The internet was my third parent. And in many cases, my first. Year after year I would clamber my way up onto seats in front of a fat screen, then a thinner screen, then a screen I could fit in my palm. Between classes I vanished to the computer lab or the library to pry apart webpages and chat on forums. I distinctly remember the red sliding-keyboard phone that I saved Skyrim fanfiction blog posts on, scouring excruciatingly formatted webpages for any scraps of text that were lucky enough to survive my rapidly dissipating cellular connection. What remnants of the writing that didn't load were spliced in by my own imagination. I was constantly, inextricably tied to the web.
An initial reaction to a lifestyle like this today is likely one of revulsion, or put more tactfully: disappointment. Imagery of children slumped in chairs, magnetized into trances induced by franchised characters contorted into puppets of engagement, glittering slot machines of overly-juiced animations and lurid pseudo-games insert themselves into the mind of the receiving party who hears "I spent so much time in front of a screen as a child, I was practically raised by the internet."
I have since stopped saying this — this statement is no longer as charmingly quirky as I once thought it was (and every child is raised by the internet now). But perhaps what I find to be the salient point is that I was among the first few generations that was born into this onslaught of digital proportions as the Pandora's box unraveled itself year after year. I recall flickering between tabs of addictinggames.com and Newgrounds, crudely drawn pixel art forums featuring Frankensteined amalgamations of Pokemon sprites, and laggy Fantage clients that served as the playgrounds I met my childhood friends on. The first business I ever opened was a tailor shop: a virtual one exchanging custom digital clothing made by me in Paint.NET for Robux (Roblox's virtual currency at the time).
The platforms changed, but my exploration pressed on. Competitive games devoured nights and weekends, and as I logged onto Steam I swore to never use voice chat to seem more mature: my typing speed exponentially grew, far faster than the depth of my prepubescent voice, as I sought to conceal the truth of my identity in the online games I played with twenty-somethings.
These moments were the genesis of my fascination with the internet as an infinite playground. An amorphous entity that not only you inhabit, but that simultaneously embeds itself into your own character.
I loved every moment of it. I raced onto YouTube and Twitch each afternoon to seek out familiar faces playing the games I was deeply enamored with. I trawled wiki after wiki to unearth the lore of characters that I dutifully studied, inadvertently memorizing ability damage, cooldown timers, type effectiveness, dialogue trees. Rainy afternoons queueing up Toonami Jetstream and trudging through flash game after flash game in pursuit of flavors of novelty. The overwhelming buzz of stumbling across Reddit at 11 years old through an app "Funny Memes Free!" with a cartoon turtle as its icon. The torrent was endless, but my appetite was insatiable. As my vision grew increasingly myopic, so too did my own immersion into a world sunken deep beyond the prying eyes of family. A world that is for everyone and myself all at once.
Gratitude is a strange word to assign to a deluge of moments that most would characterize as the meanderings of a child. Contrast that to the present day, where I see numerous parents advocating for careful restraint and application of the technologies that consume the attention spans of children. It's for fair reason: the Internet that I embraced at once with sheer equanimity has grown beyond the scope of any one individual to control. The subcultures sink deeper and deeper, twisting into snarled branches of esoteric structures that go beyond surface-level understanding. It's becoming more difficult to understand what the kids are doing online, and even I am coming to grasp the reality that I too, have become the generation that is left by the wayside as a new crop of users rears its curious head and sinks into its own peculiar tendencies of speech and culture.
At twelve years old I remember sitting in a large auditorium when my classmates and I were sternly lectured by a visiting ‘cybersecurity' expert to not post too much on the internet. To conceal ourselves in self-defense. “Who knows what's out there?” He said. By the time I turned fourteen, the same expert gave another talk. This time: “Post whatever you’d like. Just don't post anything stupid." As someone who has been an internet denizen for nearly the entirety of my life, I won't deny that the internet feels different than it used to be. I'm sure that you, too, as an internet denizen also can feel the shift. There is a current of latent animosity, of a sense of care that needs to be taken when traversing site after site, app after app. It's not the cozy, strange place once occupied solely by the nerds and misfits and hobbyists.
But if you tread carefully through the weeds you may find an enclave here, an unworked footpath there: gathering places where the unseen coexist in insular peace. 2000s sound design forums. Neocities. Scattered places to associate and commune: are.na, curius.app. Twitter microcosms where comments get magnetized over and over to the same fifty accounts, who despite not knowing the exact trajectory of their messages, have an unshakeable faith that the algorithmic tuning fork will guide the right people to their words. Countless forums, webpages, and archives whose occupants will see them through until their dying breaths.
I recognize these attempts, yet I know for a fact that the internet — this home and caretaker and teacher and friend will never return to its prior state. Everything only experiences infancy once. But in the same way you return to your hometown after years of absence and see it evolve and reconstitute itself, the vestiges of beauty on the web have matured into new forms. Discord servers, Steam groups, and Twitter circles are our cul de sacs, our public squares, our benches on grassy hills. And they will always become the sanctuary for another.
Looking out from the new vistas of the web, there is life everywhere. Snippets of poetry circulating between pseudonymous friends. A small town band livestreaming from their garage. An infinite number of love letters sent, infinite connections being drawn between strangers in comment sections. And you understand that things cannot be put back, but they can be repurposed. And the places you once loved will blossom again, in a different form, with different hands.