Supplemental re-entry.

Once in high school I accidentally called Mexico with a modem. Somebody answered through the speaker: “Bueno? … Bueno?” I said “Sorry” and disconnected, but my dad found the charge on the phone bill and took the modem away.

My first internet experiences were on BBSs, which were long-distance phone calls from Alaska for me then. There weren’t many. Eventually a local gateway to a university network became available, and my usage went up dramatically.

A friend who’d gone off to college called to tell me about a new “M-U-D”. I connected and found them there, but they seemed different online. I have a distinct memory of navigating the weirdness of a personality refracted through text while fighting fuzzy bunnies in the newbies’ paddock.

Soon afterward, I found myself in something related to MUDs called a MOO, which was essentially a chat room disguised as a collaborative text adventure game, this one set in the creator’s house. A year later, after spending many hours there, I wound up navigating in meatspace to a hotel suite in some corner of Seattle, where I was greeted by a roomful of total strangers yelling my username.

Still later I met someone else in another text-based web forum, and we emailed for a year without exchanging much in the way of Personal Identifiable Data at all. Then, while on a roadtrip, it transpired I was passing near enough to their city to detour. I met them in human form, and now we’ve been together for half of our lives.

If I’d grown up online I might feel differently about the last 4.5 years, but without physical human interaction, the bite-sized epistolary nature of social media seems hollow. You’re great, but you’re better in person.

I miss eating meals with people. A year into the pandemic I began to have a series of dreams in which I was with a group of people on a sidewalk, trying to decide where to eat. I had at least six of these, then they stopped. I haven’t had a sit-down meal in a restaurant since February 2020.

Last weekend I saw a lot of old friends and met some new ones, all of which was thanks to the Internet, and got a little taste of what the network used to feel like. It was a bit overwhelming, I’m out of practice. It was good to hang out and break some metaphorical bread, even just takeout in a park.

It feels like the best reason to get online anymore is to somehow increase the odds that I’ll be able to meet someone offline, which is where most of the good stuff happens anyway. We need to be able to find each other.

I’ve worked as part of a team on public-facing projects, but for a few years I’ve mostly been working alone, in private, and nobody ever sees any of it. I don’t think that’s healthy for me. It was kind of romantic when I wasn’t exclusively online, in a kind of Pattern Recognition sort of way, but even Parkaboy shows up eventually.

I realize this is not universally applicable or even available, and I write from a place of privilege, but I’m trying to push against a future of entirely digitally-mediated relationships. By posting on my website. Baby steps.

Even just writing this feels a bit awkward, but relearning a muscle always does.

Here are some ideas I encountered or re-encountered this week that I’m still thinking about:

Stories as travel, flashbacks as wormholes. Keepsakes and mementoes as an everted memory palace, each object containing a universe from a specific point of view.

Object as word, form (or style) as language, work (artwork, building, project) as book. World as library. Everyone a librarian.

The dark forest hypothesis of the internet. The duty of care for those who don’t or can’t connect to protected spaces. Airlocks between inside and out.

“Deep web” as literal bathymetry.

Cognitive wilderness preserves: a place in the mind for intentional ignorance on a topic. I think I want to rewild a lot of my brain – I’ve spent so many years learning things I no longer use or need, and I’ve felt a bit morose about that. It’s nicer to imagine those areas becoming a mental pollinator garden. Maybe something else can grow there.

Building in the ruins.

Anhedonia as atrophy.

A coffee mug made out of space shuttle thermal tiles. …No, it’s a terrible idea. Probably.

Thanks for meeting me here. What’s good?