I’m grateful to be able to share my journey with you.
Life is not always easy, but I believe lives are built one memory at a time.
This Journal is where I’ll record some of those memories, share what I’m learning, and occasionally look backward to better understand where we may be going.
Those of us who began using the internet in the mid-1990s remember a very different digital world.
Many people reading this have never known life without social media, influencers, recommendation algorithms, endless notifications, and a device constantly tugging at their attention.
You have never lived in a world without what I’ve come to think of as a digital leash.
But before all of that, the internet felt like a place you visited.
You could stop by a friend’s website to see what he had been building.
You could read someone’s personal journal, explore a strange collection of links, join a discussion group, or discover something created by an ordinary person halfway around the world.
It was imperfect, awkward, slow, and absolutely fascinating.
Imagining the Information Age
In the 1990s, I was a young single mother attending graduate school at San Diego State University and working in Counseling and Psychological Services.
We were standing at the dawn of what we called the Information Age, and I was imagining how networked technology might improve people’s lives.
- Could someone receive counseling or emotional support online
- Could families know where a loved one was while that person drove across the country?
- Could we purchase something as complicated as a car through a computer?
- Could students attend college without living near a campus?
- Could an individual publish ideas and reach people without owning a printing press, television station, or large company?
Many of those ideas sounded improbable then. Today, they are ordinary.
The original internet grew through cooperation among researchers, universities, government agencies, engineers, and private industry.
Its open technical standards allowed different computers and networks to communicate without requiring everyone to purchase the same proprietary system.
Freely shared specifications played an essential role in its expansion.
That mattered to me.
Large technology companies wanted customers locked into their software, databases, contracts, and ecosystems. Open standards and open-source software offered another possibility. They suggested that knowledge and technology could help level the playing field rather than merely build taller walls around powerful companies.
I believed the internet could distribute opportunity.
I still believe it can.
But I was also concerned about what might happen when our identities, relationships, conversations, and personal information moved into commercial systems. At the time, I was a young woman, a single mother, and a graduate student. I did not have a powerful platform, and very few people cared what I thought about the social consequences of technology.
That is another story for another day.
The First Wave of Hype
We sometimes remember the early internet as an innocent golden age, but it had its own hype machine.
Every company suddenly needed a website. Investors poured money into businesses with little more than a domain name and a promise. Technology companies claimed they were overturning every old rule. Existing giants fought to keep users inside proprietary systems, while new companies promised liberation through their own systems.
Some predictions became reality.
Others evaporated spectacularly.
The important lesson is not that the excitement was wrong. The internet truly did transform commerce, education, communication, publishing, relationships, entertainment, politics, and daily life.
The mistake was assuming that transformation would automatically produce equality, wisdom, democracy, or human connection.
Technology gave us new capabilities.
It did not give us better judgment.
Another Paradigm Shift
Today we are living through another enormous technological transition.
Artificial intelligence is real. It can help people write, learn, translate, analyze information, create images, develop software, recognize patterns, and complete work that once required specialized training.
Organizations are adopting it rapidly, and investment is enormous. But the evidence is more complicated than the advertisements suggest. Many organizations using AI report benefits, although the most common revenue and cost improvements remain relatively modest. Stanford’s research also warns that governance, evaluation, education, and public understanding are not keeping pace with technical development.
That is the truth beneath the hype.
AI is neither a magic wand nor a mechanical apocalypse.
It is a powerful collection of technologies being developed inside political, economic, and social systems. Those systems will influence who benefits, who pays, who is heard, and who gains control.
The current debate feels familiar.
We hear promises of unlimited abundance, effortless businesses, medical breakthroughs, personalized education, and machines handling everything we dislike.
At the same time, we hear predictions of universal unemployment, social collapse, uncontrollable machines, and the end of human creativity.
History suggests that reality will be less theatrical and more complicated.
Some jobs will disappear. Others will change. New kinds of work will emerge. Productivity may increase without its benefits being distributed fairly. People with access, knowledge, capital, and computing resources may gain advantages over those without them.
The technology will matter enormously.
So will the choices we make around it.
The Algorithmic World
There is also an important difference between the internet we imagined and the digital world we inhabit today.
The early web helped us choose where to go.
The modern platform economy increasingly chooses what comes to us.
Algorithms decide which stories rise, which disappear, which emotions are provoked, and which ideas are repeated until they begin to feel true. Research has shown that altering exposure to hostile and antidemocratic political material in social feeds can change how people feel about those outside their political group.
The algorithm is not simply showing us the world.
It is arranging the world around us.
This has profound political consequences. False information, propaganda, hate speech, artificial images, selective facts, and emotional manipulation can move across the planet before careful reporting has put on its shoes.
The United Nations warns that damage to the information environment can undermine democracy, elections, public health, climate action, peace, and human rights. It also cautions that attempts to combat disinformation must protect legitimate expression rather than become excuses for censorship.
That tension is real.
We need truthful information without appointing unaccountable authorities to determine every acceptable thought.
We need freedom of expression without allowing powerful systems to profit endlessly from deception and division.
We need technology companies to innovate, but we also need transparency, accountability, competition, and meaningful choices for the people using their products.
Politics, Power and Control
The internet once promised to route around centralized control.
Today, much of our digital life passes through a small collection of platforms, cloud providers, app stores, advertising networks, and AI companies.
