Playing outside until the lights came on is a mythos we hear about fairly often online. What do you picture when someone tells you that’s how they spent their childhood? I picture summery golden hours, evening breezes swooshing through the heat, and the chirps and giggles and ball bounces of the neighborhood. A pleasant memory, but not my own. A memory created by depictions of the 70s in movies and TV shows, from old family photo albums, and sensations of my own that I transpose onto the picture in my head.

My childhood is a mythos of the Internet back when it used to be fun. What do you picture when someone tells you that’s how they spent their childhood?

I remember coming home from school and rushing to my desktop and start it up. Grab a drink and a snack and come running back just in time to log in. My homepage was my central hub, truly the home base of my little Internet life. My email inbox wasn’t full of spam (unless I had signed up for it myself), but it would sometimes have a message from my friends at other schools would sneakily send during their computer labs.

By the time I got home, my friends on the east coast were already online, there were two or three precious hours of overlap between our time zones after I got home from school and they had to go to bed. I remember their names even today. I didn’t actually know any of them, but we all loved Harry Potter (yes, Millennial cringe, I know) and we role played on Yahoo Forums every day. One of us, Cass, had set up an exquisite game for us. We would write out first-person stories about our characters interacting with the others, responding to each other. And while some of us were writing, the rest of us were plotting over instant messages what our characters would do next and what action would take place. We knew each other’s secrets, we knew about each other’s struggles, and we all genuinely loved spending time together this way.

These friends introduced me to Oakaki boards for the first time. Browser-based paint apps that walked so Photoshop could run. They introduced me to fan fiction storytelling and I discovered the penultimate genre of storytelling – Alternate Universe (AU) Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon crossover fiction. And why not? Why shouldn’t Sailor Moon fall in love with the prince of all Saiyans? His power is over 9000 and all Tuxedo Mask does is throw roses around!

To this day, the greatest fanfic I ever read was by an author I only knew as Becky Tailweaver, whose epic AU retelling of Inu Yasha was nuanced, moving, tender…

Before YouTube, amateur video editors were making edits of anime footage and setting it to popular music, some better than others. They were Anime Music Videos and MeriC was one of the best, her edits were satisfyingly cut to match the beat of the music. An editing technique that sounds obvious today but was rare back then. If not for MeriC’s music videos I would have never watched Hana Yori Dango, or Boys Over Flowers, or Samurai X, or Cowboy Bebop, I could go on.

I suppose what I am trying to say is that the Internet used to feel like a daily adventure. And every day I felt like I learned something wonderful and fun. Back then, nothing beat sitting in my room, boom box blaring, drawing or reading fanfics in the dark while refreshing MySpace to see if my crush had replied.

Even after social media overtook the little niche spaces of the Internet, daily quests to Reddit would be full of funny memes, posts, rare digital spectacles that we watched unfold in real time.

When my husband and I first started dating, we would often sit side-by-side and scroll Reddit while we watched something and when we saw something funny we’d show it to the other. Sometimes we would turn to show each other the same exact thing at the same time. There was so much to enjoy.

I was there the day of the 2 pen!s guy posted, and the day we all learned about Kevin and his mom. I was there for the doodle battles of all the shadow artist accounts. I was there the day Unidan was exposed for manipulating upvotes…

And then one day I looked up and the Internet was no longer fun. It had lost its whimsy. Its adventure.

The Internet is full of spam. Social media uses us for data mining and free labor (review any community notes lately?). Everyone is either a bot, three 12-year old boys in a trench coat, the NSA, influencers, and creeps. Anything fun is immediately turned into a transaction, monetized, and enshitified.

Forget growing food and homesteading with our BFFs. Let’s reclaim the Internet and bring back the whimsy.

What do you miss about the era of fun Internet?