Beneath the leviathans, there is room in the forests
this essay was originally published in the third issue of Halcyon.txt. It is available for print (physical) or digital (free) editions via the Halcyon Palace website with illustrations and page designs by illustrators and article collaborators Swamp and Solar.
For a period of time in my life, I constantly and systematically lied about my identity: my age, location, occupation, name… anything, really. I was a teenaged math whiz living in New York, a diehard ice hockey fan stuck in the barren deserts of Arizona, an avid roleplayer arguing power levels and politics from a University of Miami college dorm, or a Canadian gamer with an alibi so airtight that I managed an entire gaming community while members knew neither my voice nor appearance.
Despite how clandestine this all sounds, I wasn't some darkweb hacker or spy living out my own "Catch Me If You Can" moment. I was around twelve or thirteen; this was simply how I mediated my interactions with the World Wide Web.
These were the nebulous years of AIM and AOL Chatrooms, MSN Messenger, ICQ (and later, Skype), where there were no real inquiries into your life deeper than "a/s/l?", when the old New Yorker comic — you know the one, "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" — still reigned supreme. We were past the idyllic period of Usenet BBSes, ad-hoc online bulletin boards and communities mostly frequented by hackers, college students, and early adopters. These individuals understood the early promise of online community, but whether due to novelty, self-preservation instinct, or shyness, chose to interact with it in a strange, pseudonymous way. Here, you might talk about your closest sports interests with hackers or telephone phreakers who went by Scorpion, Corrupt, or Lord Digital, or your college roommate who signed off all of his messages with simply "Dave".
The AOL boom resulted in a sort of "suburbanization" of the Internet, shunting off the Wild West of Usenet and gently acclimating hundreds of thousands of new users to the walled garden of America Online's communities, groups where SurferDude81 could chat it up with JerseyGirl or KnicksFanMan halfway across the country as long as they all had an open phone line for dialup and were willing to pay $9.95 a month — or still had hours left on their demo disc.
It could be argued that the Internet never recovered from the Eternal September of low-quality discourse and ill-intentioned user behavior that AOL unleashed. And that’s to say nothing of the actual process of getting online. Even as a child, I remember it being chaotic; the dial tone followed by atonal squealing, a proprietary, slow, and unwieldy web browser riddled with pop-up ads. But nevertheless, it was how my 90s household (a row-home in North Philadelphia) first got connected, and how I experienced the Internet well into the late 2000s — starting with my mother bringing home a Dell Inspiron from the Gateway Computer store in a scene that might as well have been the Moon landing.
A new world was opened up to me then, first via CD-ROMs, then mediated-treks in the 2000s through KOL, Teen AOL or AOL Red’s parent-controlled functions — new communities, and with it, the potential for new relationships with identity in every exploration. Naturally, my digital avoidant streak began here. Even in these early years, I was coached comprehensively on how to dodge Internet villains that would seek to do me harm: if someone were to ask me "asl?" (age/sex/location, "the profile bio" of ephemeral chatrooms) I would rattle off misidentifying or misleading information so that any curious questioner would be thrown off my case. This was deep within the days of "Stranger Danger", and, obviously, the same mindset extended to the Internet — shows like To Catch A Predator gave middle America its first sensational exposure to adults attempting to groom minors. And the idea of predators lurking around every corner, real or online (aided in no small part by post-9/11 paranoia) contributed to an ambient neuroticism, and eventually the collective psychosis of early 2000s US pop culture.
It was simple: I didn't want to become bait for online predators, so I tried randomizing the stakes. It just made perfect sense to me — I didn't want to get trafficked, so I would make myself hard to catch.
This isn’t to say that my earliest years on the Internet were rife with deception and constant intrigue — they weren't. By and large, I was just another tween on 56k Internet with access to the usual suspect sites: Gaia Online, Newgrounds, Habbo Hotel, Neopets, Kongregate. When I sent in song requests to online radio stations like Radio KOL with Rick Adams, I did it under my real name, not thinking twice about the privacy risks. I yearned for time on the library computers because they had faster connections, which meant a better Runescape or Stick Arena experience. I still had my circle of friends, although they'd insist I refer to them as ChillyAcademic online rather than their actual names in school. I'd try my best to get around parental control locks so that I could access various ProBoards forums and gossip about games, comics and manga.
