The End of the Extremely Online Era - by Thomas J Bevan
In 1988 the Berlin Wall would have seemed like a permanent and enduring part of the city, an inevitability. Its guard towers, checkpoints and blockades had been up for 27 years and the ideology that led to its construction had been in the ascendancy for over 70 years. Only the oldest citizens could remember, dimly, a time before Communism. And yet a mere year later the wall was pulled down and less than a year after that Germany was formally reunified1. This is the way it goes- things appear to stay static for years and years and then everything changes all at once. Such is the nature of momentum and chain reactions and the compounding of small results into inevitable grand transformation. In the midst of it we are oblivious, complacent, living each day as it comes and then we find that suddenly everything is different and our old way of life recedes into a mere memory. Some obvious examples of this: at one point, not that long ago, the vast majority of adults in the Western world wore
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