(1) I like the internet because it taught me to love my attention deficiencies. The internet is a great playground for neurodivergence because it swallows you and your inattentiveness whole. It is fast enough to accommodate for impatience and deep enough to cater to obsession. They say adhd is the learned habit of dissociating from an acutely painful world. Every day I am reminded of my incompatibility with the world I have been forced into. I have never been good at operating in physical spaces, and I have suffered for it since I was a child. My coordination is poor, my collapsed arches limit my mobility, my directional sense is hopeless because I always forget to perceive the world around me. I don't know how to stay organized and I lose almost everything I own. In elementary school the physical world disoriented me so much I used to cry every time I left my home. When I discovered the internet I felt housed in a way I couldn't find offline. All my life has been hurtling towards some unknown, and the internet paved the way for such transportation. I use a chrome extension to watch all videos on 2x and have my trackpad at the fastest setting. I ctrl+t a new tab and am rewarded a blank canvas with only the slightest hint of latency. I type at 100 wpm without the physical constraints of shaping letters with a pencil and the existential panic of your thoughts evaporating before they are written. The internet was patient and enduring with autosaves and deep archives and a patent lack of judgement if you knew how to fall into the right crowd. The internet made me feel safe enough to sink into.
(2) I like the internet because it was my first substrate for intimacy. I had a childhood of acute social rejection and the first moments of closeness I felt were online. Texting is a romantic medium for me. For most of my relationships I fell in love over a continuous stream of text back and forth for months before I could really put a name to my feelings. I fell in love with the slowness of the medium, the simplicity of being limited to thought alone. I fell in love with the quiet fantasy of filling in the blanks beyond what texting could accomplish (i believe fantasy is necessary for romance). When I was younger I required such periods of slow intimacy in order to navigate and rein in my emotions before I could process them. In eighth grade I nurtured a careful crush on a friend of mine through late night skype conversations and trauma dumping; I remember the anticipation, the thrill of watching her active status light up in what was my first experience with meaningful intimacy. I repeated this process with my first partner as we spent many evenings peeling away at our layers. We documented our relationship with meeting minutes and spreadsheets, thirteen hour calls spilling by as we circumvented controlling parents and the physical space between us. In the freedom of adulthood it is still my favourite means of interaction, even when friends are an uber away. When we are together we still choose to connect online; in a chat thread, in a figma file, in a minecraft server. Digital communication is discrete and permanent in a way speech is not. I feel a certain freedom in my expression; I speak without inhibition and probe deeper into my thoughts. In person speech has too many variables to parse: an awareness of body language, the physical noise around me, the dance of not interrupting. With texting there is an asynchronous stream of communication. I often imagine what it means to inhabit someone's mind. It is inside a chat typing away in real time that I come closest to simulating such an experience. As I dissociate into the conversation it is as though we have entered a thought capsule with nothing but our brain output echoing off the walls.
(3) I like the internet because I am always trying to forget my body. My body is fun to remember when I am curating an outfit and delighting in being perceived but not so fun when the weight of nonconsensual objecthood and dispossession hits. When I remember my body I think of the way my knees curve inward and the scars on my forearms and the misery of growing up ugly. When I remember my body I remember all the ways in which I have failed at perfect objecthood. At 10 all I wanted in the world was to be pretty. At 15 I felt increasing dysphoria at the idea of growing breasts and wanted to remain skinny and shapeless in a way I struggle to define to this day. At 20 I would grow wary of my body and viewed the physical space it occupied as a reminder of the possibility of violation. A few years later I would manage to reprogram myself into coveting subjecthood. I was both fearful of sexualization and terrified of being undesired, and in that intersection I learned to enmesh desire with emotional closeness. The internet was my vehicle for such entanglement. Glitch Feminism: "in chatrooms I donned different corpo-realities while the rainbow wheel of death buffered [...] through this storytelling and shapeshifting, I was resurrected." the more I was online the more my body felt like a rental, easily exchanged for whatever avatar I had slipped on. In this manner, I yielded good objecthood in pursuit of being a good thinker. In my internet fantasy of a thought web of disembodied minds chucking words back and forth I think that is all that would matter.
(4) I like the internet because it welcomes the freaks. I like how it taught me about sex and drugs and exposed me to a litany of very bad ideas at a very young age. I remember my 10th birthday, my parents gifting me an ipod touch. Pocket sized and lovely, it was the first time I had the internet so close to me. At night I would slip under the covers and read fanfiction religiously until 2am. At any noise I would shove the device under my pillow, throw the blankets off my face, and drape my best imitation of sleep over my body. In the safety below the covers I entered ao3 and exited the stifled world of catholic school and robotic achievement and could become whatever I wanted to. I marvelled at the liberation of being online, the way it unmasked people. When you are surrounded by freaks you cease to be one. Unsupervised, I wandered around rap forums and deranged tumblr posts and the sex education of the internet, mingled with stans and edited articles on english monarchs and female writers and engaged in debates on abortion and evolution, consumed r/TheRedPill and 4chan and the YouTube channels of fundamentalists and indulged in the delight of being enraged. I came of age in this nightly ritual, at the fringes of human nature, observing its underbelly, sharpening the edges of my values. At times I felt only a few reddit threads away from extremism. In its own way it taught me a certain degree of restraint.
(5) I like the internet because I fear erasure. When I am online I am amorphous, untethered in mind as well as body. The act of digital creation is a means of playing god. When I consume online content I feel like I am tapping into something beyond myself. When I text my friends I marvel at their constancy in my life. When I create online it is as though a piece of me is being uploaded onto a network. I often think of how I will soon be erased but these websites will bear witness to my existence. I once watched a VSauce video about how the internet has the weight of a strawberry. When I am overwhelmed by the entropy of physical decay I close my eyes and imagine these words embedded deep in a fruit sized hard drive drifting time capsule style in the satellite we have sent out in response to the existential dread I tasted when I first learned about the heat death of the universe and the sun subsuming the earth with the lazy indifference of an astronomical process played out over and over, waiting to be unravelled by some intelligent life with wrinkled green hands or semi-digital parts or something I lack the concepts to describe. If you are the recipient of such an artifact I hope these thoughts resonate with you. Even in death I long to be understood.
(6) I like the internet because I have to. I like the internet because we are its stewards, and it is increasingly our reality. I like the internet because I work on a website to help people talk to one another, and I need to believe I can make it better. I like the internet because it taught me to love this world as it became the entirety of mine. I like the internet because I believe in our ability to unite and come together. I think of wikipedia and its strange web of knowledge enthusiasts, of internet highways and paths, of careful archives and digital libraries, of r/place, of the making of the internet in itself, and marvel at our collaboration, the collective birth of enormous magnitude. I like the internet because I believe in people. The labour has never ended. We are always pushing for more.
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