An elegy for ye olde internet

Once upon a time in ye olde internet (which is now far, far away), there was a fantastical place called LiveJournal.

All kinds of people lived there: fandom youngsters and fandom olds, poetry nerds, literary greats. And one teenager in South Carolina writing fanfiction on the family laptop while her mother was in bed.¹

The denizens of LiveJournal did their best to live in harmony,² and developed a thriving community. An LJer would style their blog to match their personality, add an icon for every situation, change their mood with every post, but most of all: they would feed the community by reading and commenting on their friends’ posts.

There was no algorithm and (for a beautiful and fleeting moment) no real censor. LJers curated their experience and cultivated their friends list or they perished.

Then, one day, a dark shadow named SUP Media fell over the land. Slowly, things changed: blogs disappeared without warning overnight in a first great purge, and then a second.³ The law and the rulers of the land slowly turned on LJ’s most vulnerable citizens.⁴ Eventually, with great sadness, LJers began departing their once-homeland for safer lands, where they owned the soil and tilled it themselves.⁵

And although most internet denizens never dug their toes in that rich dirt and thus don’t know what they’re missing, many elders still remember what it felt like during those halcyon days, planted in the very earth of the web; connected not by the endless scroll, but by the endless roots of the great community tree.

~*~

Okay, that’s enough purple prose.

I hate to be a stereotype—the annoying snob who doesn’t believe that anything they don’t enjoy is “real”—but in this one thing I think it’s fair:

I miss the internet.

No, not the internet we’re all forced to endure in order to stave off the horrific malaise of living in late stage capitalism and a declining civilization.

I miss the real internet. The World Wide Web. The home of newsgroups and then listservs and then Geocities webrings and IRC and LJ and and and.

I know it wasn’t all great. There’s a reason we were all terrified of our wallet names getting connected to our fannish names, that we told younger fans to never meet someone they first met online without an adult present, that to this day the name Cassandra Clare sends shivers down my spine.

But it was shitty in the way we humans are shitty. Shitty human problems were at least understandable and, while not always tolerable, did at the time feel more manageable.

As opposed to the internet we have now, in which we are constantly being sold to, constantly pushed into and out of algorithms, constantly bombarded with every injustice in the world, constantly showered with AI slop, all culminating in an evil mixture of misinformation, distraction, and disconnection from our people, whoever they may be.

It can’t go on like this. Or, more accurately, it can go on like this (right over a cliff, probably), but it can go on without me.⁶

~*~

I was late to just about every new thing on the fannish internet.

I was, surprisingly, very early to fanfiction.net and mailing lists. But I clung to both long after they were out of fashion, and thus I was late to LiveJournal, and then to Dreamwidth, and then (relatively) to Archive of Our Own, and then to Tumblr, and then to Twitter, and so on.

This could honestly be my epitaph: Here lies Steph Lundberg - she turned being late and uncool into a sport (that she was somehow still bad at).

So it’s no surprise to me (and, I’m sure, anyone else) that I’m still clinging to the internet of yesteryear. Last to join, last to leave.

I guess in this case, it’s both, because I’ve certainly come to this late; I’m just one of many writers who’ve created a blog like this out of a desire to return to the old internet. But I’m also hopeful that I’m still among the first wave to do so, and that it’s the start of a bigger movement.

We should continue to use the internet to make real connections and build real community, but we should do it in spaces we own, not in spaces controlled by megacorporations that see our need for human connection as merely another opportunity for profit.

And I’m not saying that no one can make money off building or being in community, but if anyone’s making a profit off our time, our work, and our writing, it should be us, with the enthusiastic consent of those of us in the community.

And yes, it’s going to be harder to build your own personal network than to go on a site which will automatically load you into an algorithm that’ll immediately engage you and keep you engaged for as long as you can keep your eyes open. But be real: are you really being social on social media? Or are you actually just consuming before you metaphorically wave at strangers in passing as you swipe to the next post, the next video, the next tweet?

~*~

Of course, I didn’t just create this blog out of nostalgia and concern for my fellow humans. I’ve got selfish reasons, too.

For one, I miss the kind of casual writing I used to do on LiveJournal. I miss being goofy and fannish and complaining about silly problems to people who also think they’re silly but will read and commiserate anyway.

And as much as I love Dreamwidth, most people I know in my work and personal life aren’t over there, and I think the folks I know are more likely to read a blog occasionally than go out of their way to become familiar with a whole new blogging platform. And besides, I wouldn’t own my space there, so it’s a moot point.

I’ve also been feeling a little stifled creatively by the newsletter. Which is not to say I don’t enjoy doing it; I do. It’s just that my brain works kind of like a queue: I have an idea, and then I need to do something with that idea before I can let myself go to the next one.

It’s terribly inefficient, and often annoying, but it means that I’ll experience a kind of writer’s block if I have an idea that doesn’t fit the newsletter. I won’t feel right committing time to the idea because I don’t have anywhere to put it, but I also struggle to refocus on the Roundup or Bad Job Bingo. Now I have somewhere to put those ideas so I can get them out of my head and get on with the other work I want to do.

Also, the Support Human newsletter is great because it has a specific lane and purpose: to inform, enable, entertain, and celebrate CX and Tech professionals. Not all the things I want to write about will be in that lane or robust enough for the newsletter, and that’s okay. Now they’ll live here.

Not to mention that I have certain quality expectations I commit to when I do the newsletter. I mean, it’s not The Atlantic or anything, but I want to elevate it to the highest possible standard. Here, because it’s more casual, I can just…relax. Let Steph be Steph and not focus on whether a post is paid subscription-worthy.

Finally, obviously I’m hoping to reach more than just the people I personally know — it’s a public blog, after all — but I’m hoping those connections will be…more purposeful, maybe. Slower and more meaningful.

You know, like on the old internet. ;)

Sorry, Mom. ↩
Although they weren’t always successful, else Fandom Wank wouldn’t have been so busy and so popular. ↩
Known colloquially as Strikethrough and Boldthrough. ↩
In addition to the above purges, SUP Media started changing image content policy (which sparked another controversy, Nipplegate and LiveJournal’s TOS. ↩
Dreamwidth and Archive of Our Own, respectively. ↩
Metaphorically, I mean. Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. ↩

Footnotes

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