I... this should be be printed on beautiful tie-dyed paper and made into paper airplanes and big origami flowers and spread around the world. Printed on t-shirts, painted on park benches, put on posters boards in cafeterias and etched in stone on large tablets in dry arid lands where the tablets won't decay. Yes, everything and all of what you said.
That's such a beautiful image, thank you. I really didn't expect this kind of response at all, and I think the thing it says most starkly is how much we all hunger for kindness and community right now, maybe more than we have in a good while.
"Twitter is and was the home to so many small artists who clawed their way to an audience, who had the opportunity to be seen by the world without the intermediary of already-established success."
This is where I finally started crying. I've been online for nearly as long as you (I'm a little older, but wasn't able to get online until about '96), and have been through so many lost communities. Hell, LJ was where I found you and your work. Twitter, though. Twitter was the one where I was finally able to start seriously thinking I could make it as an artist. Twitter is where I found a community of artists, writers, and other weird little creators. The art community in my physical area isn't particularly online and is pretty much impossible to get into (and weirdly insular about letting non-artists near their work) unless you've already been an established gallery artist for years. Twitter is what allowed me to find my people. Twitter is where people started finding me and *my* art. Losing it is breaking my heart, and I am so. damned. angry. that we keep having to pack up and start over again every few years. I'm tired of losing people, and I'm terrified that my fragile, infant art business won't be able to survive the loss of community and I'm so. damned. angry. about all of it.
Sorry for the rant. That line, in particular, resonated a lot.
I'm really frightened, too. All the sites I mentioned are where I slowly built my career. Twitter is my main avenue for keeping it. I don't know what's going to happen and the unfairness of it rankles so hard. I'm sorry you're there, too. I hope it doesn't turn out the way we think. Big hug.
I'm wondering if all of the impacted artists and creative people who used Twitter to find their audience and who are now losing business because of this fascist dimwit would be able to put together some sort of class action lawsuit? I mean he's a billionaire with high powered lawyers, but maybe enough people working together can manage to do something.
I think if he actually does manage to bring down the whole site, that could be possible. But as it stands right now (obligatory I Am Not a Lawyer) I think it would be very hard to prove audience-loss was directly because of Musk. Twitter doesn't have an exit-survey when you delete your account. And many will simply drift away without deleting, which leaves no trace at all.
On top of that...well, this very essay has shown me that despite the hemorrhaging, it IS still possible to gain followers and build on Twitter. This is the first time I HAVE gained instead of lost followers since his take over, and I deeply suspect the gain would have been in the thousands (based on other things of mine that have achieved this kind of reach in the past--and the audience increase on Substack in comparison) instead of the few hundreds if it had happened last year, but that's impossible to prove in any litigable way.
But if he takes the site down entirely, a lot of avenues of redress open up, especially when you consider that many, many towns and cities use Twitter as their primary emergency channel to communicate with citizens, etc.
Long before any of that happens, though, I suspect the EU and his flagrant violations of their laws will put the pain on, far worse than Tesla stock faceplanting.
As a voter in the E.U., I will do what I can to make this happen. I'm not optimistic about redress of any kind, in particular attaining site-building, paid or voluntary workers.
From across oceans, it may seem that the Union is unified, but from over here, it's clearly as fragmented as elsewhere. Only by luck and in a relative sense have things worked out so far that it looks preferable from afar. We are all learning that nothing is inevitable in social consensus.
Well damn, I just got a whole blast of your dragon fire and I love it. This is the right sort of rant - the one that actually means something, that comes from way deep down, that just needs to be screamed like a warrior's cry as she thunks her shield and sword and races into battle.
Phew. That's some energy.
I love connection, the internet has been such a wonderful place, even with all the assholes, and I've found wonder abd friendship and love and so much more here. And I've lost and moved on and lost again and moved on again. It's a bit like a real-life roguelite 😆
And you know, just making this post, already, I've been engaging more and in more places online, in the ways I used to, than I have in a long while. It might take a little extra work, but no one can buy us.
I want to give you 50,000 standing ovations and hugs. I could barely read this from shouting YES so hard.
