The Great Game of Chance That Was LimeWire

by Felipe De La Hoz

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

At 29, I’m too young to really have lived the fabled bedlam of the early internet, but old enough to remember an internet before it had been taken over by aging tech bros who could crush communities and destroy rival websites, publications, and companies at the snap of a finger.

I trawled Omegle and laughed at adult strangers trying to prey on me, half-erect by the blue glow of a dim screen in a dimmer room. I collected photos of teenage parties lit unflatteringly by direct flash on colorful point-and-shoot digital cameras that are once again all the rage, posting them on a Facebook that was years out from seeming so sinister.

But perhaps the most chaotic environment I can remember was the casino of digital content known as LimeWire. LimeWire was a peer-to-peer file-sharing client, what is commonly known today as a torrent platform. Everyone who joined the network shared certain files on their computers, and every user could download any of these, cumulatively and simultaneously, to their own machines, which would then become part of the pooled distribution network. It was easy to search inside the LimeWire app itself, so every curious teen was only a few keywords away from a vast ocean of music, movies, pornography, software and whatever else the files were purported to be—though they weren’t always what they purported to be. You spun the roulette wheel and, if you were lucky, you got a serviceable copy of M. Night Shyamalan’s terrible thriller The Happening (2008), maybe with the audio a little off and subtitled in Portuguese. If you got unlucky, well, time to explain to your parents what an “.exe” file was and how some guy in Macedonia managed to charge four flights from London to Paris on the family credit card.