What We Used to Get Away With

The early internet was a different country. Politicians couldn’t spell the name of the thing they were trying to regulate, and on most personal blogs only two or three friends and one jealous ex were watching anyway. You could post amateur porn, schoolyard fights, private confessions nobody asked for—and nobody particularly cared. The oversight that exists now simply wasn’t there. You wrote into a void that felt, briefly, like freedom.

That’s over, obviously. The laws tightened. The audiences grew. At some point this journal stopped being a private dispatch to a handful of people and became something that could theoretically generate real legal trouble. Which meant taking inventory of what had accumulated over the years and asking some uncomfortable questions about it.

The list of newly forbidden content is mostly what you’d expect: explicit genitalia, close-up sexual acts, content that glorifies eating disorders, sexual images of anyone whose age reads ambiguous—hentai included, which I will say I found slightly funny in a bureaucratic way when I first saw it written down. The wilder stuff—the animal carcasses, the anonymous confessions, the images that accidentally educated visiting relatives about safe search—was more chaotic than malicious. But chaotic doesn’t hold up in a legal brief.

The genuine surprises on the list were the very specific physical thresholds for what legally constitutes an erect penis. I will not elaborate. I am still thinking about it.

The site rates itself at sixteen-and-over going forward, which is accurate and not particularly restrictive, since the filtering systems that actually matter only activate in schools or when a parent has deliberately turned them on. It’s not the end of anything. It’s just zoning. I’ve been doing this long enough that knowing the laws of the neighborhood seems reasonable. Clean out the archive, draw the new lines, keep going.