Adrift online

I’ve been writing my whole life, mostly for an audience of one (me), sometimes for an audience of two (a poem or short story for a lover), and rarely for an audience of a dozen in a writing workshop (strangers, low stakes). This newsletter is an attempt to desensitize me to the absolute terror of vulnerability I feel when I put my words into reality.

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Gabrielle Garland, Untitled 139, 2017

I don’t have a home on the internet for the first time in two decades. After the Elon Musk circus, the failure of Threads, the disappointment of BlueSky, the headache of Mastodon, and the lack of alternatives, I am returning to blogging. Lol.

Nostalgia for Neopets

As a kid, I made a home for myself on Neopets. I spent every single day for years on that site playing games, visiting The Giant Omelette, selling books in my neostore, and feeding my pet kacheek. I joined a few guilds and eventually ran one myself.

It was exhilarating to feel a sense of agency and control over a tangible real-world outcome as a child. I learned very simple coding, elected strangers to my guild council, and created polls to get the guild’s opinions on silly matters. This was the start of my lifelong obsession with the internet, and perhaps also my foray into cooperative governance.

Intimacy on Xanga

Neopets was for interacting with strangers, and Xanga was for interacting with friends. I made an account when I was eleven, set a black background with lime green text, and posted about my daily adventures hanging out with my best friend, Sylwia, and the two older boys we each had a crush on, Sparky and Blaze (I wish these names were anonymized; they’re not). It was journaling in public, but it felt intimate like most of the early days of the internet.

I never had a LiveJournal: I remember thinking, “LiveJournal is for nerds, Xanga is for cool kids.” Though I’ve now learned that there were real differences between the platforms unrelated to the nerd-to-cool spectrum: LiveJournal users were more likely to be white and older, and Xanga users were more likely to be Asian and younger. Xanga users posted with the purpose of connecting with others, while LiveJournal users posted more about their feelings. No surprise I landed on Xanga as an emotionally repressed pre-teen.

Broodiness on Myspace

MySpace came next, probably around the time I was thirteen or fourteen. My coding skills sharpened. I used a code snippet to hide my “wall” from prying eyes. I chose the song Satan Said Dance to play on my page and stripped everything back to it’s basic form. My aesthetic was angsty and minimalist; my profile photos were broody, my face blurred.

I knew if my best friend was mad at me based on where I appeared in her top 8, which I checked every day. She eventually became semi-famous for her makeup skills, and I remember on several occasions other teenagers recognized her “from Myspace” when we were at the mall, hanging out in front of Hot Topic or smoking cigarettes in the parking lot.

Community on the Quilting Bee

I was in sixth grade when I made my first website on GeoCities. I stayed after school to use Mrs. Mascari’s computer to update the homepage with the homework assignments every evening. (If you can believe it, I still thought of myself as “cool.”)

When I outgrew GeoCities, I used DreamWeaver and even Notepad for coding. I learned how to set up an FTP server, how to use CSS. I made simple sites with silly names using tables and iframes. “Pink Paperclip” was bright, bubbly, fun. “Tea & Sympathy” was dark, gothy and featured rows of rotting teeth from art made by Russell Mills. I had range, you could say.

But making websites was a solitary activity, and the internet was supposed to be about community. I found my next home in the Quilting Bee, an interactive community of people (mostly girls) who also made personal websites and traded pixel art with each other. Nobody in my “real life” was making the things I was, and it felt like I had found my people. 

We exchanged tiny pixel “quilt blocks” with each other virtually. Newly acquired pixel quilt blocks were added to a unique digital quilt of your friends’ art. It was a way of connecting with each other and finding new people who also loved coding and cute things.

Everything felt simple, finite, like I could grasp the edges of the internet. The Quilting Bee was the internet at its very best.

Strangers on Stickam & ChatRoulette

The internet also had a dark side. I discovered Stickam with my friend Nadia. It was a space where we could join and host live video chatrooms with strangers. We put on ridiculous costumes and makeup, and taped our noses up to our foreheads with clear tape. (Webcam quality was so bad back then, you couldn’t see the tape, and we thought this was the funniest thing ever). Sometimes, people we knew in real life joined our live video chatrooms. But mostly, it was older men jerking off or asking us to show our tits. Actually, that would be too many words; they literally just said “tits?” We were in middle school.

ChatRoulette launched soon after. Instead of a public chatroom that anyone could join, this platform matched random users in a one-on-one private video chat. We met a lot of interesting people this way, though quickly got bored. The audience still skewed mostly older (in their 30s, which to be fair was double my age at the time) and mostly men (90%). One in eight of these chats were sexually explicit. A predator’s paradise.

The longest run on Facebook

When I started high school, I made a Facebook account because MySpace was banned on the school computers. My school assigned each of us a .edu email address, which meant we were able to join a social media site that was, at the time, only meant for college students. It felt refined, though all we really did was “poke” each other throughout the day. I remained angsty in my online persona for several more years. My profile photo was my bright red Doc Martens hovering over a friend’s face.

In college, I lived with seven girls in a house we called the Bridgeman Brothel. Our private Facebook group mostly consisted of us asking everyone to please send $3 after one of us made an alcohol run for the weekend.

My account remains active to this day, mostly for finding deals on Marketplace or getting rid of my stuff on the local Buy Nothing group.

Resistance to Instagram

I was a late adopter to Instagram. I remember feeling a deep aversion to joining the platform, and didn’t cave until after college. When I made an account, my posts mostly mocked the idea of posting “meaningless” photos. In reality, I was just self-conscious of myself as a visual artist. I saw it as a platform for photographers and people who had something visually interesting to share. Not me.

My first post was the head of a baby doll affixed to a candlestick holder, two Serrano peppers jolting out of its eyes. I had grown the peppers in my garden. My second post was a blurry photo of a woman holding a baby in front of wall graffiti that says “fuck the pigs,” that I took at a protest the day after the cop who killed Eric Garner was acquitted.

Blurred lines on Twitter

My first few years on Twitter consisted of tweeting quotes from books or songs I liked, including phrases I thought sounded interesting despite having no idea what they meant (“I’m getting light in my loafers” and “Mine is good, he don’t come quick.”). I eventually made a career out of digital organizing, using the same platforms to organize people to build workplace power and mobilize around economic and racial justice. I deleted my embarrassing collection of quotes and subscribed to a service that deleted my tweets every two weeks. 

I went viral a few times, including once that got me in trouble at work when I tweeted breaking news on both my personal and an organizational account I was managing (“why did it go viral on your personal account and not the organizational one?”). I made a minute-by-minute timeline of my decision-making to defend myself and had to explain to my boss that I did not, in fact, control the internet.

Present day, adrift online

Time stood still for a while. The early days of joining an online community for a few months or a few years turned to a decade on this platform or that one.

I’ve always had a robust social life both offline and online. There’s no place I go regularly online anymore to find community. I lurk on Reddit to read product reviews or learn about skincare, but I never post. Instagram is now filled with ads and reposted TikTok videos. I went from checking Twitter multiple times a day to once a month.

Today the internet is at its biggest and most expansive, seemingly infinite in all directions, but no corner of it to call home.

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