Does anyone remember Nexopia? Probably not, unless you were a millennial in western Canada in the mid-2000's. Nexopia was a curious example of a social media platform that, despite being online and globally accessible, nevertheless had tight geographic localization. About 50% of the user base was located in Alberta and British Columbia, with another 30-40% in Canada broadly. I suppose this is because it was founded in Edmonton, and mostly spread by word of mouth back then. Launched in early 2003, it predated MySpace by six months, and Facebook by one year. Despite its head start, it never achieved the same success of those two giants and remained a distinctly Canadian phenomenon. For a handful of years, it was the place to be online for an angsty emo high schooler in Canada's southwest quadrant. Some context here: no one really knew what kind of place this was yet, or how these platforms would come to shape culture. Almost all interaction with the platform occurred at home, on a (probably shared) desktop computer. Internet connections were often still dial-up, and even the broadband of the time wasn't great by modern standards (we thought it was amazing though). Uploading photos was a technical challenge. Phones (at least the cheap ones our parents gave us) didn't typically have cameras yet, mobile internet was little more than a proof of concept, and there was no widely available cloud services, so getting your picture online usually consisted of: 1. Get a dedicated digital camera (not cheap at the time). 2. Figure out how to physically bridge it to the brick on your desktop. Maybe the camera used SD cards, but did your family's computer have a way of reading them? Perhaps there was a cord that came with the camera, but was there a port for it on your computer? Things weren't well standardized back then. Can I find an adapter at RadioShack? What software do I need? What the hell is a driver? Better look it up on Yahoo, hope I don't get any viruses when I download this... 3. If you made it through step 2 and the pictures actually existed in digital form on your computer's hard drive, congratulations. You didn't really understand what you did or how any of the shit you just downloaded to make it happen worked, but you won. Now just upload them to the platform. This will take at least a few minutes per low-resolution photo. 4. Now wait for an actual human employee to manually review your picture for ToS violations and voila! The world can now see a blurry picture of your sick skateboarding skillz. Nexopia was the first social media platform I ever used, and it would be the last for two decades until I reemerged on Primal recently. There was something special and unique about it that could never be replicated by the corporate giants that would soon come to dominate the space. Nexopia in the mid-2000's was a time and place that felt like it largely belonged to one generation of young Canadians who were, together, leaving the innocence of their analog youth behind and leaping into a brave new digital future. We didn't know what we were doing, or where we were going, or that we would someday miss where we came from. We can never return to the innocence of our analog past. The world has changed, as we have changed. I suspect that much of millenial 90's nostalgia is probably just misplaced sadness for the lost innocence of our childhood. But it is, perhaps, a childhood innocence that can no longer truly exist, one that died with our generation. We lived through the final days of a world where a kid could just be a kid: believe in Santa without the ability to ruthlessly fact-check him on Google, say and do stupid things without fear of them being forever immortalized online, experience love and sexuality as a progressively revealed mystery, not a grotesque spectacle of voyeuristic debauchery. We didn't know what we had until it was gone, and now we live in a world where it is difficult for any child to have this experience of youth. We can't return to the innocence of our childhood, nor should we seek to. Once our eyes have been opened to the harsh truths of the world, they cannot be shut. But everyone deserves a period of innocence before these harsh truths are revealed, and to have them revealed incrementally. We can't go back to the world as it was, but we can create homes and families and ways of living that allow kids to just be kids again, in a world that pushes them relentlessly towards jadedness.