But forums brought with them a form of roleplay, and roleplay meant protective false identities, so when people tried to pin down the person behind my profile, I'd spin off a little story to give myself separation. And when health issues isolated me in school, I retreated further into the Internet, first as a lifeboat in times of unprecedented stress (sound familiar?), then as a liminal space between URL and IRL in which I could still live out my social life, albeit digitally.
There was a bit of a thrill in interacting with people then, even those presumed to be in your peer group. Internet users were both unusually, flippantly forthcoming about personal details but also evasive if they felt like it. If another user on IMVU or, (God forbid, these were still operating) a MUCK told you they were a fanatic crocheter, astronomer, and collector of American Dolls, you kind of just had to believe them, because there was no way at the time of looking behind the curtain. I mean, at this point, SecondLife seemed just as real as anything else to us.
I remember becoming embedded with fanfiction communities where my peers and I would speak (type?) in hushed tones about other users, because after a certain time anonymity granted them a kind of “urban legend” status — represented only by a 250x250 avatar on Fanfiction.net, wordlessly releasing a new polemic targeted towards their next fandom. We pored over positive reviews in a comment boxes, guestbook messages or favored stories like teens reading the latest magazine issues. Of course, in retrospect this behavior seems silly, and these mysterious figureheads of our digital communities were mostly pockmarked teenaged peers with slightly better grasps on their alibis.
I fell in and out of Internet cliques the same way I did real-life friend groups — sometimes we’d just drift away and stop talking, other times we’d force each other out over perceived slights or beef. Some of my bloodiest Internet battles took place on off-site ProBoards communities for Neopets roleplaying, or involved teenagers impersonating military veterans to obtain power on the servers of long-running 2D video game Space Station 13. I remember playing the turn-based fighting game Toribash, and ingratiating myself with an in-game clan. I was basically myself, but with some embellishment — I went to college in Florida (I was still in high school) for engineering (I was failing geometry) and I knew Spanish (I did not). To seal the deal, I snapped a pic of one of my older cousins and pretended it was me. It was an unbelievably grainy phone picture that it turned into a meme amongst my friends in the community…but it worked. Eventually, like all friend groups, we faded away and drifted apart — but my cover story passed scrutiny through the passage of time.
I can't pinpoint exactly when I stopped using cover identities for my online communities, but I can distinctly remember when I found myself at the other end of that spectrum. I had been playing youth football, and as all teams usually do, we had gathered for the yearly team picture. I don't actually remember creating a Facebook account, I was 13 and my main concern was trying to memorize the defensive playbook — but I remember the feeling I had when I saw this picture on the Internet. There I was, in all my pixelated glory.
And someone had tagged me — with my full name.
I felt caught. It wasn't that a stranger had tagged me —it was probably just an overworked coach running down the roster list for completeness — but that feeling of being seen, identified, categorized — was new to me at the time. It was the first time I had been simply referred to as myself. Without my quiver of painstakingly prepared identities, I was exposed.
It was a strange feeling. To be acted or actioned upon, and identified without agency or an ability to verbalize my discomfort.
Now, about a decade later, I'm realizing that it really wasn't about the "disguise" of the identity, or loss thereof, as much as the fact that these disguises, these embellished versions of me, allowed me to discover parts of myself before I realized them in real life. These aliases and the communities that I accessed through them, were the keys and unlocked doors, respectively, to a form of self-expression and world-building in which I could learn without getting hurt. If I had to envision what I did for so many years, I wouldn't choose to describe them as “masks” (although constantly changing identities bring to mind the masquerade) — I'd see them as safety valves, or better yet, exosuits — industrial tools used to secure and explore new and foreign environments. And who’s to say that those environments were actually new or foreign? Technologist É. Urcades said it best: websites or social media platforms aren’t virtual architecture or locations (digital public infrastructure), they’re literal extensions of ourselves and our psyches, "temporary bodies ... when [people] design interfaces [they’re]…designing the sensory organs people use to perceive information".
And yet now, society has opted for monetized, total front-facing identity, a sort of real and virtual organ harvesting in the Urcadean sense. It’s not enough to simply exist online, to spread out one’s idiosyncrasies in a new medium; one is expected to have an online brand, to flatten multifaceted, multidimensional souls into billboards for digital clout: hawking Carrds, circulating Linktrees, shilling TikToks of greatest hits for fifteen minutes of fame. Stuck in hyperlinked hyper-reality, 2020s netizens pawn content and clout for survival in a world where GoFundMe and mutual aid funds are new safety nets below already-tattered safety nets — digital lacework held together by the same fifty dollars being shuffled from Venmo to Square Cash to PayPal while governments, ostensibly there to help, move and retreat like glaciers.
