I’m John Rambo.

“It’s over, Johnny.”

I was born in 1978. Rambo: First Blood wouldn’t be released in theaters for another four years, but my story had already begun. I’m part of the now-40-something generation that was forced to make the leap from an analog world to a digital one and as such, I have a good understanding of how the internet works. I was there just when things were picking up steam and it was pretty glorious. Email. Wav files. MIDIs. MIDIs were so awesome. Looking back at it now, most of these innovations look like the result of cavemen building things with twigs, but they got the job done.

It wasn’t until the early 2000s that I would discover php forums. Nearly 25 years later, most of the web forums are abandoned – lost to time – or if you’re lucky, the Wayback Machine will generate the top level of a site on which you used to spend an ungodly number of hours calling people stupid in new and creative ways. To me, this was like coming home.

I always liked to argue and fight, so when I found a forum full of fellow comic book nerds, I thought “I’ll insult them. Watch this.” Never mind that I was a nerd too; I was 100% certain that I was a rung above those other nerds. A nerd alpha. I trolled, I mostly got trolled, I learned a lot about the vast untapped power of anonymity, but it was like a drug. I found bigger, swearier forums where people didn’t just get in arguments over the mundane, but rather structured entire forums around who could flame their opponents harder, better, more hilariously. I joined the great flame wars of the 2000s, and I was okay at it.

But like John Rambo, eventually the war ended and all the time I’d wasted crafting increasingly ostentatious personas and ridiculous insults seemed to haunt me more and more as each site folded. I spent so much time on forums that I’d forgotten to live or communicate with people outside the bubble. I wasn’t an alpha, I was a loser. Where once I did battle in an arena you couldn’t convince me wasn’t real, now everyone was moving on to Facebook or politics. The only thing I’d gained from the experience was the ability to absolutely rip on someone for even the most innocuous offenses, ie: nothing useful. I was a soldier in a stupid internet war that honed his craft just to see the fighting stop and all the warriors get slow and fat.

When I search, I can still find one or two forums where flaming is allowed, but their membership consists of maybe half a dozen sorry masochists, some of them talking to themselves under sock accounts because they’re too broken to move on. War heroes in our own minds, we learned how to photoshop people’s heads onto fetish porn or Weird Al a song’s lyrics to roast the a stranger, and found out later that they weren’t exactly marketable skills.

And just like Rambo, people just aren’t accepting of tired old internet trolls or interested in their tales of valor. People blast each other with every curse in the book under their real names now. The character aspect of the game is lost in the ’20s. It’s like none of it ever happened… but to us it did.

There are opinions on whether or not the old internet was better or worse than it is now, and you can hold any view on that subject that you wish, but when 20-year-olds who only recently started shaving can throw shade better (and more relevantly) in a random shitposting meme group than you ever could back when Britney wasn’t crazy, maybe it’s time to admit the war is really over. No one wants your kind here.