Governments have also learned to use the internet for surveillance, censorship, propaganda, and repression. Freedom House reported in 2025 that global internet freedom had declined for the fifteenth consecutive year and described the internet as more controlled and manipulated than ever before.
The struggle over technology is therefore not only about innovation.
It is about power.
Who owns the infrastructure?
Who controls the data?
Who writes the rules?
Who can appeal when an automated system makes a mistake?
Who gets to participate without surrendering privacy, independence, or dignity?
These are political questions, whether we call them political or not.
Education, Shared Truth and the Work of Democracy
Education has always meant more to me than preparing someone for a job.
It’s how we learn to think, question, listen, evaluate evidence, recognize manipulation, and participate in a democracy.
A functioning democracy depends on more than elections. It requires some shared understanding of reality. We may disagree about policies, beliefs, priorities, and the meaning of events, but we need enough common ground to discuss those disagreements honestly.
We need facts that are not simply rewritten to suit whoever holds power.
We need institutions willing to correct mistakes.
We need citizens capable of distinguishing evidence from persuasion, disagreement from hatred, and leadership from performance.
For much of my life, I believed we had agreed upon certain basic rules.
That every person deserves dignity.
That religion, race, gender, wealth, disability, or background should not determine someone’s worth.
That we could disagree without treating one another as enemies.
That truth mattered, even when it was inconvenient.
That knowledge carried responsibilities as well as opportunities.
Perhaps that was partly a hopeful or naive understanding of the world. History makes it clear that these principles were never applied equally or consistently. Many people were excluded from the democracy others believed they were already living in.
But imperfect ideals still matter.
They give us something to measure ourselves against.
What troubles me today is not simply that people disagree. Disagreement is part of democracy. What troubles me is the growing belief that facts themselves are optional, cruelty is strength, empathy is weakness, and anyone outside our group is somehow less deserving of dignity.
Technology did not create those impulses, but it can amplify them.
Algorithms reward certainty, outrage, humiliation, and fear because those emotions keep people watching and reacting. Artificial intelligence can now produce endless quantities of convincing material, making the ability to evaluate information more important than ever.
That is why education must include more than learning how to operate new tools.
We must teach people how those tools influence them.
We must teach media literacy, historical context, scientific reasoning, ethical judgment, and the courage to say, “I may be wrong.”
We must teach people that intelligence without compassion can become another instrument of power.
Most of all, we should remember that we are all here together.
No one makes it out alive.
This life is finite. Our time with one another is limited. We are here to live, learn, create, love, struggle, change, and eventually leave the world to someone else.
We will not agree on everything.
We do not need to.
But we can choose not to dehumanize one another.
We can protect the dignity of people whose lives and beliefs differ from our own.
We can remain curious.
We can tell the truth as best we understand it, correct ourselves when we learn more, and resist systems that benefit from keeping us frightened and divided.
Perhaps kindness sounds too small for the problems we face.
I do not think it is.
Kindness is not passivity. It is the daily decision to recognize another person’s humanity.
Education helps us understand the world.
Ethics helps us decide what kind of world we are willing to build.
We need both.
Technology on a Warming Planet
There is one more difference between the optimism of the 1990s and our present moment.
We’re developing enormously powerful technologies while living through an accelerating climate crisis.
The World Meteorological Organization reports the eleven years from 2015 through 2025 were the hottest eleven years ever recorded. Rising temperatures, warming oceans, severe weather, disrupted food systems, displacement, fires, floods, and damaged infrastructure are no longer distant possibilities. They are part of the world we already inhabit.
Technology may help us model weather, manage energy, improve agriculture, design materials, protect communities, and understand environmental changes.
But technology also consumes energy, water, minerals, equipment, and land.
We cannot evaluate the future of AI only by asking what it can produce or how much money it can generate. We must also ask what it requires, whose resources it consumes, and whether it helps us build a livable future.
Climate change, political instability, concentrated corporate power, misinformation, and artificial intelligence are not separate stories.
They are overlapping parts of the same historical moment.
So What Is True?
The truth is we’re living through a genuine technological transformation.
The truth is every transformative tech arrives wrapped in salesmanship, fear, ambition, ideology, and dreams.
AI will solve some problems.
It will create others.
It will expand human abilities.
It is also expanding inequality, surveillance, manipulation, and environmental pressure. What do we do? We have to make deliberate choices about how it’s developed and used.
The internet did change lives.
It allowed people to learn, create, communicate, publish, organize, build businesses, find support, and reach across distances in ways we once only imagined.
It also became commercialized, centralized, addictive, intrusive, and politically volatile.
Both stories are true.
History does not tell us exactly what will happen next. It reminds us the future is not something technology simply delivers to our doorstep.
People build it.
Governments shape it.
Companies sell it.
Communities adapt to it.
And individuals decide how much of themselves they’re willing to give it.
Creating a Smaller Place Online
Perhaps that is why I am building this Journal now.
I’m simplifying my physical life, but I’m also simplifying my digital life.
VeeLane is my home online where I can share what I’m working on, what I ve learned, what I remember, and what I’m still trying to understand.
No endless feed.
No pressure to manufacture a personality for an algorithm.
No promise that every post will change your life.
Just a human being keeping a record, offering useful things when she can, and inviting others to stop by occasionally to see what is new.
It reminds me of the internet I once hoped we would create.
Maybe we cannot rebuild the entire web that way.
But we can build small corners of it.
One memory at a time.
Come along for the journey.