cw: i discuss sex a bit, but nothing too graphic
I want to register my excitement for
Sadgrls Yesterweb projects!I loathe the internet, but often struggle to get through to people that I don't like. Hate being able to connect with strangers or be exposed to new ideas.
I remember being on the internet in the 1990s, and it was fun and weird. Then, at some point, the internet became a slog - associated with this cludgy cotton-brained sense of alienation and despair. For years, I assumed this was nostalgia. Then I became a linux user: my laptop broke, my husband found me his 15-year-old one, but it had seized up and was too slow with modern Windows operating systems. So, I installed Lubuntu - a different operating system, designed to be really lightweight on old hardware but with all the modern features.
Oh gosh I don't want to be that GUY that LINUX GUY but...but...
it was like a cool, fresh cup of water. It was like the fog cleared from my eyes. It was like, my computer was no longer a content machine where I passively grazed like a factory farm animal that had never seen the sun - but it was a tool again, and I was in control of it.
So, when I think about the modern internet, I associate it with these emotions. I have a dreamwidth, after all. I also have a neocities, tho i am thinking of making another one soonish. In the 1990s, the internet was power: easy enough for you to participate in, because the code was rudimentary, and a bit like the wild west - stumbling upon treasures. There was very little interactivity, and frankly this was good. I remember envying people who could set up guestbooks on their websites; but even then, it was bottles washing up on the sea shore, and when I look at what social media has become, I think that perhaps the 90s were best. You'd encounter ideas without any way to respond to them, and have time to think them over; easily ignored, because there were no real networks between them, but the freedom to write your own response in your own way and maybe nobody would ever read it. I remember too that the best hobby websites all died sometime in the 2010s, and that if you are currently in a craft hobby you are almost certainly relying on Sidney Eileen's corset website or some 90s SCA person's writeup of nalbinding or some cosplayer's archived geocities that shows how to make the really good papier mache. I check in with Phil Hine's old website through the internet archive every couple of weeks. Where did that content go, or rather - where did the
desire to make that content go? Evidently, the new web rewards new ways of behaving - ways that are less collaborative, less longform, less permanent.
I am reminded of the first telegram ever sent, in the 1880s, as proof of concept. It was a quote from the bible, reading WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?
And I remember weirdass stuff like the first time I encountered polyamory at the age of 9, because someone had made this fun little desktop widget you downloaded which put a little cartoon character there (called something like OTAKUKIN?), and in the ABOUT this program explained the creators were in a polyamorous family. That was the old internet, though! You'd just bump into this shit, and it was kinda innocent too.
When I say innocent, I say this as a person who is loves kink. How do I explain this. I love weird sex stuff on the internet. I love stumbling across handmade art that some person has poured their heart and soul into for an audience of about four people. I love reading erotica for stuff I am not into, for the sheer joy of discovering somebody else's secret desires. Stuff that is properly bizzare. Regardless of how filthy it is, there's something oddly chaste about it too - and I think this is because I'm thinking of "filth" as "dirt" and "dirt" as "moral degradation, sin, taint". When somebody with a niche fetish makes (often quite bad!) art, there is something in that which is pure and wholesome and beautiful; and beautiful in similar ways to having sex with a partner, where you're discovering things about a
person. There's no money being made, no social cred, no big web empires exploiting the labour of sex workers, and none of the ugly messaging that comes with mainstream porn. There's nothing innocent about a video made by a corporation based on what it thinks straight men like, being used to build an internet monopoly. Participating in that - as a customer, as a consumer, as someone who has to watch the advertisements, as someone trapped within the world that world of wealth creates, feels like being exposed to a miasma you can never scrub clean.
That innocence is freedom from capitalism, I think; freedom from pressure, freedom from other voices and minds, freedom from the knowledge that you are
being observed. People, left to their own devices, are pretty freaky. When I have cause to interact with instagram, I can't help but notice its normifying effects - everyone slowly angling themselves towards what's likeable. i am disquieted by the creeping commercialisation of the Folk Horror Haunted Generation Scene. The pleasures of a pre-neoliberal world, of weird memories and dreams, of lost footage, of music that had no value, of cheap movies that went missing under the M4; and now you can buy an
Owl Service replica plate and a folk horror tarot deck and the NO SWIMMING sign from that one PSA everybody likes.
