Don’t Blame the Internet
Despite being in my thirties, I occasionally feel like an elderly man when I tell someone younger than me that we once had to pay an hourly fee to access the internet. It’s deeply strange, although not as strange as the fact that when I was a child we simply didn’t have the internet at all. Progress has a way of making you feel older than you are. In the mid ’90s, I spent two summers at a local “computer camp” which sounds so quaint in 2021. It would just be called “camp” now.
Someone at the school that hosted these camps was smart enough to realize that there was an untapped reserve of nerds who would attend as long as they didn’t have to go outside. The actual “computer camp” consisted of whatever tech was available on their machines at the time — a hybrid of BASIC, CD-ROMs, the long-forgotten visual language Logo, etc. It was mostly about being on computers, which many of the attendees weren’t normally allowed to spend all day on because it was considered odd. Each day, there was a free period where we were encouraged to swim, which inevitably led to us standing around the pool patiently waiting to get back to our computers.
The second year of the camp saw slightly upgraded equipment and the arrival of something truly mysterious: “the internet.” This internet was available through America Online and a rickety dial-up connection, and every student could use it for one hour per week because it cost a fee. I still remember walking into the computer lab and seeing another student browsing the web for the first time with an instructor. It was like getting off the plane in a foreign country. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the new world around me. I was hooked; I can still see the websites and chat rooms that looked so mysterious and exciting. There was a big “MTV” button you could press on one of the AOL pages — the home of Beavis and Butt-Head! After the camp ended, I got my own AOL subscription, along with a modem and multiple large bills when I couldn’t stop chatting (my parents were oddly forgiving of this, for which I am eternally grateful).
Last summer, I was thinking about computer camp a lot. We were all locked down, and we were all on the computer all day. It wasn’t weird or unhealthy, it was normal. We actually started to get annoyed at the concept of talking to people online, at having to do everything online. I found myself getting irritated whenever someone would write a piece about The Internet when what they actually meant was Social Media. I defended it on Twitter, at one point tweeting “don’t blame the internet” to a friend — it was a long summer. I think my camp memories of staring at a screen all day made me want to stick up for something; not the internet but at least the idea of it. The idea remains beautiful.
As “lockdown” slowly moved into “vague lockdown with malaise,” I tried to remember that first moment of seeing the internet again. Staring at someone else’s screen, feeling overwhelmed and excited and confused. I couldn’t have survived this past year without being online — without friends, emails, the Zoom session with my therapist where she told me that I needed to stop reading social media so much. Without streaming some terrible Netflix original called something like The Secret Alcove that ran for ten episodes, ended on a massive cliffhanger, and was promptly cancelled. I recently finished reading a novel about online life in which the main character was a classic unreliable narrator — controlling the story and not letting you see past her field of vision. She was not a “likable” character, and yet I felt a connection to her because she reminded me of the entire internet these days. It’s a sloppy mess of anger and happiness and love and, yes, terrible television. And I’m glad it’s there for when we don’t feel like going to the swimming pool.
Christopher Busch lives in Baltimore and would like to talk to you about Judy Greer. You can follow him on Twitter here.
