Early Internet
Even a hardened asshole like me gets sentimental around this time of year, thinking about how we all started with this internet thing. 2003 maybe, I don’t remember exactly. None of us knew each other. We just did our own shit with stolen code snippets and no real idea what we were doing or what you’d even call it.
We were a small diehard clique that bonded through link lists instead of status updates. A substitute family that got us through the usual disasters—bad breakups, failed exams, parents on our backs. We knew something connected us, even if it was just the weird combination of bits and bytes and the occasional semi-nude photo from one of the girls. The rest of the world didn’t want us anyway. Too ugly, too weird, too fat, too much. But I loved every single one of them because we rode through the same shit together on our self-built machines.
Then something shifted. Maybe gradually, maybe all at once. The internet became different. Worse.
When I go back through deleted posts from that time—when people still bought CDs, when the Dreamcast was current, when you could write openly about sex without shame—I realize how lucky I was to be there. Nobody cared if you spent ten paragraphs talking about your friend’s body in crude detail. You could put Nazis and Smurfs and terrible jokes in the same sentence without getting hate mail or discourse. You could insult your twelve daily visitors just because they made you miss The O.C., and the only consequence was some coked-up asshole knocking the antenna off your roof. There was something honest about how little we cared who was listening.
Most of them left. Got real jobs as construction workers or accountants or just quit the internet entirely. The rest got absorbed into whatever social media became, and now they’re stuck counting followers and arguing with idiots in the replies. I don’t blame them for leaving.
A few of us are still around. Ines lives in Berlin, writes sometimes in English. She made a life that isn’t terrible. Marcel became some kind of internet god, gathering more zealots as he goes. I don’t know how to feel about that anymore. Sara left—abandoned all of it, the crude talk, the jokes, the Australian guys—and went traveling instead. She’s the only one I’m genuinely jealous of because she was the one who made this whole internet thing actually cool, and now she’s somewhere warm doing something that matters.
I copy my favorite old posts into a blank document, close the browser, and think about where I’d be without those weird people. No idea. The world just keeps changing and if you can’t keep up you’ve got real problems. So I tell myself that even back then it wasn’t as perfect as I pretend it was, that I’m romanticizing it all, and I’m back here. Present. Still online. Still thinking about it.