Discovering something new or making personal spaces online seem to be bugs, not features, of these platforms, each cloning the other’s latest quirk or eating the carcass and content of a dead one before it. Tumblr arose from the ashes of LiveJournal. Google cannibalized Yahoo (who themselves consumed AskJeeves). Quora eats Yahoo Answers. TikTok eats Vine. And when these platforms shut down, or simply fade away, a more haunting world is created. Not an active one…a lost future, a crumbling garden without space or time, captured fully only in the memories of those who were around to create it — memories that with the onslaught of Content become eventually obsolete.
Sure, it’s convenient — it was a lot easier to coordinate beers with my college roommates when they recognized me by name and appearance rather than as Skyline32, MantisBox or Flyersfan39. But it’s also incredibly exposing. My mom doesn’t use her face for her Instagram or Facebook profile pictures. My dad has two Facebook accounts under his real name — he locked himself out of one — and to be honest, I don't know which one is the active one.
What's actually private or personal about any of this?
I am not a unique individual anymore. I am a collection of metadata in the Dirac sea floating endlessly in Facebook's data servers. There are millions, no, billions like me, and that knowledge should feel freeing, but instead I feel trapped. Worse, I don’t know how to get free. How can I, when I freely gave myself up into Web 2.0’s glossy web? I can disconnect, but not in any meaningful way: my name, my face, my web of Facebook friends, Twitter mutuals, Instagram followers, WhatsApp groups and GroupMe chats are all tied to me, or at least that particular digital extension of me. Anonymity is no longer assumed or even optional — I am a pinpoint on a grid, a frictionless content feed to check out. One of the "people you may know".
I have felt, and continue to feel, alienated by the way we use the Web today. There’s a lightness to it all, like something being relieved from me even though I didn’t ask for it. The house always wins, its work done efficiently by algorithms in virtual servers in data centers, endless calculations by black boxes put together by developers that don’t (and in some cases can’t) understand the short and long-term effects of their creations. The future is here and it’s both endlessly disappointing and poorly distributed — as Kurt Schiller writes, “we live in a world not of cyberpunk but of corporate gothic,” encountering ghosts in the ruins of speculative futures and crumbling digital architecture.
I’m interested in alternatives to these platforms and these situations.
Beneath the leviathans, there is room in the forests.
The “dark spaces” that make up the majority of the Internet beyond that of dominant platforms offer a better understanding of ways to sidestep or opt out. Kickstarter founder Yancey Strickler views the Internet like a dark forest: prioritizing smaller, private, depressurized and decentralized areas of conversation and collaboration. In these spaces, I see the same threads of the shared spirit of collaboration and solidarity that informed my earliest experiences on the Web. Not the profit-motivated Clear Web, not the decomposing moral base of the “Dark Web” either. Patient, user-mediated, low-stakes, like-minded, harmonious communities, protected but not insular — digital gardens being tended to over time. As Venkatash Rao and Maggie Appleton puts it, a “cozier Web”.
What might these new communities and platforms look like? Dungeons and Dragons players designing community spaces for roleplay, fantasy sports crews collecting stats, educational communities teaching themselves new skills and sharing resources — friends using technology to share their niche interests, creating new tools of their own, and making new dreams of their own. These are processes society already does, but ones that can exist technologically at a very different and specific level. Substack newsletters and Are.na pages are constructing lattices of collective understanding – perhaps they will empower their participants’ collective potential instead of subjugating it to SEO score, forced engagement, or algorithmic timelines.
To take the name of the digital cyber-raves connecting outcasts worldwide throughout this pandemic, I want a Hurt-Free Network. I want to visualize digital community spaces that are made for mutual trust, utopian thinking, creativity begetting creativity like iron sharpening iron. I don’t want “mutuals”, I want co-conspirators. I want to feel the same way I used to when the Internet felt like magic — when all those identities I took on felt as real as anything else in the world.
This may be myopic to say, but I sincerely believe we’re at a significant turning point in the history of digital culture, and the next steps we collectively take are vital. I think these communities are the best chance to get out of this framework of extracting identity for capital (both financial and social) and creating new commons of public space online.
The zine you’re reading right now is a good start.
this essay would not be possible without the help of a host of editors, proofreaders, friends, and co-conspirateurs, including Chace, Geoffrey Mak, Dillinja Escape Plan, & everyone else in the Halcyon Palace discord.