1.
Maybe your next piece could be about the state of the internet, my editor said. Oh wow, I replied, strapping myself to a parasail large enough to glide on solar winds. Cool—that’s a great idea. My plan was to float gently into the annihilating darkness of space, safely exiting our solar system before being made to write any part of the assignment I was now, to my own horror, agreeing to undertake. Don’t get me wrong. I love the current state of the internet. I’ve always enjoyed screaming about politics inside a racist strip mall. I just didn’t want to write about it.
I’m in! I told Aric.
Ten minutes later, as a friendly air current bore me aloft into the upper atmosphere, my phone pinged again. It was Aric. Aren’t you always pitching me some idea about old-school internet forums? Maybe just write that.
Do you know how to disengage a parasail harness at 26,000 feet? I replied.
Old-school internet forums! I was put on this earth to discuss them! Old-school forums are, to me, the most fascinating places on the contemporary internet, largely due to their overwhelming non-contemporaneity. Ancient holdovers of a pre-algorithmic civilization now lost in the mists of time, forums offer us a vision of an online culture free of all the stuff we complain about when we complain about online culture. These relics are not, as we say, “optimized for engagement.” They do not show posts out of order. They are not a space where the Old El Paso salsa brand account can clap back after some loose talk from A.1. steak sauce. They are, in many respects, maddening and terrible, but they’re maddening and terrible in ways that are precisely inverse to the ways most of the internet is maddening and terrible. They are the dark mirror that shows us what we’ve become. They are also a pretty good place to get gardening tips.
Do you know what I mean when I say “old-school internet forums”? I’m not talking about, like, 8chan. If your forum has been linked to even one mass shooting, it is not the kind of forum I’m talking about. I’m also not talking about subreddits, though Reddit appropriated and modernized the same basic structure, and I’m not talking about Discords, though Discord appropriated and modernized the same basic approach to community. I’m talking about a message board with its own unique domain name and a specific topical focus. Maybe that domain name is peppermintchat.org. Maybe that topical focus is peppermints. Peppermint Chat will have been founded by a single peppermint enthusiast, possibly called Stuart, in about 1998. It will have undergone precisely one redesign in the intervening 26 years, probably around 2007.
Extremely Online A Celebration of Internet Ephemera
The users of peppermintchat.org will be the biggest group of hardcore freaks you can possibly imagine. They will be passionate. They will be scholarly. They will be deeply opinionated and wildly adventurous. And they will be each of these things exclusively about peppermints—nothing else. Their lives will revolve around the peppermint. (And also possibly their grandchildren, at least one of whom is named Peppermint.) They will use language like, “When I began my peppermint journey.” They will import rare and exotic peppermint cultivars from China. They will have contacts inside Brach’s and report breathlessly on minor tweaks to the candy cane formula ahead of what they call “the high season.” They will say things like, “I’ve probably spent upwards of $70,000 chasing that red-and-white-striped dragon.” Will their site load on mobile? It will not.
Within the larger body of Peppermint Chatters, there will be a smaller subset of elite posters, micro-celebrities of the peppermint kingdom. Their personalities, proclivities, states of residence, and even real names will be known to all who frequent the site. They will sometimes meet up in real life for peppermint-related activities, and in the world of the forum, these meetings will have the gravity and significance of the Yalta Conference. MintMan1 flew to Belarus to see PepperMinsk! The forum will be divided into many subforums, with the biggest fish spending most of their time in General Peppermint Talk and the most deranged individuals in human history congregating in Off-Topic Musings. Many threads, of course, will devolve into arguments, for such is human nature. Depending on how strictly the forum is moderated, these arguments will either end peacefully, with a broad acknowledgement that no type of peppermint is better than any other, because we are all on different peppermint journeys, which is why it’s so wonderful to have variety in the world; or they will end violently, with seven pages of posts in which Peppermint Chatters accuse one another of not “understanding basic logic.”
I’m sure you’ve encountered sites like this. There’s one—often more than one—for every interest, from flashlights to falconry, and as quaint as they may seem, they are a primary lens through which many thousands of people experience the internet. For me, they tend to come up when I’m researching a purchase. I’ll google, say, “best camping cooler yeti coke zero,” and seven hours later I am preparing to order a $1,900 wine refrigerator from Japan because someone called Fahrenheit Bob says it’s a game changer in the vacuum-seal space.
