Inhabiting Worlds

I miss the old internet.

That’s not quite true. Or rather, it is true, but only in the way that most true
things are also incomplete.

I don’t miss dial-up tones, broken image links, table layouts held together by
spite and nested HTML, or spending half an afternoon trying to work out why something had shifted six pixels to the left in Internet Explorer but not
Netscape Navigator. I don’t miss the inconvenience, not exactly. I don’t miss
the friction for its own sake.

What I miss is that the internet once felt like a world you could inhabit.

Not a platform. Not an audience capture mechanism. Not a personal brand
accelerator. Not a place where every profile is expected to be an ID badge,
résumé, storefront and confession booth all at once. A world. A place with
districts and weather. A place with handles and lore and recurring characters.

A place where you could stumble across someone’s writing at two in the morning and feel like you’d found a little settlement in the fog.

That’s the part I miss.

When I was younger, the internet felt adjacent to reality without being fully
claimed by it. It was real enough to matter and unreal enough to expand with you as you breathed.

You could be there sincerely without standing under a floodlight. You could
write in a heightened voice, or as a persona, or as a version of yourself that
leaned more heavily into wit, sadness, drama or absurdity, and other people
would understand what you were doing. They wouldn’t accuse you of being
fake because the performance was part of the grammar. They knew. You
knew they knew. It was all a nod and a wink.

And within that nod and wink, a self that was too weak - in the way that a freshly-birthed fawn is weak - could emerge slowly into the light.

That’s the part that seems hardest to explain now, because modern internet
culture is so flattened by literalism. We are asked, increasingly, to be
ourselves in a way that feels less honest the more insistently it is demanded.
Show your face. Use your real name. State your affiliations. Clarify your
position. Collapse the distance between the person and the performance until there is no performance left, only exposure. We call this authenticity, but I’m not convinced.

Sometimes a mask is not there to conceal the truth. Sometimes it is only
from behind the mask that we can find our voice.

Back then, a handle was not always an act of hiding. Often it was an act of
rendering. You picked a name not because you were ashamed of who you
were, but because who you were could be expressed more precisely through style than through biography. You could become legible through voice before you became legible through demographics.

People could hear your voice without the accent.

The old internet had space for the kind of self that was neither fully invented
nor fully exposed. A stylized self. A performed self. Not fake. Not
confessional. Just angled. A true angle of the person, made livable through
language.

And other people, if they were any good, would “yes, and” it.

That was one of the great acts of generosity the old internet knew how to
perform. Someone would arrive in a thread, on a personal site, in a forum
signature, in a half-apocryphal column, with a voice that was clearly a bit and clearly not only a bit. Everyone understood the terms. The spectacle was the point. Not because it was false, but because the spectacle created enough distance for sincerity to survive contact with other people.

I think about that sometimes when I try to understand what exactly was lost.

Not community, though some of that was lost too. Not anonymity, exactly,
though that has certainly been dragged into the street and interrogated. What was lost, maybe, was the social permission to be oblique. To be heightened. To be a little “in character” without anyone pretending the character was all there was.

The old internet understood something that modern online life seems
embarrassed by: that people are often most themselves when they are
allowed to perform.

That’s true of theatre. It’s true of drag. It’s true of tabletop roleplay. It’s true
of flirtation, prayer and fiction. It was true of the old internet too. You could
inhabit a voice the way you inhabit formalwear, or evening light, or a version
of yourself that only comes into focus when given the right architecture.
That didn’t make it false. It made it possible.

And because so many people were doing this at once, the internet took on
that strange half-fictional atmosphere that is almost impossible to describe to anyone who wasn’t there. It was ridiculous and not-real in a way that let it
feel more alive.

You could read the comments on popular websites, old forum posts, weird personal sites, columns passed around like contraband, and get the sense that there were people in the fog becoming characters in real time. Not celebrities. Not content creators. Characters, who, underneath it all were people with day jobs, Thanksgivings to attend, awkward trips to the grocery store to contend with who could become more than the mundane, without the need for the naked fakery and pretense that pervades social media.

That distinction matters more than I can easily explain.

The kind of naked fakery I mean is when an influencer post photos of themselves in front of a Lamborghini and what you don’t see outside the frame is the angry manager of the dealership about to throw them out. On the old internet, that same dreamer could have written about that life in the way that Hunter S. Thompson wrote about his travels, while driving their Honda Civic to work.

The difference is atmosphere. The atmosphere being inclusion. We could all join the writer on their quest to reason about who they would be if they were a person who could live that sort of life. But nobody was under any illusions that they were; most importantly of all was that they weren’t under that illusion.

That atmosphere of early internet had something that we’ve lost. It had dusk in it. It had enough technical friction, enough social looseness, enough textuality, and enough distance from ordinary life that a person could become mythic at small scale. Not famous. Not powerful. Just vivid. You could know someone entirely through their writing and come away with a stronger sense of their presence than you might get now from a dozen high-resolution photos and cross-platform identity graphs.

