On the internet, everything is forever. At least that’s what we were told as we sat in the library for grade school web safety seminars. Forever sounded nice to me, like something magical, the end of a fairy tale: They lived happily ever after, forever and ever—but this was a bad forever, the librarian said. Once it’s out there, it’s out there, and it’s coming back to get you.
My parents were Gen X tech-savvy, and street-smart enough to install parental controls, ban me from creating a Myspace or Facebook account, and disable the free chat feature on my Club Penguin. There would be no talking to strangers if they could help it. They tried to instill in me a distrust of corporations and a disdain for people who made posts about their mundane lives. So I just clicked around and consumed and consumed. This was long before the algorithms were strong enough to lead you down a set ideological path, or toward the mind-numbing avant-garde popular content of today (like the Elsagate videos, dark content seemingly geared toward children, and the terrifying Skibidi Toilet web series). Being a kid alone online was exhilarating, but the world inside the computer felt fraught, small, and in need of constant attention. Virtual pets starving from my lack of regular logging-on haunted my dreams. My igloo was bare and my penguin naked, so embarrassing.
I’d love to trace the digital footprints that led from that naked penguin to becoming someone with a web of 10 Instagram pages—among them main Insta, Finsta, backup, visual memes, main memes, edgy memes, religious memes, social justice, and my stalker alt account—that I posted on like breathing and devoted Adderalled hours to name-searching myself and making a document with every nice, mean, and in-between thing anybody had ever said about me. I moved to New York in 2020, COVID summer. At a rooftop party, I realized that everyone from the internet was there. I had stepped into the Explore page. Digital acceleration of time—memes going stale in days, newborn myths suffering sudden death—was starting to happen in my real life, too. It was fun at first when I’d see other people post my memes, but then it was scary, the dopamine fading. “Are you a robot?” tests became harder and harder for me to pass. I became a hater, screenshotting others’ story posts I considered cringe and filing them away like the NSA. In the past, I’d been proud to be cringe.
It had all been so sweet once. When I got on Instagram in 2010—“It’s for photography”—I posted sparkles on a page of Alice in Wonderland, heavily filtered photos of daisies, and blur-faced self-portraits. Because my early internet memories were all about playing, it just felt like another game. Everything online did then. Dressing and undressing on Omegle was no different than playing digital paper dolls. Strangers were strangers, there on the screen and then gone. On Polyvore, I made collages of outfits for fictional characters and events. Here’s what to wear as a Gryffindor on a winter trip to Hogsmeade; here’s what a shy goth girl should wear on her date with a vampire boy. I had no idea it even had an e-commerce side to it; I thought it was all just for fun, and that that was the way it would stay. But not everything on the internet is forever. When I recently typed in the Polyvore URL, I was redirected to Ssense. Playtime was over.
I’d always loved playing pretend. Social media is sort of the ultimate game of make-believe: I make you believe I’m having fun. You make me believe you’re having fun. We play characters and eventually become them. Everything was a reflection of a reflection, infinite confusing screenshots of screenshots. The fee...
My parents were Gen X tech-savvy, and street-smart enough to install parental controls, ban me from creating a Myspace or Facebook account, and disable the free chat feature on my Club Penguin. There would be no talking to strangers if they could help it. They tried to instill in me a distrust of corporations and a disdain for people who made posts about their mundane lives. So I just clicked around and consumed and consumed. This was long before the algorithms were strong enough to lead you down a set ideological path, or toward the mind-numbing avant-garde popular content of today (like the Elsagate videos, dark content seemingly geared toward children, and the terrifying Skibidi Toilet web series). Being a kid alone online was exhilarating, but the world inside the computer felt fraught, small, and in need of constant attention. Virtual pets starving from my lack of regular logging-on haunted my dreams. My igloo was bare and my penguin naked, so embarrassing.
I’d love to trace the digital footprints that led from that naked penguin to becoming someone with a web of 10 Instagram pages—among them main Insta, Finsta, backup, visual memes, main memes, edgy memes, religious memes, social justice, and my stalker alt account—that I posted on like breathing and devoted Adderalled hours to name-searching myself and making a document with every nice, mean, and in-between thing anybody had ever said about me. I moved to New York in 2020, COVID summer. At a rooftop party, I realized that everyone from the internet was there. I had stepped into the Explore page. Digital acceleration of time—memes going stale in days, newborn myths suffering sudden death—was starting to happen in my real life, too. It was fun at first when I’d see other people post my memes, but then it was scary, the dopamine fading. “Are you a robot?” tests became harder and harder for me to pass. I became a hater, screenshotting others’ story posts I considered cringe and filing them away like the NSA. In the past, I’d been proud to be cringe.
It had all been so sweet once. When I got on Instagram in 2010—“It’s for photography”—I posted sparkles on a page of Alice in Wonderland, heavily filtered photos of daisies, and blur-faced self-portraits. Because my early internet memories were all about playing, it just felt like another game. Everything online did then. Dressing and undressing on Omegle was no different than playing digital paper dolls. Strangers were strangers, there on the screen and then gone. On Polyvore, I made collages of outfits for fictional characters and events. Here’s what to wear as a Gryffindor on a winter trip to Hogsmeade; here’s what a shy goth girl should wear on her date with a vampire boy. I had no idea it even had an e-commerce side to it; I thought it was all just for fun, and that that was the way it would stay. But not everything on the internet is forever. When I recently typed in the Polyvore URL, I was redirected to Ssense. Playtime was over.
I’d always loved playing pretend. Social media is sort of the ultimate game of make-believe: I make you believe I’m having fun. You make me believe you’re having fun. We play characters and eventually become them. Everything was a reflection of a reflection, infinite confusing screenshots of screenshots. The fee...
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ELLE (Digital) - 1 Issue, June/July 2024