So few of us remember Prodigy, but let me tell you this: I was the community leader/lead moderator for the Homelife bulletin boards on Prodigy. I was a contractor that every day talked to those people yelling at each other about cars and recipes and abortion and shih tzus and everything else that mattered to them, and I (and my team) found and pulled down the people who tried to ruin it. I might well have been watching over you and that grandma. And I told the Prodigy management over and over that the community was the value. They wanted people to log in and look at news and stock market reports, but I kept telling them that people logged in to talk to each other. They never believed me. I was a veteran of online communities for several years by then, so I knew in my bones what that meant. They decided the way to monetize the BBs was to switch from a flat monthly subscription rate to an hourly rate, and it was pandemonium. Ironic now that no service is metered and the social media sites want nothing more than to get people connected to them as long as possible.
Anyway.... I hear you so hard, and you're right. As a nearly-40-year veteran who kind of considers her nationality to be "Internetian", I'm right there fighting with you on the side of love, the thing we do better than anybody.
My god, thank you for your service, seriously. I can't imagine what it must have been like doing that jobs in the pre-wild west days of the internet. Prodigy could have been THE internet if they weren't so stupidly short-sighted.
I *met my husband* on a music board on Prodigy.... Thanks for this, Cat -- Steve Silberman shared this on Post, maybe you want to give it a try there. If you're up to potentially be disappointed one more time.
Here's one thing I remember about LJ that I will enthuse about to anyone who will listen: the LJ FriendFinder. It was a tool that would take your "interests" list -- which, you may recall, was just a list of things you typed out, separated by commas, that would link itself, hashtag-style, to other users who'd typed the same thing in their list -- and crank through all other users' interests, and spew out a list of LJ users you'd likely be friends with, ranked by the number of interests you had in common.... BUT (and here's the genius part), it was also *weighted* based on how rare a shared interest was. So if I typed in some super-obscure band, or some random phrase like "driving at night with the windows down," and someone else had the same thing, they'd appear at or nearer to the top of the FriendFinder list. So you could find a bunch of like-minded weirdos who enjoyed exactly the same oddball stuff you did.
Genius. And yep, I found friends. And kept them. Why the hell hasn't anyone else done this?
LJ FriendFinder is how my wife found me. It was Labor Day weekend, she had just filed for divorce, and she was stuck in a tiny apartment with a 7-year-old who didn't understand why this was happening.
She just wanted to talk to an adult, and because I was a nerd who also lived in the greater Detroit area, I popped up as one of the top suggestions. She messaged me via AIM, we had a rom-com full of missed connections, and finally started talking. That was 20 years ago, and we've been married for the last 15 of them.
Dave! This story is amazing and makes my cranky old heart happy. You Found Your Friend! You should write it all out, I'd read the longer version. Wishing you both a lifetime of health and happiness together.
Since I wrote that comment, I have started writing the entire story. Thus far, I've gotten through the crazy missed connections and the nine months we put off meeting each other - my last line is "That's when she saw me. She screamed and ran." 😂
I'm an experienced self-publisher (and publisher of others) for more than a decade. If/when you get that story to book-length, be in touch and I'll walk you through how to get it in print and in ebook form. P.S. Several of my real-life and online writer friends came from Prodigy circa 1994... they still have an FB group and keep in touch after all these years. We called ourselves the "Housewife Writers." Not all of us were wives, house or otherwise, not all of us were women, and not all of us were writers, but most.
What you said here resonates with me so much. I was a Prodigy kid too (well, a Prodigy 20-something anyway), and have felt the loss of web-based communities a time or several myself. (For me, the big one was IMDb's user forums, which in retrospect were probably doomed after Amazon bought the IMDb.) More feelings stirred up here than I can easily express...but one thing for sure, I'm nominating your essay for a "related work" Hugo.
I just read this in the shadow of reddit now being destroyed, and I feel this exact rage, and thankfully have also realized that we will create our place again. I am still in the fury stage, but reading this right now is incredible, because it really puts it in perspective. This has always happened, and we just keep pushing on. Than you for writing this and sharing it.