The more real the internet became, the less of this it could tolerate.

Real names. Real names tied to jobs. Jobs tied to networks. Networks tied to monetization. Posts tied to reputational risk. Everything searchable,
indexable, sortable, performatively accountable. The social web became less like a city at night and more like a brightly lit business park with security
cameras. Convenient, perhaps. Efficient, certainly. But hard to haunt.

And I think some of us are lonelier there than we know how to say.

Because what we miss is not simply privacy, and not simply pseudonymity,
and not even simply freedom. What we miss is the existence of a stage on
which a person could become more fully themselves through indirection.

I know this is true because I see people born too late to experience what I’m describing longing for it. They wish social media could be connective without exposing. They wish their voice could be heard without every word being examined.

I keep circling this because I don’t think it’s only about the internet.

It’s also about selfhood.

When I look back at who I was online in those years, I don’t think I’m only
looking back at old posts or dead platforms or that particular texture of late
90s and early 2000s cyberspace. I think I’m trying to understand who I
wanted to be, or perhaps who I was able to be, when there was still enough
separation between the person I was in ordinary life and how I could express myself when everyone was watching the performance instead of watching me.

I miss that.

Not because I want to retreat into some adolescent unreality where nothing
counts and nobody can be held accountable for anything they say. That would be childish. The old internet had its cruelties, its idiots, its bores and its monsters just as surely as every age does. But it also had a social literacy around style that feels increasingly rare. A shared understanding that writing could be theatrical without being dishonest. That reality itself could stand a little dramatic distance now and then.

I think that dramatic distance mattered because it let us inhabit ourselves
more gently.

To say this is me is sometimes too blunt an instrument. Too naked. Too
easily misunderstood. But to say “this is a voice I can inhabit, and through
that voice you may be able to see me more clearly than I can bear to be seen directly” — that is a different proposition altogether.

That is not less true, it is not a lie.
It is, in some cases, real in a way that the blunt reality of who we are in everyday life simply cannot be.

Maybe that is what the old internet made room for: not anonymity as such,
but masked sincerity. Not performance as deception, but performance as a
container. A vessel sturdy enough to carry real thought and feeling without
spilling them everywhere or demanding that they be defended in literal terms.

You could write dramatically and be answered dramatically. You could be
funny in a way that implied a whole life behind the joke. You could be sad in a way that had shape and style and some residual dignity. You could be weird without having that weirdness marketed to. You could be
earnest without someone immediately trying to either monetize it or diagnose it.

The internet has become many things: too commercial, at once hyperreal and too exaggerated, full of gullible people who expect reality and cannot understand the truth in showmanship.

We reached the end of the concert and the house lights came up, and the magic vanished. Too much floodlighting, not enough creeping darkness, not enough fog.

And without the fog, there are no cyberpunks emerging from it. There are
only founders, posters, influencers, subscribers, employees, brands, users
and adversarial readers. The old internet gave us personalities that felt like
presences. The new internet gives us people who have been flattened into
metadata.

No wonder so many of us keep looking for a world to inhabit.

A world, after all, is not merely a place where things happen. It is a place
where style, meaning, action and identity all cohere. The old internet was one such world for a while. Not because it was perfect, and not because it was more morally pure, but because it still permitted atmosphere. It still allowed small mythologies to bloom in out-of-the-way corners. It still let ordinary people of ordinary means become strange and vivid to one another through connection at the expressive layer.

You didn’t have to be a celebrity. You didn’t have to be a founder. You didn’t
have to be legible in daylight. You only had to have a voice and the nerve to
use it.

I don’t know if we’ll get that world back.

Historical moods close. Platforms calcify. Frontiers professionalize. The internet that once felt adjacent to zines, theatre, bulletin boards and forums, fandom, cyberpunk, roleplay and correspondence now feels more adjacent to payroll systems and shareholder value.

I don’t think that’s just nostalgia speaking. I think some doors really did close.

But I also don’t think the desire itself is obsolete.

The desire to inhabit a voice.
The desire to meet others in shared performance.
The desire to be known through style before being captured by biography.
The desire for a world that is both real and not-real enough to allow for
transformation.

Those desires still make sense to me. More than that, I think they point to
something human that we have become too quick to dismiss. We are not
made only for disclosure. We are made for rendering. For ceremony. For
costume. For the kind of expression that reveals the self in the space between the words.

I don’t so much miss the old internet as I miss all that it enabled.

I miss the worlds that could be built there. I miss the way a person could step into one under a name that was not their own and, by doing so, tell the truth more accurately than they could have managed otherwise. I miss the shared wink. I miss the fog. I miss the spectacle of performance, and the courtesy with which it was once received.

Mostly, I miss that strange old feeling that there were people out there,
writing into the dark, and that, as you stumbled across them by accident you were finding worlds to inhabit.