Old Woman Yells at the Cloud

I recently listened to an episode of Never Been a Better Podcast in which Austin Walker, referencing a Twitter thread by @v21, posited that we are moving into a new era of the internet where content is generated by machines rather than people; where once the internet was used by people to access large bodies of information and to connect with other people, we now use it to connect with machines that regurgitate photocopies of photocopies of information.

The transformation of the internet from a database of (somewhat) reliable information into a long game of telephone is troubling; as they discuss on that same podcast, no video game walkthrough site that ranks at the top of Google today is ever more reliable than the GameFAQs txt files filled with ASCII art that were painstakingly written by fourteen year olds, peer reviewed, and continuously revised.

That is all true, and it is worth discussing and writing about. But I am thinking about the point of connection. I often feel that we have lost the human connection found on the internet of old.

I don’t know how old I was exactly when I “discovered” the internet. I can remember when we got a computer. I was four or five years old, which would have been 1998 or 1999; my dad bought a PC because he was in college at the time, and our musty basement became its home. I spent time playing Gus Goes to Cyberopolis and various Reader Rabbit titles. My dad would go on to drop out of college, and when my parents split up a few years later, the PC remained and eventually made its way up to the main house. I continued with my edutainment games and graduated to doodling on MS Paint and experimenting with fonts in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. (This, I have realized, was my first hit of the rich world of font obsession, and I have maintained that sickness into adulthood; I also started to play a lot of Solitaire, which I still do today, too.) The extent of my forays into the internet were, however, when my siblings and I browbeat my mother into allowing us to start a Neopets account and when we would watch over my older cousin’s shoulder as she browsed FunnyJunk (a proto-meme site), Albino Black Sheep, and Bored.com.

My experiences with Neopets were short lived because I was too young and too stupid to figure out how to make money, so I couldn’t feed my Neopets and had to get food from the soup kitchens. It felt bleak; how I missed the games on Neopets, I do not know, but suffice to say that this capitalism simulator was not the stuff of thrills for elementary schoolers. The websites my cousin would browse felt a bit too risqué for me, so after a stint where I would play Cadet Kelly games on the Disney website, I eventually landed on one of the only websites I knew to be safe, trustworthy, and mom-approved: eBay.

My mother has been an active eBay user since 1998. Most afternoons when she was home from work, she would sit at her desk and browse eBay, eventually building a decent side-income buying and selling curtains on there. eBay was a fixture in our household, and so it became my first step into online fandom. I would spend hours searching my favorite video game and book series on eBay and browse the troves of merchandise for purchase. Somewhere in my brain, I realized that there were other people out there who loved the same things as me.

That opened the floodgates. Soon I was browsing Angelfire and Geocities fanpages, reading fanfiction, and joining message boards. I was teaching myself HTML and CSS to create personal and fan websites on Freewebs. All of this was in pursuit of connecting with other (by this point) pre-teens and teens (and some grown adults) who shared my passions. I didn’t find those same connections at school, so I sought, and found, them online.

This so far is a rather rosy view of the early web and my time on it. I don’t mean to say that all of my interactions online were positive, and my relationship with the internet as the years went on became deeply unhealthy. I spent most of my childhood on the internet and did a lot of stupid shit on it. But the best parts of it were feeling like I was part of something – a community – and like I mattered within it – something that I was not finding in my “real” life. (I would often decry the folks who drew a line between their online lives and “irl” because, to me, the internet was my life.)

To keep those rose-colored glasses on for a few more minutes, though, I miss that today. I miss following the webrings and reading the webmaster’s about page. I miss searching up my rare pair on Fanfiction.net and finding one (very dedicated) user churning out fics. I miss reading guestbooks and comment sections (that aren’t filled with the most hateful tripe you can imagine).

I miss feeling like the internet was something bigger than me but that I was a part of it. I miss feeling like my voice mattered on it. I miss feeling like I wasn’t just shouting into the void; people were calling back.

There is human connection to be found online today. Many, many folks use social media to keep up with faraway friends and family (I do, too); there are thriving Discord servers centered around fandoms and other niche internets¹; and there are amazing efforts out there like the IndieWeb that seek to reclaim some of the experiences I’ve described. It all just feels too big. I took a broad step back from my once rather public (but thankfully detached from my “real” self, by which I mean my name and my face) internet persona and intentionally broke a lot of the connections I had, choosing instead to focus on college and my career and my in-person relationships. I am happier and in a better place mentally for it. But I have still, over the years, remained on social media, tried to put my voice out there in small ways (blogging and podcasting, mostly). I often question whether those attempts are a relapse, chasing the hollow highs I once felt from (very minor and within a very niche circle) internet notoriety.

I’m choosing instead to interpret the urge as chasing after the internet that once felt useful and exciting and joyful to me rather than the one I see today, which feels like a proverbial yoke around society’s neck. I want to reclaim control of the time I spend online and the content that I choose to put onto it – rather than feed the obsessive spirals I once fell into, which have grown more and more insidious as they have corporatized and monetized and designed algorithms that provide steady streams of dopamine. I want to focus on the small: the independently run, the hyper-focused, the demonetized. The shit made by folks who are, like me, passionate and a little bored and who have a little more time than good sense.

I think my failed attempts at blogging in the past have always come back to feeling like I didn’t have anything useful or productive to say. I was focused on the void and not on the shouting. Perhaps sometimes we need to shout to just to shout, to shout just to hear ourselves, to shout just to know that we are alive and have a voice that we can use. Otherwise, we learn to feel voiceless and alienated and disconnected, and we feed the content machines that are delivered to us rather than find our own internal power.

This is the first time in human history wherein we can shout and be heard by millions of people across the globe with the push of a few buttons. The long-dead writers and artists I love did not have that luxury, but that didn’t stop them from shouting. I’m often caught in the anxiety that someone has already said what I’m getting at, probably in a more witty or articulate manner. Maybe or maybe not. That’s not what matters. Quiet is passive. Quiet is easy. Time to break the silence and use my voice. Connections will follow.