"Don’t lose joy. Be us. Because us is what keeps the light on when the night comes closing in. Us doesn’t have a web address. We are wherever we gather. Mastodon, Substack, Patreon, Dreamwidth, AO3, Tumblr, Discord, even the ruins of Twitter, even Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok, god help us all. Even Diaryland.
It doesn’t matter. They’re just names. It doesn’t matter who owns them. Because we own ourselves and our words and the minute the jackals arrive is the same minute we put down the first new chairs in the next oasis. We make our place when we’re together. We make our magic when we connect, typing hands to typing hands.
Hello, world. Come in from the cold. This will be a good place. For awhile. And then we’ll make another one."
This is beautifully said, Cat.
And, reading it, I found myself realizing, "She's describing SURFING."
Not web surfing, but the real thing: paddling out, waiting on the board for a long time for a wave that you can catch... and more often than not wiping out. Paddling out again. And again.
I was never any good at surfing (I was decent at the "wiping out" part), but I did enough to understand the shape of it.
We tend to think of online communities as being analogous to real-world homes and villages, with the aspiration to permanence that that implies. I humbly submit that the rhythm and structure of finding an online community and living in it is really much more like catching waves, and working hard to stay on the board for as long as you can. No wave is permanent, but the urge to look for the next one is overwhelming.
Because the ecstasy of riding a wave when you do catch it is worth all of the work and waiting and disappointment.
Not to turn it all on its ear, but you should see the history of Russia’s social media sometime. VKontakte (or VK) as the Facebook of Russia... huge active user base... open and free... until the owner was forced to sell it to the Russian government. That led to Russians seeking western social media (LJ and Facebook being two examples), hoping to avoid their government taking over their conversation again. Instead, their government just restricted access until it became too frustrating for the Russian people to bother.
I am reminded by this favourite quote of mine, by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, that gets quoted by the Black Socialists of America often.
"Beneath the governmental machinery, in the shadow of political institutions, out of the sight of statemen and priests, society is producing its own organism, slowly and silently; and constructing a new order, the expression of its vitality and autonomy." (1851)
This is not just about the Internet. It's about our right to self determination that is continuously at threat. Yet we find ways to escape through the cracks that don't fit into their plans, the standards that they are trying to fit us into. We escape, we queer things and cover it with rainbows and flowers and glitter. We hide in safe spaces so that we can emerge in public and maintain some sanity.
And it's important to remember that we have ALWAYS been here. Like feminists and BIPOC activists and LGBTQ+ folk, it must be constantly recalled that we have a tradition as long as humanity, that we do NOT have to start over from scratch every generation, that we have always existed.
In any historical period or place you care to point to, there have been free thinkers and iconoclastic intellectuals and societal outliers that formed communities based on something beyond might makes right and wealth makes more right. From Socrates' corrupted Athenian youth to the radical nunneries of medieval France to the academics of golden age Islamic culture to the salons of the Enlightenment and forward and back and between. We are as much creators of this world as the elite who believe they alone own it, and that will never, ever change. Even past the apocalypse, there will be roving gangs of bookish nerds hiding among the warlords and reading by firelight.
Our fire is the glow of a screen right now, but, to quote a great 20th century thinker, it was always burning since the world's been turning.
This made me laugh and cry on a plane across the Atlantic. I've tried to put my feelings about all this on paper (or, well, Substack) but in trying to mitigate the severity of my feelings, lest I drown in them, the result was predictably a bit detached. This was catharsis embodied, and I'm really grateful you shared your thoughts and your heart on the issue. See you around cons and the internet, and thanks for the eyeshadow advice. 💙
I've been feeling this fury and frustration building up in me about social media, Google whatnot for years now. This year it reached boiling point, and you describe my anger perfectly! Pretty tired of losing my communities over and over and over again. Not only this but being pushed around by algorithms that want you to behave or write a certain way. Each time Google pushes it's new SEO update I want to scream, "Enough, shut the eff up!"
