the internet the first time I used it at my dad’s office and thought it was the ULTIMATE COOL,” I wrote, when I was ten, on an Angelfire subpage titled “The Story of How Jia Got Her Web Addiction.” In a text box superimposed on a hideous violet background, I continued:
But that was in third grade and all I was doing was going to Beanie Baby sites. Having an old, icky bicky computer at home, we didn’t have the Internet. Even AOL seemed like a far-off dream. Then we got a new top-o’-the-line computer in spring break ’99, and of course it came with all that demo stuff. So I finally had AOL and I was completely amazed at the marvel of having a profile and chatting and IMS!!
Then, I wrote, I discovered personal webpages. (“I was astonished!”) I learned HTML and “little Javascript trickies.” I built my own site on the beginner-hosting site Expage, choosing pastel colors and then switching to a “starry night theme.” Then I ran out of space, so I “decided to move to Angelfire. Wow.” I learned how to make my own graphics. “This was all in the course of four months,” I wrote, marveling at how quickly my ten-year-old internet citizenry was evolving. I had recently revisited the sites that had once inspired me, and realized “how much of an idiot I was to be wowed by that.”
I have no memory of inadvertently starting this essay two decades ago, or of making this Angelfire subpage, which I found while hunting for early traces of myself on the internet. It’s now eroded to its skeleton: its landing page, titled “THE VERY BEST,” features a sepia-toned photo of Andie from Dawson’s Creek and a dead link to a new site called “THE FROSTED FIELD,” which is “BETTER!” There’s a page dedicated to a blinking mouse GIF named Susie, and a “Cool Lyrics Page” with a scrolling banner and the lyrics to Smash Mouth’s “All Star,” Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” and the TLC diss track “No Pigeons,” by Sporty Thievz. On an FAQ page—there was an FAQ page—I write that I had to close down my customizable cartoon-doll section, as “the response has been enormous.”
It appears that I built and used this Angelfire site over just a few months in 1999, immediately after my parents got a computer. My insane FAQ page specifies that the site was started in June, and a page titled “Journal”—which proclaims, “I am going to be completely honest about my life, although I won’t go too deeply into personal thoughts, though”—features entries only from October. One entry begins: “It’s so HOT outside and I can’t count the times acorns have fallen on my head, maybe from exhaustion.” Later on, I write, rather prophetically: “I’m going insane! I literally am addicted to the web!”
In 1999, it felt different to spend all day on the internet. This was true for everyone, not just for ten-year-olds: this was the You’ve Got Mail era, when it seemed that the very worst thing that could happen online was that you might fall in love with your business rival. Throughout the eighties and nineties, people had been gathering on the internet in open forums, drawn, like butterflies, to the puddles and blossoms of other people’s curiosity and expertise. Self-regulated newsgroups like Usenet cultivated lively and relatively civil discussion about space exploration, meteorology, recipes, rare albums. Users gave advice, answered questions, made friendships, and wondered what this new internet would become.
Because there were so few search engines and no centralized social platforms, discovery on the early internet took place mainly in private, and pleasure existed as its own solitary reward. A 1995 book called You Can Surf the Net! listed sites where you could read movie reviews or learn about martial arts. It urged readers to follow basic etiquette (don’t use all caps; don’t waste other people’s expensive bandwidth with overly long posts) and encouraged them to feel comfortable in this new world (“Don’t worry,” the author advised. “You have to really mess up to get flamed.”). Around this time, GeoCities began offering personal website hosting for dads who wanted to put up their own golfing sites or kids who built glittery, blinking shrines to Tolkien or Ricky Martin or unicorns, most capped off with a primitive guest book and a green-and-black visitor counter. GeoCities, like the internet itself, was clumsy, ugly, only half functional, and organized into neighborhoods: /area51/ was for sci-fi,