There was a sort of romanticism about technology in the 1990s and early 2000s that I kind of miss. Computers and the Internet were still a new enough thing that we treated them a little like actual, real magic. Putting the word “virtual” in front of something made it seem vastly more powerful, and “cyberspace” was still a thing that people actually said unironically. “I'm having a hard time envisioning this 'Internet' thing,” we said.