publishing into programming. Running infrastructure while building on top of it.

The web was genuinely open: no algorithmic gatekeepers, no app store approvals, no platform permissions.
An idea and a server were enough.
That simplicity felt natural, structural.

ADSL at home. No more tying up the phone line, no more scheduled download windows, no more listening to the modem negotiate its handshake at 9 pm. The web became always-on and the psychology shifted with it.

Personally: dual SDSL uplinks, own AS number, BGP peering and IXs access, full routing table in a 5 m² kitchen.
Not your typical home connection.

Running high-traffic hosting infrastructure while clients quietly disappeared. Managing a small team, maintaining clusters for businesses that no longer existed. The servers kept running. The invoices stopped coming.

The hype died; the web didn't.
The 2000s were the hangover. They were also the decade that built what lasted.

PageRank changed how the web works: not just search, but distribution. The web stopped being navigated by URLs and started being navigated by one company's algorithm. For a long time, that felt like a fair trade.

Until the algorithm started optimising for Google's revenue, not your relevance. One update can now erase years of traffic overnight. Later, Facebook added attention to Google's distribution.
Every web property became a tenant. Nobody signed the lease.

The year before, I'd been running 200 Linux servers at EdenCast: peaks above 10 Gbit/s, BGP routing with Quagga then Cisco Catalyst 6500s. The kind of infrastructure work AWS was about to commoditise.

For sysadmins, this was existential. The entire discipline of racking servers, capacity planning, datacenter ops collapsed into a billing dashboard.

A one-person shop could run global infrastructure. The low-level knowledge didn't become useless; it became leverage. Knowing what the abstraction was hiding turned out to matter.

iPhone.
The web had been designed for mice.

Responsive design, touch UX, the mobile-first decade. Layouts that had worked for a decade broke overnight, hover states vanished, and every site had to be rebuilt for a finger instead of a cursor.
The irony: Steve Jobs spent his career building for cursors, then shipped the thing that made all of it wrong.

The platforms had been social since 2004. In 2016, it became obvious they were something else. Feeds replaced timelines. Algorithms replaced editors. Engagement metrics increasingly rewarded outrage. The Brexit vote. The US election. Attention as infrastructure, weaponised at scale.

Friendships flattened into follows, conversation into content.
Interaction went up, actual connection went down.
The loneliness came free with the feed. The name came later.

ChatGPT arrived in November 2022. The world kept moving. Then DALL-E: you typed a description, a face appeared. A face that had never existed, assembled from a century of absorbed visual culture.

The tools were fascinating, mind-bending.
But the shock came later.