Halcyon Dial-up Days
Before the arrival of our family’s first computer, I had been manic to the point of hyperventilating. It was bought, we thought, in an ‘off the back of a van’ type deal. A friend of my uncle who was intentionally vague about his job and it was always assumed he had connections to the criminal underworld. Which my dad loved because of his own “connections”, the extent of which, I’d find out, was having an ingrown toenail removed while on the same ward as one of the Kray twins.
Years later it turned out Nigel was not a fence but just a man who had racked up a huge amount of credit card debt. Still, if only he knew how grateful I was for our liberated Hewlett Packard. Though my brother and sister seemed uninterested I was at exactly the right age where not being able to turn in homework with Word Art felt like a human rights violation. I had always been slightly but infuriatingly late to trends. So while I could shoplift a Tamagotchi I could not do the same for a desktop computer.
The internet followed soon after and we got an extra-long modem to go from the phone line to the opposing end of the front room, now the designated ‘computer corner’. Every evening I’d try to hold out as long as possible before unfurling it so I could get that sweet, beeping endorphin rush of the dial-up internet starting. No amount of Professor Frink dork noises from my sister could deter me. I took to wrapping one of the curtains around the back of a chair to form a booth and became apoplectic at anyone loitering behind me, peeking at the screen. Privacy, when living on top of each other and when tampon wrappers in the bathroom bin were casually brought up to explain why you might be “in a mood”, was a luxury. The internet afforded me a level of secrecy I’d never been able to indulge in before.
I want to say something trite here like how the internet became my refuge but I don’t think that’s accurate. It also makes it sound like I was holding wholesome online slumber parties and building Angelfire sites. I wasn’t. Aside from pushing my bladder to breaking point to stay on MSN Messenger as long as possible, I largely used it to watch uncensored music videos and people blowing their brains out on Rotten.com. At one point I’m pretty sure I was being groomed in an AOL chatroom by someone posing as a 16-year-old boy. Nevertheless, I found all of it exhilarating and it instantly became a huge part of my life.
I can say with confidence that since then I don’t think I’ve been away from the internet for longer than a week. That is creeping up to nearly twenty years of MySpace bulletins, scouring WebMD then panicking over mysterious skin tags and arguing with anonymous commenters. My formative years shaped by hours slumped in front of a screen.
On my first day at an internship for Arena, I bounded into the office with my Boots meal deal, ready to shake tables with my definitely totally unique and edgy ideas. What I walked into was an empty desk facing a wall away from the editorial team. I was gently batted away from any attempts to get near the magazine like a toddler with mucky hands but, instead, tasked with writing a post for their blog. They regarded the website they’d been forced into maintaining through ailing print sales with groaning disdain. I, however, was euphoric.
Here is where, as a writer and as a journalist, I should insert something poignant about the death of print. How satisfying the smell of the pages in a brand new magazine is. How holding something physical in your hands has more ceremony than mindlessly scrolling ever will. I believe those things but I could never match the misty-eyed mourning of my peers. There was always in the recesses of my mind a little voice, possibly a bleating Windows 95 eSheep, telling me that those worlds were not for me. Magazines, books, any and all print felt just out of my reach. But inflammatory, lawless tirades on this depraved platform called the internet? The Pandora’s box had been opened and this was my realm, baby.
Off the back of one blog post, I wrangled a part time gig churning out “authentic” local reviews of bars and restaurants for pennies per piece. A job which was just vague enough that I could get away with loudly introducing myself in bars as a writer. The other poor souls roped in had similar aspirations to me. I got obliterated with one after a shift, a shy guy who poured his disposable income into making zines no one read. He had a giggle that became more high-pitched the drunker I got and the more I goaded him into increasingly worse behaviour. Stealing shots from the bar, forcing him to do a photoshoot sprawled out on the bonnet of a strangers car like a pin-up girl.
I didn’t see him again before I was let go after it came to the company’s attention that, in order to meet my weekly quota, I’d been inflating my target with increasingly surreal reviews of kebab shops and public toilets. But, maybe a year later, I was excited to bump into him at some wanky free drinks event because I had news. I’d just been given a column at his favourite publication and all I’d had to do was be a showboat on the internet. To date, I have never seen the blood drain from someone’s face quicker.
Of course, this is all bitter-sweet now. You think having your Tweets read back to you in a disciplinary meeting would be the top five of the most mortifying things that could happen in your career but, fortunately, I was impressed at how thoroughly modern it was. A relative minnow in the company and yet someone in HR had to comb through my reposted memes and navel-gazing to construct a serious allegation of defamation.
I sat slouched, keeping my composure by staring off into the background, past the panel of my executioners, at one of the VICE magazine covers that’d been made into an eight-foot canvas and proudly hung in the meeting room. It was a closeup of an acid tab on a woman’s mouth, her lips slathered in bright red gloss. I remember the issue. It had a feature on “girls tripping their vaginas off!” and an article entitled ‘Allahu Akbar in a Parking Lot’.
