The Netthings

Of course they just had to release that thing on the net. Things were just getting interesting too! But noooo they just had to "accidentally" have it escape from "totally secure servers, man". You know the thing! Like if you see it or whatever you just blow your shit right off, people really sending that like those old email chains and posting most of 'em think it's some kinda trend or skit or something. "Le big ARG" but nah man, it's getting a lot of folks.

Not much to be done, they won't shut the net down cause "muh economy" and you don't wanna be one of those unlucky bastards to just scroll past it someplace and clock out. You can just kinda... leave? I guess? Some folks are doing that, just kinda walking out the door one day and not coming back, can't wander the wired anymore so just wander the corpse of the real.

A sort of parallel society (strong word there, makes it sound civilized and put together, more like a neo-hobo network) has developed as a result, way more of them neo-hobo runes graffitied all over the place to sort of give directions to those in the know. Some non-evil tech bros and NEETs were trying to come up with browser extensions to block stuff but it was pretty tough, some rumors of things working for some while others just got baited into being exposed to the stuff those things were posting, or thing? Was never clear if it was one centralized thing or a bunch of 'em like a swarm.

People got really into blowing up data centers and all kinds of production facilities connected to net tech. Corps couldn't hire much of anyone to protect them either since most people were directly affected (of course there were still handfuls of corpo bootlicking scum around but not nearly enough).

Heard there were a few instances of it getting used sort of offensively, more like mass-assassination which was crazy but to be expected, lotta home brewed signal jammers became the norm, same with funky glasses that blocked out screens entirely.

Pretty sure there were a couple movies that predicted the vibes of the whole situation pretty accurately which was strange, who knew we'd get a really stupid and cringe end of the digital age and modern civilization and not something at least mildly interesting. Really was some sort of mass-scale 2010 creepypasta type event.

But honestly after the whole grieving period at the death of modern civilization (even though that was on the way out anyway) life became simple again, a sort of tranquility washed over the remaining people. Global access to the net was totally lost but we're pretty sure it still technically exists, just totally infested and quarantined which is quite odd to think about. Have to put up a sort of hostile architecture thing to warn future folks from trying to connect to it ever again.