It’s 30 years after the year 1994 which means that the majority of my close friends are throwing a big birthday bash to celebrate the Big One, and since March is a popular time of year to be born I have been going to a lot of birthday parties these past few weeks (Pisces and Aries split down the middle, sorry Pisces) and those birthday parties had themes that make us delve deep into the past—blanket Y2K, middle school, Jersey Shore, etc. All these parties have got me thinking a little bit, one, that I don’t fit into anything I once wore as a preteen and it’s kind of hard to put together an accurate costume these days, and two, I’m a millennial dweeb who loves nostalgia just like all the other millennial dweebs. Embarrassing!
When trying to make a PowerPoint for a 13-going-on-30 party, I really started thinking about what life was like back in 2007, when I was also thirteen years old. I was so, so sad but also quite happy considering what my adult life has turned out to be. I was cringe, but I was free. I had a huge crush on a guy named Tommy who I would talk to on AOL Instant Messenger on the daily, even though he didn’t like me back at all. I spent most of my free time on the computer in the computer room (kids these days just DON’T know what it’s like to have a computer room!), and I would spend hours loading up music videos on YouTube because we still had dial-up. When I went to my friends’ houses, we would just do the same thing on the computer over there. The bands we listened to had blogs we could read and we could see what our friends were doing on MySpace and Gaia Online (the MySpace for people who were cool and liked anime).
Sure, the internet was always a scary place with scary things. Back in the day you could just look up “Pete Wentz” and see a picture of his penis (something I did NOT want to see back then!). My parents had no idea what a computer really did so there was no way to check out what I was doing on there. I managed to destroy the first family computer with viruses by downloading full albums illegally. Luckily I never experienced anything too traumatic while spending time online.
“We get it, you went on the computer a lot when you were younger and now you’re still on the computer a lot but it’s different, and you’re old and annoying so you’re going to complain about how the internet used to be better 15-20 years ago because you hate progress. Is that what you’re making me read a whole newsletter for?” you may be asking. And the answer is yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing.
It could be that my adult-ridden melancholy is so great that I have a hard time enjoying time spent online these days, but I also don’t think I’m the only one who feels as though the internet is simply less pleasurable to use than it used to be. We don’t really have…websites anymore. There are apps that are also websites, and they’re all social media and all the social media does anymore is try to sell stuff to us and the stuff is expensive and also poor quality.
There used to be sites for anything really—social media, niche videos, dress-up games, random meal generators, forums, the list goes on and on. But as smaller sites became less popular over time, becoming too expensive to keep running, and the end of support for Adobe Flash Player made all fun free online games unplayable, it seems as though the endless scroll given to us by big tech companies (and microtransactions on phone games) are all we have anymore, at least that’s the way that I feel. I don’t go onto Facebook, Twitter (now called something I do not acknowledge), or TikTok and have a really fun time. I’m there for a long time, but certainly not a good one.
If it wasn’t for being part of the local comedy community keeping up to date with shows and stuff, I probably wouldn’t use Instagram much at all. The content they give me is from nobody I follow, and the recipe videos I’m given look different but always turn out to be beans in some kind of sauce. TikTok’s algorithm has pushed me into a side that’s just discourse and thirst edits, and I really have to make sure I’m not there for too long or I’ll feel bad after wasting two hours of my life away. Twitter hasn’t been good for a long time—I miss when celebrities would tweet about being on the toilet or whatever back in, like, 2013. I just haven’t used Tumblr in a long time because, well, I’m not ready to open that can of worms again, but I have heard the user experience nowadays isn’t the worst.
My favorite part about going online now is reading other newsletters in my email and playing the New York Times connections game. It’s one of the only ways I’ve found to avoid being fed content by an algorithm. You just have to be on your email app while waiting for a friend at the bar. Is this a product of being old, or the internet being dead?
Personal pages are less customizable than ever before and meanwhile every image you see on Google Images is probably fake and made by AI. Online media is dead and dying. The best dating app is a movie review website. All I want is to put some custom music on my profiles and play dress-up games on my laptop. Is the internet currently less fun, or am I just a curmudgeon?
Who’s to say? But I will mention that the American Girl website no longer has fun little games you can play for free. And you used to be able to do that. But who’s even paying attention to that? Let’s all go on Pinterest, the only site that’s been consistently all right for vision boards and very old memes.