From The Economist's 1843 Magazine:
In my experience, the real intoxication of
the internet in the 1980s lay in the contrast between the luminescent
yellow-green symbols and the fathomless yonder. This is how it appeared
on my first computer terminal, a boxy khaki Zenith z-19, which I lucked
into when my father bought it on a whim in 1979 and I was the only one
in my family who was rapt. Behind the letters there seemed to be a cold,
mile-deep mountain lake or perhaps an uncharted galaxy, colder still. I
explored the earliest online “conferences”, as the first message boards
were known, in the days of the arpanet, the vast network
created by the Pentagon in 1969 and considered to be the precursor to
the internet. I imagined that the darkness – maybe all darkness – was
cyberspace itself. To be truthful, the experience was erotic. As a
teenager, such shudders were always close at hand, of course, but new
longings were also stoked by the green words that embellished the void.
They were not quite “sexts”, more tentative flirtation: what’s your room
like? Is your mom around?
That breath-holding apprehension of the
sublime – romance, starless night, the internet – returned to me in the
spring, at the moment when work, social life, commerce and the exchange
of ideas slipped from largely online to wholly online, when the economy
shut down in deference to the pandemic. The pathogens choked the air.
We ceded the outdoors to them and confined ourselves to the domestic
realm. There the internet became mandatory and panoptic. It never let
up. Zoom meeting after FaceTime catch-up after e-commerce bender and
always email, texts, documents, bill-paying, social media and Netflix. I
still have the ticket stub for the last film I saw in a cinema the
night before I stopped leaving my house in March: “First Cow”. That’s
the same month my tickets for “Mrs Doubtfire” on Broadway were refunded.
Now I wonder when I’ll sit in a theatre again.
Thirty-five years
ago the internet was a fantasia, to be slipped into like Narnia, at the
back of a shameful closet, out of sight of grown-ups. Though socially
distanced, you could fall in love and have your heart broken there, but
it was all your own very secret, very eccentric crisis. Now, by order of
the state government, my daylight hours are supersaturated by the
uniformly high-noon screen of my Macbook, as far from my Zenith
interface as a craggy cave wall is from glossy magazine paper. I crave
the time when the internet was a lacuna in regular existence, and not
the entirety of it.
We left New York City, my two kids and boyfriend and I, soon after
the virus peaked there. Hundreds were still dying of the disease every
day. Thousands were on ventilators. An 18-wheeler that had been
converted into a mobile morgue was still stationed a block from our
apartment. We saw people pile in bodies. I had lost my aunt and my job
by the time we drove to the countryside in my boyfriend’s battered Honda
Odyssey. Sirens wailed as we headed north. I still sometimes get a
skullful of their Doppler effect. As a casino-worker I met told me the
night before we left, I had the advantage of being a “soft pants”
worker, whereas he – a pit boss in Las Vegas – was a “hard pants” one.
As a soft-pants worker, I could make my living online at home in Tencel
leggings that our grandfathers would not recognise as workwear. The pit
boss, however, needed to suit up in trousers made of a more dignified
fabric, monitor gamblers at arm’s length and glad-hand with regulars.
Risk disease, in other words. Maybe he had identified a categorisation
that ought to supersede the one between blue and white collars.
For
me, what’s changed? I’m at my computer as I’ve been for 35 years,
through adolescent longings and university paper-writing, through
message boards and gifs and attempts at actual sexting and Bumble and
the development of my cheerful Bitmoji and my current truly adorable
Animoji, a rendering of me which I can animate and give my own voice. I
open the dear old world wide web, born 1993 to father Tim Berners-Lee.
Here come the tabs: news of the presidential election, videos of
violence, data on the pandemic, the antivirals, the promised vaccine.
Sometimes I’m on a sofa.
Sometimes I’m on a deck by the creek, batting
away mosquitoes. But really I’m on – or more like in – Twitter, where
the world’s ascendant autocracies are always top of mind. How
extraordinary that this internet, my first true love, is no longer a
guilty infatuation. It’s work! Meanwhile, my militantly Luddite son Ben
is not too far behind, even though he disdains a smartphone, teases me
for being a “screenager” and uses a manual Royal typewriter to keep off
Google Docs. “Can I get an ‘um’?” he sometimes says, when I’m deep in an
internet trance....
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