My Own Private Information Superhighway

by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Welcome to The Lost Internet, a month-long series in which the members of Flaming Hydra revisit internet marvels of the past. 

Much hay is made about the tiny screens emitting a bluish glow into your naked face as you scroll through Instagram during 4:00 a.m. bouts of sleeplessness, not that I would know anything about that. But I wonder what the health experts would have said, had they been called upon to do so, about the blue-black screens on which harsh cursors in Brat green or slasher-movie orange blinked soullessly back at you from the beige plastic coffins in which they were once imprisoned, long ago. You couldn’t take those suckers to bed, even the monitor weighed like 50 pounds. I’m talking about the internet of the 1990s, a virtual Wild West in which one had to type actual characters on a thick, heavy keyboard in order to navigate at all. The idea of seeing a real photograph on a computer, let alone a website, let alone a full-color photograph containing more than a thousand pixels, was a dream out of a sci-fi movie. 

It was in the actual Wild West that I first absorbed this eyesight-deteriorating light from the beige boxes, under equally damaging, dim fluorescent overheads in a communal computer lab in Laramie, Wyoming, 1994. Overseeing my typings were an inexplicable oil painting of a mushroom cloud—very realistic, the embodiment of post-Cold War dark humor—and my crush, the black-haired bassist and computer-lab manager who would one day mildly ruin my life. “Web Sites” were still an inchoate abstraction. I vaguely recall viewing a rudimentary Tori Amos “e-zine” consisting of her two-album solo discography.

For me the tidal wave of The Internet came with Usenet newsgroups: endless lines of glowing, flowing text where people around the world could come together to discuss their interests, which in my case consisted mainly of riot grrrl and Björk.

On alt.icelandic.waif.bjork.bjork.bjork, which had spun off, as a lark, from alt.music.bjork, I discovered the Icelandic singer’s history as an 11-year-old pop star and learned when each new music video had been added to the MTV rotation. The tagline, "Ex-Sugarcubes—Not the Swedish Chef" suggested a particular cheekiness, and in addition to learning that the tween Björk had once played a tribute song for the Icelandic painter Jóhannes Kjarval on recorder, the site defined for me an internet lingua franca that has only become, simultaneously, ever more sophisticated and elemental: ironic, acerbic, and dedicated to shitposting (with love). The challenge even then was that, if you weren’t sharing useful information with your Usenet cohorts, it helped to be the funniest person in the room. Groups like this—and there were thousands of them—were pure, distilled examples of what the internet at its best and most fun would always be, though posting publicly to such a newsgroup came with a jolt of fear and anticipation that is relatively rare today: the stress of saying something, in public, with your name attached, and praying that it landed.