Like you I was born in the 70s, so I saw the transition to the Internet age. The early years was so exciting. I built my first website in 1999 on Geocities. The comment threads were my social media. Then corporations took over the Internet, and I went from owner to vassal.
I vividly remember working on the design for my geocities site for hours and hours in my university computer lab, making it all look as classical greek as graphics then could, being so excited to aesthetically arrange a place that was truly mine, when in the real world I could barely afford a fucking milk crate to sit on in my apartment. This stuff matters, it's always mattered.
Oh geocities... ❤️I loved the little worlds there.. makes me think of Lambda moo text based worlds, too. I spent so much time creating a little Anne Rice-inspired geocities front porch with bougainvillea in the garden district...
Yes, the connecting has always been what mattered, where it began, where we go back to.
First time diving into your substack, and at the risk of leaning too far in to silver linings, I had forgotten how much I love your (non-novel) long form. You’re one of the first artists I truly discovered online, and to think of that opportunity being lost for so many artists and fans alike hurts my heart. Communities will find a way through times of change, but thank you for highlighting the core of what gets lost over and over again while not giving in to the kind of fatalism that causes one to go numb.
I've been doing it on Patreon for a good bit, but usually I try to be more organized there--I think I forgot how much I enjoy a healthy scream on the internet. Thank you for following me here, and really it does my hart good to think I was one of anyone's first online artists.
Oh my, I feel you. I'm a 1971 solid Gen Xer, and remember my old prodigy I. D. (Mkmm33c) under my dad's account because I was a poor college kid. My 1991 boyfriend and I used up the free messages, so we'd post in code on the bulletin boards about what was going on that day.... Like when he was ranting about his stepmother not letting him wash his jeans at home, we turned it into a public post about the hardcore band "April's Laundry" that was "just insane, and have you heard the latest one, 'Hot Food Breaks the Fridge? ' "
Of course, as a daughter of a weird Navy guy who had Arpanet, I had been on the Internet since around 1981. I remember logging in with a telnet i.d. (and pretending to be 18 with) to chatter with some nice guy named "Psiman".
And so on... What were we saying?
Yeah.
I've always loved the connection potential online.
You inspired me to go back to my own Diaryland page, and I smiled, seeing it's all there, "underneath my eyelid," or whatever it is. I posted begging for peace on 9/11.
Hot Food Breaks the Fridge sounds like a fucking BANGER, I love it.
And I love love love, and have always loved, that little piece of the joy of these communities: that our private jokes so specifically tied to our personal lives can become universal and shared among others who never knew the origin but still laughed along. Now I know about April's Laundry, and I'll remember it for a long while yet. Someone only last week referenced a filk I did of Baby Got Back about the weird Victorian TB wasting waif aesthetic called Baby Got Hack. In 2005. Someone I've never met in person remembers that dumb inside joke after 17 years, when even I had mostly forgotten it.
Aside... Totally misread that later sentence as "someone I never met in prison," and now I'm so intrigued by all the people you DID meet in the big house.
It will never cease to amaze me that THAT brought so many people into my world. I was just pissed off and wrote it on my phone in the bathtub like five (figurative) minutes after giving birth. And yet it's continually made connections over the years. Shows how truly wrong he was.
I... this should be be printed on beautiful tie-dyed paper and made into paper airplanes and big origami flowers and spread around the world. Printed on t-shirts, painted on park benches, put on posters boards in cafeterias and etched in stone on large tablets in dry arid lands where the tablets won't decay. Yes, everything and all of what you said.
That's such a beautiful image, thank you. I really didn't expect this kind of response at all, and I think the thing it says most starkly is how much we all hunger for kindness and community right now, maybe more than we have in a good while.
This is a thing you can use for that.
https://www.rorshok.com/ourzines/
Thank you for this information. I love this idea, and will share with people who might be interested (when I have the energy).
"Twitter is and was the home to so many small artists who clawed their way to an audience, who had the opportunity to be seen by the world without the intermediary of already-established success."
