As I listen to song selections from The Lost 7th Expedition, I'm reminded of the value of Timecop1983's My DeLorean and Paul Oakley's Together in Electric Dreams, specifically as it relates to time with the loss of the flesh-and-blood people that I loved into virtual avatars.

Do these people still exist or have they become just another clever AI? Deeper still, do I exist or am I just the biological component to the system? Am I something akin to Star Trek: Voyager's bio-neural gel packs or the pods in The Matrix? Do the machines serve us or do we serve the machine?

Before that crisp autumn of 1995, a toaster was just, well, a toaster. After a school night of sacking groceries, I came online for the first time and the doors were blown off my mind as the paradigm of my local neighborhood sneakernet crumbled. My title of Who Who's of Computer Science at my high school suddenly felt...small. Back then, we still swapped CDs with our friends; I paid admission to computer shows to purchase shareware for a few bucks and gawked at the towering walls of computer hardware. The commercial Internet age was at its infancy with 23,500 websites vs. January 2020's 1,300,000,000 estimate. I was numbered among a relatively paltry 16 million of use online today vs July 2020's 4,570 million.

The Internet back then was more of a curio in the home, something to impress visiting friends. It did not play its centralized role of today, a rolling mound of Kevin Baconized conglomeration at the edge of tomorrow, breaking our lives down to algorithmic pseudocode; scooping up, connecting and categorizing our daily minutia by the second; and depoisting it into the the nexus of Big Data. The Internet knows when I wake up and when I fall asleep; daily spikes of my heart rate; my choice of dark roast coffee and green teas; the music and people I love; the books I listen; the media I consume; the things I know and the things I don't know; and even my writing style. And that is just a few things I rattle off from the top of my head!

To further illustrate its powers, reaching almost deity status, allow me to borrow awkwardly from Psalm 139:

O (Internet), you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O (Internet), you know it altogether.

You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it. Where shall I go from your (Search)? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night," even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.

This is not the Internet of 1995. Is it more a kitchen toaster or the Battlestar Galatica variety?

As for personal application, I do feel a void after leaving behind the daily-activity-to-gamification application of Habitica. And maybe that's the allure of the Internet as we continue to feed and sustain its ravenous appetite. We don't mind giving away pieces of ourselves if it provides us greater utility.

From an economic perspective, the Internet does strip away some of the perils of imperfect information, and it reminds me of what a shaft it is for the price of books to be printed on covers that something that is cheap on the coasts, gets expensive in the interior where our money is worth more.

Sidebar: Yes, it is not lost on me that I do not have the same opportunity for books at my local library than I do at the Brooklyn Public Library. Fortunately, they understand as well as they provide a method for me to not be as relatively disadvantaged at a price that is cheap to them and manageable by me.

• Brooklyn perspective: their $50 fee feels like to them like $19 Tennessee dollars.
• My perspective: their $50 fee feels like $130 in Brooklyn dollars

That said, in 1995, I had zero access to the Brooklyn Public Library. The Internet has made things cheaper. But, has it cheapened our lives in the process?

Is the opening line from Battlestar Galactica, "Are you alive?" more prescient in 2020 than it was in 2003? At what point, do I simply become the sum of my inputs to the system? At what point, will a facsimile be created to replace me, making a better "me"?

And what difference would it make? Virtual Me will enjoy movies with the option to switch out the cast to set preferences. Virtual Me will apply the appropriate heuristics to choose which virtualized band will play ANY song to optimize my daily activity: Simon & Garfunkel sings Everlong for this morning's selection. And I suspect Virtual Me might be alarmed by this, assuming a recent update didn't break him.