Every time I stumble across a site like this, I’m delighted, and like a tourist landing on a strange island after a surprise detour, I take a long look around. I learn as much lore as I can. I try to familiarize myself with the local culture. Sometimes a forum sticks with me even if I am not—or not yet—passionate about its topic. Every day I check a forum called VI-Control, which is for people who write music for movies and video games. I do not write music for movies or video games; I just get a kick out of the world. I’m familiar with all its go-to abbreviations, recognize the top posters by their avatars, and have strong feelings about which virtual orchestra instruments—none of which I’ve ever used—are best suited to particular genres of music. The classic parody of this phenomenon is the first-ballot Hall of Fame Onion piece “Man on Internet Almost Falls Into World of DIY Mustard Enthusiasts." If it’s accurate, I will be scoring a Star Wars film by next summer.
2.
It will not have escaped your notice that social media, and tech in general, have become, in many people’s eyes, disturbingly inhuman. What was once a cool way to connect with people is increasingly a machine for extracting resources from them, and the agents that do the extracting are increasingly automated, mindless routines. A bot scripts a post to make you mad; an algorithm surfaces the post in your feed to make you stay in the app; another algorithm scans the keywords in your furious response to the post and serves you an ad to make you buy something; and a large language model scrapes your response’s text to train an AI search engine that will someday charge $26,000 to misdiagnose you with smallpox. You are not a person in this system. You are a seam of ore, made up of money and information that can be mined and exploited for profit. You are probably not even a very valuable seam, but it’s a volume business.
I don’t want to be redundant here. You’ve heard all of this. There are books written about all of this. But it’s still useful to remind ourselves of the basic context in which we’re living. For me, it’s a context in which the mere act of picking up my phone gives me a rush of a nameless emotion that, for the sake of conversation, we can call Time to check in with my loved ones inside the torture box. We could also call it What are the new jokes in the chasm of infinite fraud? I love talking to people online. I love many people I’ve met online. I love memes. I even kinda love, if I get very bird’s-eye-view about it, the embarrassing thing where we all parrot some slang phrase for three months till it stops being current. I love the internet! At the same time, to enjoy these (delightful, rewarding, essential) interactions, you have to pay a price, and the price is giving the crypto industry the password to your kidneys. Your kidneys will then be used to destroy democracy. It is a complicated time.
I’m not a nostalgic person. The only thing I miss is the future. The internet used to give me a feeling that something better was coming. If you were extremely online in 2006 or 2007 or 2008, you probably felt, even if only semi-consciously, that you were participating in the process of making a better world. That was the ambient assumption; it was the color of the atmosphere. Everything was getting faster, smoother, easier. More fragmented, yes—not everyone would like the same stuff; the monoculture was over—but also more tolerant. More creative, and creative in more surprising ways. Offline life, with its awkwardnesses, its frustrations, its endless variety of tediums, was something you’d be able to move to the recycle bin and replace to your own satisfaction, like a stock icon set you could swap for something cooler from DeviantArt.
Maybe it was the Apple release calendar, maybe it was the rapid proliferation of websites that solved real problems—collected song lyrics, translated Greek, let you search cheap plane tickets, let you rent DVDs they didn’t have at Blockbuster, let you tour the Louvre from your house, etc.—but if you were extremely online, you never quite lived in the present. You got in the habit of living two or three years ahead, in the world that was always about to arrive. Of course everyone is always looking ahead to the future. But this was different. This was a moment when the near future somehow seemed more stable, more solid, than the time we were actually inhabiting. The time we were inhabiting was a transition, and transitions always seem a little unreal—so many things on their way out, so many things on their way in. But the arc of improvement was clear. The next big thing was the whole world, and it was solid enough to rely on.
There is no part of my mind that wants to live in the past; the music I discovered last week matters more to me than the music I liked in high school; I’m terrible at keeping in touch with old acquaintances; I’m bored with almost every attempt to reboot old IP. But I do miss that sense of having one foot confidently planted in an optimistic future. Obviously, it was all a lie. Or at least big parts of it were. The culture we were building was real enough, but we didn’t notice that in building it, we were shoveling money and power into the arms of people who planned to weaponize our own sincerity and creativity against us. Many generations in human history have been betrayed by their ideals; somehow, hideously, we are the generation whose capacity for friendship made a god-king out of Peter Thiel.