This is where I finally started crying. I've been online for nearly as long as you (I'm a little older, but wasn't able to get online until about '96), and have been through so many lost communities. Hell, LJ was where I found you and your work. Twitter, though. Twitter was the one where I was finally able to start seriously thinking I could make it as an artist. Twitter is where I found a community of artists, writers, and other weird little creators. The art community in my physical area isn't particularly online and is pretty much impossible to get into (and weirdly insular about letting non-artists near their work) unless you've already been an established gallery artist for years. Twitter is what allowed me to find my people. Twitter is where people started finding me and *my* art. Losing it is breaking my heart, and I am so. damned. angry. that we keep having to pack up and start over again every few years. I'm tired of losing people, and I'm terrified that my fragile, infant art business won't be able to survive the loss of community and I'm so. damned. angry. about all of it.
Sorry for the rant. That line, in particular, resonated a lot.
I'm really frightened, too. All the sites I mentioned are where I slowly built my career. Twitter is my main avenue for keeping it. I don't know what's going to happen and the unfairness of it rankles so hard. I'm sorry you're there, too. I hope it doesn't turn out the way we think. Big hug.
I'm wondering if all of the impacted artists and creative people who used Twitter to find their audience and who are now losing business because of this fascist dimwit would be able to put together some sort of class action lawsuit? I mean he's a billionaire with high powered lawyers, but maybe enough people working together can manage to do something.
I think if he actually does manage to bring down the whole site, that could be possible. But as it stands right now (obligatory I Am Not a Lawyer) I think it would be very hard to prove audience-loss was directly because of Musk. Twitter doesn't have an exit-survey when you delete your account. And many will simply drift away without deleting, which leaves no trace at all.
On top of that...well, this very essay has shown me that despite the hemorrhaging, it IS still possible to gain followers and build on Twitter. This is the first time I HAVE gained instead of lost followers since his take over, and I deeply suspect the gain would have been in the thousands (based on other things of mine that have achieved this kind of reach in the past--and the audience increase on Substack in comparison) instead of the few hundreds if it had happened last year, but that's impossible to prove in any litigable way.
But if he takes the site down entirely, a lot of avenues of redress open up, especially when you consider that many, many towns and cities use Twitter as their primary emergency channel to communicate with citizens, etc.
Long before any of that happens, though, I suspect the EU and his flagrant violations of their laws will put the pain on, far worse than Tesla stock faceplanting.
As a voter in the E.U., I will do what I can to make this happen. I'm not optimistic about redress of any kind, in particular attaining site-building, paid or voluntary workers.
From across oceans, it may seem that the Union is unified, but from over here, it's clearly as fragmented as elsewhere. Only by luck and in a relative sense have things worked out so far that it looks preferable from afar. We are all learning that nothing is inevitable in social consensus.
Well damn, I just got a whole blast of your dragon fire and I love it. This is the right sort of rant - the one that actually means something, that comes from way deep down, that just needs to be screamed like a warrior's cry as she thunks her shield and sword and races into battle.
Phew. That's some energy.
I love connection, the internet has been such a wonderful place, even with all the assholes, and I've found wonder abd friendship and love and so much more here. And I've lost and moved on and lost again and moved on again. It's a bit like a real-life roguelite 😆
I loved this. Thank you.
You're so very welcome.
And you know, just making this post, already, I've been engaging more and in more places online, in the ways I used to, than I have in a long while. It might take a little extra work, but no one can buy us.
I want to give you 50,000 standing ovations and hugs. I could barely read this from shouting YES so hard.
So few of us remember Prodigy, but let me tell you this: I was the community leader/lead moderator for the Homelife bulletin boards on Prodigy. I was a contractor that every day talked to those people yelling at each other about cars and recipes and abortion and shih tzus and everything else that mattered to them, and I (and my team) found and pulled down the people who tried to ruin it. I might well have been watching over you and that grandma. And I told the Prodigy management over and over that the community was the value. They wanted people to log in and look at news and stock market reports, but I kept telling them that people logged in to talk to each other. They never believed me. I was a veteran of online communities for several years by then, so I knew in my bones what that meant. They decided the way to monetize the BBs was to switch from a flat monthly subscription rate to an hourly rate, and it was pandemonium. Ironic now that no service is metered and the social media sites want nothing more than to get people connected to them as long as possible.
