the places where you build yourself

The conventional wisdom back in the day, about people on the Internet, was that it was a seething mass of predators and liars. Anyone you spoke to there, about any topic, was widely assumed to be producing at least some level of personal fiction, probably with an eye towards stealing your money or coercing you into an unmarked white van.

I never found that to be the case. If anything, the people I knew then were surprisingly honest about themselves and their lives, sometimes far beyond the point at which I was comfortable. Anonymity has a way of drawing that out of you, where you can explore just about anything there is about yourself in relative safety.

It hasn't really changed that much, to go by places like Tumblr or the various successor networks to Livejournal. It's certainly different, and perhaps more immediate, but the basic social mechanics are the same: you connect with people through shared interests, and those people are from all over the world, and sometimes you end up as surprisingly close friends for people who've never met face to face.



Which is, you know, old hat by now. We're probably a good fifteen years past the point where that's at all unusual, even if it does still have a faint air of distrust attached to it by old media. I'm probably a member of the last generation who remembers when it was considered strange.

I'm thinking about my old crew today. I still keep in touch with a lot of them, and one of them's my housemate. It's been a good eighteen years, an entire adult person, since the whole thing came together, moving from the discussion board for a frankly ridiculous fanfiction project--back when you had to have your own webspace to pursue fanfiction and Usenet was still a thing--to its own board on the inexplicably-still-existent Network54, and then it just existed so we could keep in touch, our own little insular social group that sometimes seemed to extend throughout most of the Internet.

And then we got old, and busy, and out of school, and scattered to the corners of the Earth, and some of us lost touch along the way. A lot of that old crowd have careers now, and spouses and kids. It's that same bizarre disconnect when you don't talk to anyone for a long period of time, and they've evolved beyond that distant mental snapshot. They're supposed to be a geeky college student who could, if pressed, write a graduate thesis about anime, so what are they doing as an adult? Who allowed this to happen? Can I file a bug report?

One of the guys I'd lost track of, as it turns out, died recently. He's the first one I'm aware of, in that original crew, to pass away, and he left a surprisingly big legacy behind: an infant daughter, a number of friends in the webcomic community, a family left reeling. I had no idea. He's been gone for almost two months, and had been by the time I thought to look him up. This was never an option I'd considered.

And then there's the bizarre selfishness of grief, where everything I look at feeds back into it. He posted relatively recently on the old message board, asking what people had been up to, and got no response. It turns out he'd independently into some of the same hobbies as I had, and had been living in Los Angeles, where I'd been traveling to against my own will at least once a year since 2003. There was no reason why he should've been the one guy from back in the day that I lost touch with, and if I'd thought to look him up at any point in the last ten years, I think we'd have been friends again. It's all for the lost potential, mourning less for the actual person and more for what Karen Horney called the "tyranny of the shoulds."

I never really thought about it until now, at least not in any more than the most generalized abstraction, but I'm still grateful, always will be grateful, for that sense of community from back in the day. There's a lot of foundation work in me that was built on that little message board, with those people, talking about such silly inconsequential bullshit for so long, and it lingers to this day, and it was too soon to have to deal with part of that dying. So I'm mourning, for me and for parts of me and above all for my friend, who I wish I'd taken the time to get in touch with again.