Can the internet feel good again?

All Your Base Are Belong to Us.

Uh, hi. If you’re reading this you probably know me. If you’re reading this and you don’t know me, then you should know I have spent a lot of time on the internet. I hung out in AOL chat rooms when I was honestly too young to be hanging out in AOL chat rooms. I used words like “phat” and destroyed the chat with ASCII art. I was 9.

The internet is weird. I live in New Mexico because of the internet. My mom met my step-dad (yes they are still together), in an AOL chat room. He lived in New Mexico so now I live in New Mexico. I do have free will, but there are worse, more expensive, more crowded, more humid places to live. I have lived a handful of other places and New Mexico is my favorite so far.

There was a time the internet felt new. Even when I was 9 in the mid 90s the internet wasn’t new, but AOL was new, chat rooms were new, having fun online was new. There were people out there, all over, and we could talk to each other and that felt new.

I was not popular in elementary school. I refused to wear most clothing except sweat pants and sweatshirts that my grandmother would iron woodland animals onto. I had one friend, and we hung out a lot, often on the internet. We sat next to each other for hours watching Homestar Runner videos, discovering All Your Base Are Belong to Us. We IMed strangers, and when I moved to New Mexico we IMed each other, a lot.

I was also not popular in middle school. I traded sweats for Jncos, but I still lacked clout. I mostly read books about Eastern religions, hung out with my one friend in New Mexico, and wished the cool boy in my class would like me.

Me and my one friend in New Mexico also spent a lot of time on the internet, and a lot of time making our Sims drown in swimming pools- really fabulous swimming pools. I also still spent time in chat rooms, more niche now. I found a very specific chat room called “Bagism,” which for those not as deeply invested into the life of John Lennon as I was in middle school is “a genre of performance art satirizing social prejudice, where by living in a bag a person could not be judged on their bodily appearance.” The Bagism chat room led me to my first (online) boyfriend. We talked a lot, this online boyfriend and I. I have no idea what about, my memory escapes me.

I spent hours nightly at home in high school chatting on AIM, shit-talking on my Deadjournal, and googling "emo." The internet felt like a place. Being online at 2am kind of felt like being at Denny's at 2am. Maybe you were chatting with friends, or cueing up songs to download overnight. There were webrings to discover, CSS monstrosities to decipher. I read fanfiction, found cool t-shirts on the electronic bay, and looked up guitar tab to Seven Nation Army.

For those around, I don't have to tell you the internet feels different now. Now it feels, bad? Google sucks, AI sucks, websites suck, Amazon sucks. Everything unique and fun and cool and new and original has been squeezed until as much value as possible has been taken out of it in the name of capitalism. Cool t-shirts are just drop shipped plastic garbage, social media isn't my friends but just a ton of ads for Zucky boy's latest con. There aren't ways to find cool original websites because Dig and Stumbleupon are gone, and Reddit is full of supplement bros and marketers tricking the AI algorithms.

But the internet still exists, it's just that capitalism has made it bad. I believe that the internet can be good, cool, useful, and fun. It doesn't have to be a silo where 5 websites get 95% of the traffic (I made up those statistics but it feels like it's true). I believe the internet, and technology can be beneficial for society, but we have to seize the means of production back from the tech oligarchs.

I also think making the internet feel better also involves less of it. I am probably not the only one here who hates their phone. I don't want it tracking my every move, I don't want the grocery store I shop in using it to deliver personalized pricing on the shelves. I want to have a healthy relationship with technology- I don't want to feel left out, I want to talk to my friends, but I don't want to scroll, scroll, scroll.

So, if you're ready for an internet that feels better, then join me and we can try to figure out how to make that happen together.

Let's leave the internet, at least this internet.

-Veve