Anyway.... I hear you so hard, and you're right. As a nearly-40-year veteran who kind of considers her nationality to be "Internetian", I'm right there fighting with you on the side of love, the thing we do better than anybody.
My god, thank you for your service, seriously. I can't imagine what it must have been like doing that jobs in the pre-wild west days of the internet. Prodigy could have been THE internet if they weren't so stupidly short-sighted.
I *met my husband* on a music board on Prodigy.... Thanks for this, Cat -- Steve Silberman shared this on Post, maybe you want to give it a try there. If you're up to potentially be disappointed one more time.
Represent - I met my husband a few years before that on BITNET Relay. 😄
Whenever I gave my son crap about spending too much time online, he rolled his eyes at me.... Couldn't argue.
I met my wife on deviantART. Slightly newer than Prodigy, but still!
Another site that's been burnt to a crisp.
Your article made me cry.
Here's one thing I remember about LJ that I will enthuse about to anyone who will listen: the LJ FriendFinder. It was a tool that would take your "interests" list -- which, you may recall, was just a list of things you typed out, separated by commas, that would link itself, hashtag-style, to other users who'd typed the same thing in their list -- and crank through all other users' interests, and spew out a list of LJ users you'd likely be friends with, ranked by the number of interests you had in common.... BUT (and here's the genius part), it was also *weighted* based on how rare a shared interest was. So if I typed in some super-obscure band, or some random phrase like "driving at night with the windows down," and someone else had the same thing, they'd appear at or nearer to the top of the FriendFinder list. So you could find a bunch of like-minded weirdos who enjoyed exactly the same oddball stuff you did.
Genius. And yep, I found friends. And kept them. Why the hell hasn't anyone else done this?
Oh man I forgot about that. It really was so good.
Meanwhile substack is just now considering whether to have "previous" and "next" entry buttons...
LJ FriendFinder is how my wife found me. It was Labor Day weekend, she had just filed for divorce, and she was stuck in a tiny apartment with a 7-year-old who didn't understand why this was happening.
She just wanted to talk to an adult, and because I was a nerd who also lived in the greater Detroit area, I popped up as one of the top suggestions. She messaged me via AIM, we had a rom-com full of missed connections, and finally started talking. That was 20 years ago, and we've been married for the last 15 of them.
Dave! This story is amazing and makes my cranky old heart happy. You Found Your Friend! You should write it all out, I'd read the longer version. Wishing you both a lifetime of health and happiness together.
Since I wrote that comment, I have started writing the entire story. Thus far, I've gotten through the crazy missed connections and the nine months we put off meeting each other - my last line is "That's when she saw me. She screamed and ran." 😂
CANNOT WAIT for you to hit us with a url for that!
I'm an experienced self-publisher (and publisher of others) for more than a decade. If/when you get that story to book-length, be in touch and I'll walk you through how to get it in print and in ebook form. P.S. Several of my real-life and online writer friends came from Prodigy circa 1994... they still have an FB group and keep in touch after all these years. We called ourselves the "Housewife Writers." Not all of us were wives, house or otherwise, not all of us were women, and not all of us were writers, but most.
Can you perchance help me? I've got a couple books I'm working on...
Hi Matt: You can find me on Facebook. Is that a place you have an account?
What you said here resonates with me so much. I was a Prodigy kid too (well, a Prodigy 20-something anyway), and have felt the loss of web-based communities a time or several myself. (For me, the big one was IMDb's user forums, which in retrospect were probably doomed after Amazon bought the IMDb.) More feelings stirred up here than I can easily express...but one thing for sure, I'm nominating your essay for a "related work" Hugo.
Oh my god, thank you, that's really too kind. I just...I guess I had a lot to say.
"but one thing for sure, I'm nominating your essay for a "related work" Hugo."
You won't be the only one.
They'll enjoy the Puppies ref! ;-)
This might be the best thing I've ever read
Aw. geez, thanks. Just a lot of pent-up mad. Trying to do something with it, like Mr. Rogers taught us.