The crux of the meeting was how my unprofessionalism was bringing a respectable, multi-million dollar company into disrepute, epitomised by my incendiary shit-posting online. It is true that I’d been warned before. My internet presence had become such a point of concern that two managers pulled me aside to instruct me to stop making one of the prized-pig staff writers “look stupid” on social media. My retort was that he could simply “stop being stupid”. But they laboured the point that it made the company look bad, that it was petty and needlessly confrontational. It made me wonder what they thought they were getting into when they’d hired me on the basis of being petty and confrontational online.When I’d started there, having anything close to an online following was regarded as a welcome quirk, something you’d be mildly impressed by but was ultimately unimportant, like a cat that could ride a unicycle. It was an indication that you had potential but lacked the opportunities for nepotism to get ahead, so were ripe for being overworked and underpaid. By the time I was having a defamation case levelled at me, however, they were balls to the wall at the mercy of mother internet. Things that had not yet been made were billed as viral, money shifted away from creating to online marketing.
After that first informal slap on the wrist, I was exasperated but my tongue twisted when trying to explain why because it involved admitting something that still felt indescribably lame. That my online self was profoundly important to me and if I had to bite the hand that fed me to protect it, to keep it mine, I would.
During the limbo of waiting for a verdict on my dismissal appeal, I’d been strongly advised, for once in my life, not to vomit my stream of thoughts online. So in an attempt to keep myself occupied, but not knowing how to do that without a computer, I spent a day rescuing old emails from an ancient Hotmail account. And that’s where I saw it. My very first email and my very first taste of romance, from all the way back in 2003, entitled simply...“sup bitch”. I was transported back to those halcyon dial-up days.
I’d met my Hotmail sweetheart at McDonald's a handful of times in order to spend the day standing outside and trying to look intimidating. We smoked garbage quality hash together even though it stained the elastic on my train-track braces. He’d talk about the latest forward-this-or-you’ll-die chain emails or ask intentionally shocking questions like if I knew what deep throating was, which I did because, y’know, of previous AOL chat room grooming. However, despite only living a bus ride from each other our communication flourished online not over Happy Meals.
Late nights on MSN messenger were supplemented by emailing each other photos and music, the Herculean effort of which seems astounding by today’s standards. I’d have to scan pictures of myself sucking the puppy fat of my cheeks into a pout, taken in those photobooths at Trocadero that made you look like a pencil drawing. He sent ‘artwork’ of himself flexing awkwardly, painstakingly overlaid with Tupac lyrics and weed leaf graphics. If I lifted blank CDs he’d burn mixes and drop them off at my Saturday job. I remember one had Wayne Marshall’s “G Spot” mixed clumsily into Artful Dodger “Please Don’t Turn Me On” and thinking: “this is literally the most thrilling thing to happen to any teenage girl in the world ever.”
Over the years our relationship became only internet-based. But when I found out I’d failed all but my English A-Level, missing my university offers by a country mile, I very calmly went home, ruined my mum’s day with the results, then logged onto MSN for a pep talk with him. He was good at that. And I did get into university, before which we sent reams of messages about how we’d stay in touch forever as if we were being prised apart like Romeo and Juliet rather than me moving an hour and the Blackwall tunnel away to south London. We didn’t stay in touch, of course. He discovered skunk. I discovered binge drinking. The emails became less frequent. But I’d think of his mixes when the student union was on its fifth play of Arctic Monkeys.
After letting out a delighted snort at the subject header: “sup bitch” I realised he had, in hindsight, been conspicuously missing from the online sprawl of school friends and acquaintances we all seem to agree exist in. That passive maze of job announcements and birthday greetings to people you’ve had no interaction with in years. However, some investigatory Googling later and I discovered, after prison and a brief flirtation with firearms, he’d been arrested on separate terrorism-related offences. The article in a local paper had a rather overwrought description of how he’d been “radicalised online” and I was shocked. Though, to be fair on him, it was a pretty sturdy explanation for not replying to emails.
I thought about how strange it is to realise you’re living through the ground zero of a huge societal shift, without knowing or understanding what the long-term battering it is doing to our collective psyche. This one thing that’s shaped politics, money, violence, sex, all human interaction at lightning speed, and yet is so much in its infancy that it can still be undermined with “lol taking the internet seriously is for dweebs.”
When the non-disclosure agreement I’d anticipated arrived in my inbox, I thought my jaw would buckle from grinding my teeth together. The boilerplate conditions had been edited for a new online world. They had to make it explicit that if I were to allude to on social media, email a friend or even sneeze near an internet connection about their crusade to shut me up, they’d use everything, legal or not, to ruin me.
I signed it, anyway. Slept on it. Cried about it. Then woke up one day and decided to email the NDA in full to a New York Times journalist. I hadn’t shut up since dial-up, I wasn’t about to break the habit of a lifetime.
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