When no one is making money, and no one is sure if they're being read, and no one is connected to their real-world identity, it creates a space for humans to be authentically weird - and I love that. & i wonder if part of my growing love of internet kink spaces is because it's one of the few places that still delivers that, and with it parts of that DIY culture I miss - like Carta Monir's charming zine where she got her partners to rate the sex they had with little forms, and used that as a jumping off point for writing about her sexuality. The embarrassment that modern pervs feel in case their hidden blogs are discovered is the last bastion of how we all used to feel about the internet!
I think about how the normal people have moved in. By this I mean, there was a brief era of the internet in which everyone online was 1. a tech nerd, or 2. someone being so badly bullied that they lived in their bedroom. In other words, a lot of weirdos. So much of what is beautiful about the internet comes from that time, such as free culture and open source, weird occult stuff that I was stumbling upon aged 10, and when I imagine this period I have this incredibly vivid mental image of the sort of person who
was online; and she's this cybergoth transfemme anarchist surrounded by broken-tech clutter. Internet culture shifts as people join who have never been bullied/who do the bullying. The internet becomes less autistic - a dynamic that autistic fans have noticed, for example. It becomes less collaborative, nobody knows anybody any more. The internet becomes less queer, less ugly, less pervy, less bizarre. The internet stops being this janky DIY punk bar where local no-hope bands chip in to keep it open and a dyke twice your age introduces you to direct action, torrenting and gifts you her old flogger; and starts feeling gentrified, homoginised, the shopping mall that bulldozered the janky punk bars and replaced it with a glassy place you go to shop.
(One of the most disheartening things to happen in recent times in my life is the influx of wealthy and attractive people into cosplay and costuming. Which, on the surface, sounds like geek elitism against the pretty girls or w/e - but there's a sincere sense of grief here too. When did cosplay become about looking good or spending money? When did it become a job people did? When did I start feeling embarrassed to cosplay because my cosplays aren't good enough, compared to the budget other people have? Drag too. When did drag stop being this shitty artform for broken people who stole clothes and hustled to survive, to a thing rich people do on instagram? When did these things stop being
self-expressive and turn into
performance)
And this world is part of my paganism, because I was 8 when I started looking into that and I have the forums and webpages around at the time to thank for that. When I have a mental image of "a pagan", it's a mature cis woman who was part of Kirk/Spock zine fandom, who
really knows her html and probably has a terrible manip of a fairy somewhere on a long-lost website that played a MIDI when you clicked the rotating pentagram gif. People who were sharing their knowledge freely with a stranger child who would never have discovered this in the physical world. I saw those women so clearly, even though they rarely shared a photo; when I see occult influencers now, my vision blurs and it's like they're insubstantial, they've transformed themselves into content. You're interacting with people through algorithms, and somehow my brain can only perceive the algorithm, not the people behind it. For all that the New!Web is social - it feels like there are fewer people here.
Sites like tumblr, say, have come to be associated with queer liberation - it's all a bit
polished - none of that authentic, beautiful weirdness of that transvestite petticoat-fetishist website that has archived the photographs and names of so many strangers, who bravely shared a piece of themselves in neatly staged horrible quality 1990s photos of themselves all dressed up, perhaps in the only place they could be so public among others that understood (I wonder how they are all doing today?). I feel less able to self-express, because ideas travel so fast and are scrutinised so intensely, and the internet never forgets, and everybody is online now, and it's all indexed so your boss can find it, and we're all guided towards certain forms of expression which are popular (or which won't get us dogpiled); but queerness is weirdness, or it is when done right - it's something intensely personal, personal in ways that
are strange. When I find these little ruined neighbourhoods online, I can imagine feeling safe there - in a way I can't on contemporary social media.
There are other arguments; political, economic, health, social; and other people are making them, but first and foremost my grief for the internet is
sensory. it's about texture. It's about the emotions it made me feel, vs the emotions I feel now. It's mental images of kinds of people that I idolised and associated with
the fabric of the web itself, and the sense that a whole kind of person has now disappeared. And with that, I feel a kind of imagining has gone. We can only get to the future once we can imagine it.
Internet as circle cast: this is a space that is not a space, this is a time that is not a time. We are between worlds, but what we do here touches all worlds.
I feel like I have lost a part of myself. Blessings, then, be upon the people trying to keep those memories alive, reminding us that another internet is possible. Wisdom and courage be upon us - to build, seek, resist, and rediscover the joy of computing.