I just read this in the shadow of reddit now being destroyed, and I feel this exact rage, and thankfully have also realized that we will create our place again. I am still in the fury stage, but reading this right now is incredible, because it really puts it in perspective. This has always happened, and we just keep pushing on. Than you for writing this and sharing it.
"Don’t lose joy. Be us. Because us is what keeps the light on when the night comes closing in. Us doesn’t have a web address. We are wherever we gather. Mastodon, Substack, Patreon, Dreamwidth, AO3, Tumblr, Discord, even the ruins of Twitter, even Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok, god help us all. Even Diaryland.
It doesn’t matter. They’re just names. It doesn’t matter who owns them. Because we own ourselves and our words and the minute the jackals arrive is the same minute we put down the first new chairs in the next oasis. We make our place when we’re together. We make our magic when we connect, typing hands to typing hands.
Hello, world. Come in from the cold. This will be a good place. For awhile. And then we’ll make another one."
This is beautifully said, Cat.
And, reading it, I found myself realizing, "She's describing SURFING."
Not web surfing, but the real thing: paddling out, waiting on the board for a long time for a wave that you can catch... and more often than not wiping out. Paddling out again. And again.
I was never any good at surfing (I was decent at the "wiping out" part), but I did enough to understand the shape of it.
We tend to think of online communities as being analogous to real-world homes and villages, with the aspiration to permanence that that implies. I humbly submit that the rhythm and structure of finding an online community and living in it is really much more like catching waves, and working hard to stay on the board for as long as you can. No wave is permanent, but the urge to look for the next one is overwhelming.
Because the ecstasy of riding a wave when you do catch it is worth all of the work and waiting and disappointment.
Well, you got me back, that idea of surfing the wave and waiting for the next made me tear up. Damn you, Bill!
Not to turn it all on its ear, but you should see the history of Russia’s social media sometime. VKontakte (or VK) as the Facebook of Russia... huge active user base... open and free... until the owner was forced to sell it to the Russian government. That led to Russians seeking western social media (LJ and Facebook being two examples), hoping to avoid their government taking over their conversation again. Instead, their government just restricted access until it became too frustrating for the Russian people to bother.
Christ, that's depressing.
Thank you for this <3
I am reminded by this favourite quote of mine, by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, that gets quoted by the Black Socialists of America often.
"Beneath the governmental machinery, in the shadow of political institutions, out of the sight of statemen and priests, society is producing its own organism, slowly and silently; and constructing a new order, the expression of its vitality and autonomy." (1851)
This is not just about the Internet. It's about our right to self determination that is continuously at threat. Yet we find ways to escape through the cracks that don't fit into their plans, the standards that they are trying to fit us into. We escape, we queer things and cover it with rainbows and flowers and glitter. We hide in safe spaces so that we can emerge in public and maintain some sanity.
And it's important to remember that we have ALWAYS been here. Like feminists and BIPOC activists and LGBTQ+ folk, it must be constantly recalled that we have a tradition as long as humanity, that we do NOT have to start over from scratch every generation, that we have always existed.
In any historical period or place you care to point to, there have been free thinkers and iconoclastic intellectuals and societal outliers that formed communities based on something beyond might makes right and wealth makes more right. From Socrates' corrupted Athenian youth to the radical nunneries of medieval France to the academics of golden age Islamic culture to the salons of the Enlightenment and forward and back and between. We are as much creators of this world as the elite who believe they alone own it, and that will never, ever change. Even past the apocalypse, there will be roving gangs of bookish nerds hiding among the warlords and reading by firelight.
Our fire is the glow of a screen right now, but, to quote a great 20th century thinker, it was always burning since the world's been turning.
Thank you Cat, I needed to read this today
You're so very welcome, Amanda.
This made me laugh and cry on a plane across the Atlantic. I've tried to put my feelings about all this on paper (or, well, Substack) but in trying to mitigate the severity of my feelings, lest I drown in them, the result was predictably a bit detached. This was catharsis embodied, and I'm really grateful you shared your thoughts and your heart on the issue. See you around cons and the internet, and thanks for the eyeshadow advice. 💙
Oh I stopped trying to mitigate my mad long ago. It only serves others, never myself. Thank you for reading and feeling with me.
