#13: RIP 🇵🇰 interwebs, 1990s—mid 2020s
A eulogy for the internet that raised me
I like to think of myself as a recovering, chronically online millennial. From playing Dave, Earthworm Jim, and every other Disney game imaginable to learning geography on the few school computers we school kids took turns on, the internet was my home away from a not-so-great home. As a tween, I frequented all sorts of forums, searching for everything from music that transported me far from my own life to updates on Daniel Radcliffe’s latest exploits in Potter forums (sadly, those books did not age well). The internet enriched my inner universe, and kept me out of the house for entire weekends spent in seedy, male-dominated internet cafés in Garden Town, blissfully unaware of anything that was not buffering.
When Facebook was banned in Pakistan—right before the infamous YouTube ban—I stumbled upon Twitter and a bunch of people who, at the time, at least seemed like they thought like me. I created personal blogs on LiveJournal, My Space, Blogspot, Last.fm, WordPress, only to delete them with reckless abandon, forever reinventing myself amidst the chaos of my personal circumstances. The possibilities were endless, all thanks to being a hashtag-blessed child of the internet.
I am no longer a child, and the internet is no longer the playground of possibilities it once was. It is dead; long gone.
But I do want to keep thinking about the time when I was still starry-eyed about it. When I did not think twice about looking up “obscure” music recommended by some Tom, Dick, or Harry who happened to be on my screen—because that is how rabbit holes work, right? When I was emo as hell but still happily swimming in my indecipherable Welcome to Lustmord~ MSN statuses, the EP forum, and music blogs that leaked albums I would never have been able to access as a Pakistani. My mIRC days, when I briefly learnt to code (to forget it just as quickly), came to an abrupt end when our school principal stormed into assembly, bellowing at the entire girls' branch to stop using it and speaking to boys, or else MEIN TAANGEIN TOR KE RAKH DOON GI. A tech crackdown with a side of potential physical violence; so on-brand.
I miss the websites I built on GeoCities, the hundreds of journal entries I posted (and then culled) across every imaginable platform. The magazines I worked on that never saw the light of day. The interest-based Yahoo Groups I could scroll through forever. The computers in the internet cafés of Punjab Society where I did my school homework—and, unfortunately, also came across random porn images that traumatised me for a bit. The cryptic Bandbaja updates before it sadly shut down. The Dark Lyrics website with innumerous awful band names I memorised in my early teens so I could pretend to like (most) metal to keep up with a friend who seemed too cool to be true (disclaimer: they were not). The pre-Napster days cos Winamp zindabad. <3
The internet eventually gave me the language to express my politics when life could not. The 10 rupay ke scratch cards were a lifeline when I briefly had a CPU—before I had to sell it to get my first-ever sari made for my O Levels farewell.
Life experiences, community, loved ones, hashtag friends like family have their own indelible place in the world, but the internet always had my back in a way that nothing or no one else did when I was too young to know how to fend for myself. It has ensured that I do not remain one-note, that I always have a well of references to delve into without feeling the need to borrow too heavily from any one thing. It’s weird to romanticise a past that never was: a world I built solely for escaping my own hellscape. The internet I grew up with is gone, but its ghosts linger: in my politics, half-remembered URLs, defunct bookmarks, scoresssss of playlists, and the fleeting thrill of putting up my writing online, reminding me that for a while, at least, it felt safe, even if it never was.
