When the Internet Still Belonged to Idiots Like Us
Buying music on CD was still a real thing in 2003. The Dreamcast wasn’t dead yet. And none of us had ever heard the word "blog" used without having to explain it afterward. December does this to me every year—pulls me back into a folder of deleted posts and half-remembered usernames and I sit there in the dark going a little soft around the edges, which is embarrassing, but apparently unavoidable.
Nobody knew what a blog was. We stole code snippets from each other, patched together layouts that looked like they’d been assembled by a colorblind raccoon on deadline, and published whatever came out of our heads at 2am. The idea that one day companies would pay people to do this—that people would be hired to be strategic and authentic about it, to grow a community, to monetize the audience—would have seemed like a punchline to a joke with no setup.
We found each other through link lists. Actual lists, buried in sidebars, pointing at other people’s weirdly coded personal pages. Not algorithms, not mutual follows—just someone leaving a trail of breadcrumbs and you following them until you found a person you had absolutely no reason to like, and then liking them anyway. A substitute family is too clean a word for it. It was more like finding the people who were also riding their own self-assembled, aesthetically catastrophic donkeys through the same shit, and deciding that was connection enough. The few female members of this confederation provided semi-nude photos, which also helped with morale.
The content was genuinely deranged by any current standard. You could spend ten paragraphs on the ugliness of your best friend’s tits. You could weave pussies, Hitler, and gay Smurfs into a short story without anyone delivering a manifesto about it to your mother’s basement. You could insult your twelve daily visitors just because some coked-up chimney sweep broke your antenna and you missed the season two finale of The O.C. Nobody was building a brand. Nobody was nurturing engagement. The concept of a parasocial audience would have seemed obscene.
Most of those people are gone now. Real jobs, real lives—construction worker, tax consultant, the usual dignified escapes. A few committed what I can only describe as internet suicide, just stopping one day without explanation and never coming back. The remnant got absorbed into the swarm of fashion girls and Twitter pseudocelebrities and now spends its days tracking follower counts and moderating comment sections full of people you’d cross the street to avoid. When I type words like "social media strategy" I feel something die briefly inside me.
The ones still standing are few enough to count. Ines is in Berlin now, writing sporadically in English. No real envy—she’s basically living my life. Marcel is off building his self-proclaimed internet empire, collecting an ever-expanding following of devoted weirdos. The envy has its limits; we’ll have to stage an assassination attempt on him eventually. And Sara—who more than anyone gave the early internet its actual sense of cool—packed up her masturbation diaries and her foreskin-related complaints about unfaithful Australians and went traveling the world, drifting from one tanned body to the next. I mean. Obviously. Who wouldn’t.
I copy my favorite old posts into a blank document, close the browser, and sit with the question of who I’d be today without those specific broken people at that specific broken moment. The answer is genuinely unclear to me. Then I wipe whatever’s been accumulating around my eyes, remind myself that it really wasn’t all that great either—and it wasn’t, I’m romanticizing everything, as usual—and come back to the present tense. Which is exactly as uncomfortable as it always is. Unfortunately.