I've been feeling this fury and frustration building up in me about social media, Google whatnot for years now. This year it reached boiling point, and you describe my anger perfectly! Pretty tired of losing my communities over and over and over again. Not only this but being pushed around by algorithms that want you to behave or write a certain way. Each time Google pushes it's new SEO update I want to scream, "Enough, shut the eff up!"
Like you I was born in the 70s, so I saw the transition to the Internet age. The early years was so exciting. I built my first website in 1999 on Geocities. The comment threads were my social media. Then corporations took over the Internet, and I went from owner to vassal.
I'm pretty done with this paradigm.
Thanks for writing this piece.
Most welcome.
I vividly remember working on the design for my geocities site for hours and hours in my university computer lab, making it all look as classical greek as graphics then could, being so excited to aesthetically arrange a place that was truly mine, when in the real world I could barely afford a fucking milk crate to sit on in my apartment. This stuff matters, it's always mattered.
Oh geocities... ❤️I loved the little worlds there.. makes me think of Lambda moo text based worlds, too. I spent so much time creating a little Anne Rice-inspired geocities front porch with bougainvillea in the garden district...
Yes, the connecting has always been what mattered, where it began, where we go back to.
First time diving into your substack, and at the risk of leaning too far in to silver linings, I had forgotten how much I love your (non-novel) long form. You’re one of the first artists I truly discovered online, and to think of that opportunity being lost for so many artists and fans alike hurts my heart. Communities will find a way through times of change, but thank you for highlighting the core of what gets lost over and over again while not giving in to the kind of fatalism that causes one to go numb.
I've been doing it on Patreon for a good bit, but usually I try to be more organized there--I think I forgot how much I enjoy a healthy scream on the internet. Thank you for following me here, and really it does my hart good to think I was one of anyone's first online artists.
Oh my, I feel you. I'm a 1971 solid Gen Xer, and remember my old prodigy I. D. (Mkmm33c) under my dad's account because I was a poor college kid. My 1991 boyfriend and I used up the free messages, so we'd post in code on the bulletin boards about what was going on that day.... Like when he was ranting about his stepmother not letting him wash his jeans at home, we turned it into a public post about the hardcore band "April's Laundry" that was "just insane, and have you heard the latest one, 'Hot Food Breaks the Fridge? ' "
Of course, as a daughter of a weird Navy guy who had Arpanet, I had been on the Internet since around 1981. I remember logging in with a telnet i.d. (and pretending to be 18 with) to chatter with some nice guy named "Psiman".
And so on... What were we saying?
Yeah.
I've always loved the connection potential online.
You inspired me to go back to my own Diaryland page, and I smiled, seeing it's all there, "underneath my eyelid," or whatever it is. I posted begging for peace on 9/11.
This is too long. But I hear you.
Hot Food Breaks the Fridge sounds like a fucking BANGER, I love it.
And I love love love, and have always loved, that little piece of the joy of these communities: that our private jokes so specifically tied to our personal lives can become universal and shared among others who never knew the origin but still laughed along. Now I know about April's Laundry, and I'll remember it for a long while yet. Someone only last week referenced a filk I did of Baby Got Back about the weird Victorian TB wasting waif aesthetic called Baby Got Hack. In 2005. Someone I've never met in person remembers that dumb inside joke after 17 years, when even I had mostly forgotten it.
How can you EVER put a price on that?
Aside... Totally misread that later sentence as "someone I never met in prison," and now I'm so intrigued by all the people you DID meet in the big house.
Nevermind, carry on, carry on.
I found you on Twitter, years ago, during the whole Bill Maher comic book thing.
And here we go again, on to the next online place. But I'm glad you're still out there and that I can still find you.
This is magnificent.
It will never cease to amaze me that THAT brought so many people into my world. I was just pissed off and wrote it on my phone in the bathtub like five (figurative) minutes after giving birth. And yet it's continually made connections over the years. Shows how truly wrong he was.