Maybe you’re familiar with the Ship of Theseus paradox? It goes like this: If you replace the mast of Theseus’s ship, is it still the same ship? Of course it is, right? Well, what if you then replace the wheel—is it the same ship then? And what if you replace the entire hull? What if you replace every part of the ship, every plank and spar and nail, one by one? Is there a moment when it stops being the original Ship of Theseus and becomes something else? How do you identify that moment?
Being online these days is a little like sailing the Ship of Theseus in its post-replacement era. The crew is the same. The ropes and sails are in the same place. The same routines make the ship move. You can go through the motions and mostly convince yourself things are the same. The difference is that now the compass thinks north is west because it’s (ahem) “powered by AI,” the first mate will flog you if you don’t buy the anti-trans memecoin with which he’s funding Jordan Peterson’s private army of male virgins who misquote Seneca, and the life preservers are DMing your genome to a private-equity CEO’s X account.
Is it the same ship? Does it matter? If we love sailing, what else are we supposed to do?
3.
Anyway! I think the near total destruction of the future once promised by the old, human internet is probably behind my fondness for old-school forums. Do you ever feel anything like this? I find myself prowling fondly through the forgotten corners of Theseus’s ship, the really dank lower holds where they keep the kegs of salt pork and the old sailcloth, the places where nothing has been changed, or at least not changed as much. There are still plenty of spaces like this if you know where to look. Google Reader may have gone to dust, but there are webcomics that have been publishing since George W. Bush was president. God help us, there are blogs that have been running that long. Every now and again I’ll be shopping for a home-repair doodad and wind up on the site of some plumbing-supply store that hasn’t updated its web design since before the HTML3 spec was published. I treasure these moments with an intensity that I should probably run past a therapist at some point. In my defense, there are few pleasures left to us as pure as ordering a $300 socket wrench from a website that looks like the abandoned GeoCities portal of a 14-year-old girl named Sienna.
It’s not that I think looking at old websites can bring back my hope that tech will create a future that’s—what’s the word?—good. This is the bleak December of 2024, the Arab Spring was 14 years ago, and I have not recently been kicked in the head by a steer. Optimism is not a practical option at the moment. It’s more that visiting the online spaces that still exist outside the commerce-surveillance-propaganda vortex of social-media offers at least a faint hope that the human internet can still persist somewhere; that it might continue in a small way, unnoticed by Elon Musk, unnoticed even by Elon Musk's mom, until circumstances are right for it to flourish again. The members of Peppermint Chat probably don’t see themselves as carrying the torch of freedom for the human spirit, but then, not all heroes have #Resistance accounts.
The minor-key optimism here is different from the optimism you can take from an alternative social-media venture like Bluesky. I’m on Bluesky and I like it, but so far it’s very clearly operating in the negative space of Zombie Twitter. A lot of the conversations are about the same stuff, the same memes and slang serve to demonstrate cultural fluency, the same headlines get attention. Even the tone is broadly similar. It’s just that X is now dominated by furious right-wing reply guys whose deepest life wish is for the United States Army to force cool people to like a tweet reading “Perhaps the concept makes you uncomfortable, but it should not be dismissed on that basis.” Bluesky, in turn, is dominated by people who have seen all that and are just so, so tired. So tired, my God. The vestiges of the old internet, by contrast, serve to remind us that there are other ways of being online than the ways I, and probably you, are accustomed to. There are people who are every bit as online as we are, yet have no idea what the sentence “What if the Hawk Tuah pump-and-dump was black-ops fundraising for Muppet History victims?” means. (Teach me your ways, O wise ones!) These users have their own acronyms. They have their own arguments. They have influencers of a sort, but their influencers are not out to convince them that eating grass is the cure for tuberculosis, unless it’s that kind of forum, which of course some of them are. They have their own problems, but the problems they have are mostly the problems every human community has, namely that people are sometimes vain and misinformed and huffy and dishonest and argumentative, though of course people are also often the opposite of all those things. It’s a thin comfort, but maybe it’s enough to keep us tethered to the earth for a few more years: People are always the best thing you find on the internet, but there are still places where you won’t find anything worse.
