The internet opened the door to many things.

One of them was the mistaken belief that people from my country were particularly dumb.

Slow and obutse. Behind the times, unnecessarily religious and with an aversion to all things new and/or foreign. That was the merciless picture of my country's people, painted by its own intellectuals -- a trendy bunch of ideas and theories, a well-traveled, meritocratic elite who have read "all the great classics" and use diplomas from well established universities as wallpaper.

As a kid from a less than well-off family with no opportunities to travel and little to guide myself with besides my experiences living in a neighbourhood of generally well-meaning but undoubtedly thick individuals, and guided by the naivete of someone who thinks the TV, specially the smarter channels, only publish the truth, I had little reason not to believe that notion. This country is doomed. Salvation lies abroad.

Achieving english fluency as quickly as I did and securing access to the internet only further cemented these convictions. News about videogames, cheats, secrets, technology traveling so slowly in my country's side yet so quickly available in the english/unitedstatesian internet, to the point I was quicker to scoops than my country's reporters and could have easily become a freelancer. Why didn't I?

There is a special kind of human trash found in any classroom. They have their textbooks open in the unit concerning that day's lesson, right in front of their teachers. When their teachers ask a question, they'll raise their arm and answer proudly, hardly capable of hiding they're reading directly from the textbook. I tried it myself a couple of times and it always made me feel like a total tool. Unrewarding and hollow. I hadn't learned anything. I was nothing but a a parrot.

It was the same thing in this case. Add to that a couple of maxims about the internet that I still follow to some degree and I missed out on being a young enterpeneur. Was I bitter about it? Of course! But how can these guys be so bad at their job? It's right there! You don't even need privileged access, all you have to do is literally read your screen! Is this all it takes for a modicum of success? I would not allow myself to lower my Being to that of the classroom parrot. The feeling of bitterness was dwarfed by embarrassment for my own people by infinite orders of magnitude. After drowning in my emotions for a while, I refused the offer and went about my business, severing what ties I had with my country's side of the internet. Self-imposed electronic exile.

I spent the following years playing videogames with people from all over the globe, browsing, lurking, creating content anonymously, creating dozens of identities for dozens of communities, refusing all sorts of offers but nevertheless feeling a slight sense of superiority and belonging. Among foreigners, none of them any wiser to my origins. Talking about and making jokes about things everyone would be privy about as everyone was on the same level of informational exposure. Just a nice sense of implicit brotherhood. To me, even more than that. The feeling of an emergent, trans-national culture. The internet as a place where the mainstream and faux counterculture had no influence.

Then smartphones happened.

The barrier of entry to the internet wasn't that high when I first joined. I was far removed from the outset of the eternal September. Set up your modem according to the instructions, connect to it and open the internet browser. A small set of instructions and the dedication to stay in one specific place. It was that simple, and yet the amount of people that couldn't jump those hurdles was so overwhelmingly great that my mind never even considered the notion. Sure, such people might exist in "civilized" countries such as england, but not in as great relative terms as here in my country. After all, everyone here is pretty dumb. So am I.

I had fallen victim to the greatest selection bias of my life, but was keen enough to notice something wasn't adding up with the subtle changes that spawned from the internet going mobile. The dream of a transnational culture became a reality in the worst possible way and the rest is history. The lesson is that there's the exact same amount of dumb in every country. Intellectual elites who espouse the virtues of foreign lands are self-centered faggots who travelled deep into a tourist trap and whose only contribution to society is at best being the useful idiot of dubious entities, filling pages of magazines with neat front pages and soft paper. Objectively, they're a net negative who pollute the earth with meaningless paper and corrupt the soul of their countrymen with separatist phantasms that slowly strangle what traces remain of their culture.
Their greatest claim to fame being the spawning of the unitedstatesianized youth.

I was unitedstatesianized myself, but I was lucky enough to see the internet before and after it was consumed by old media. I, like many others, fought countless losing battles attempting to salvage a piece of something that felt so close to becoming Heaven until I realized it was pointless. I broke my exile and attempted to revitalize my country's side of things, but it was too late. By the time I tried, centralization within the unitedstatesian sphere was already imminent. Nothing left to do but mumble into the void about my experience, hoping it reaches others and allows them to see beyond the naive, self-centered notion that understanding the english language is a sign of myriad virtues.
Salvation lies within.

Lesson learned. I have grown as a person and rekindled the appreciation for what my country has to offer, its history and its people. Nothing is meant to be perfect. There will always be things that could be better and others that make it all worth it. Salvation is not found in another country's tourist trap, as reported by people who never actually experienced adversity. I'll forever take the extolled virtues of faraway lands with a mine of salt.

Japan, though? Those are different!

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