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Earlier this year I went back to my home town to visit family. Whenever I do, I make sure to bring a few things from my childhood with me when I go back for school. Most of my undocumented, undigitized life is still there, in some box, or sitting on some shelf. It'd be impossible to take everything, but over the course of the year I'll recall things that I left behind—things I miss, and when I go back, I make a point to take it with me.
Last year, I missed playing No Man's Sky on my family's old PS4, which had since gone mostly unused. So, I boxed it up and mailed it across the country.
When it arrived, I discovered that I pulled the plug without making sure the PS4 was fully turned off first. I'd done that a number of times in its long life, but this time I got unlucky. The hard drive was fried. After a lot of finagling, I managed to swap in a new hard drive I had lying around (shockingly, the "fried" hard drive worked alright in my server after I wiped it, so all was not lost). After even more finagling with Sony's network services, I discovered that the copy of No Man's Sky I played as a kid was in fact a digital download purchased on *someone else's account* that I merely had access to for the time. So that was a complete dead end.
I did, however, get access to all my old conversations with friends had between playing online games.
Predictably, none of them had messaged me in years. I hadn't turned on my PS4 in years. But a number of conversations were more recent.
They were from people I didn't recognize. Some of them sent just a link I dare not click on. Others simply said "hi." There was maybe five or six of these conversations, all unprompted.
On its own, this sort of thing isn't all that remarkable. You'll get problems like this on any platform that lets people send messages to others without establishing a connection first (the TCP model of building a social graph). But in that moment there was something else that bugged me about it. It felt lonely in a way I didn't expect. I couldn't help but feel sympathy for them. They wanted something they were very unlikely to get. They wanted to form a connection. Whether or not the object of having that connection was to take my money or get me addicted to an online casino, I had to admire the audacity of it.
There's this one person I know who does something similar—that is, they send messages to people they don't know all that well out of the blue with the hopes of making new friends. I can't imagine doing something like that myself; it sounds terrifying. You can't know if someone wants you to reach out to them until you try, and to tell someone you don't know well that you want them to reach out to you is to make yourself vulnerable to someone with whom you aren't comfortable being vulnerable.
And yet, for the person in question, this strategy works. It's worked several times. I was honestly kind of astonished to hear it, but I do have a theory: I think most people don't really like the way we're generally expected to make friends as adults—that is, to meet people circumstantially and out of a shared obligation, and/or to leverage existing relationships to grow your "network." I've encountered a lot of people in life who find this sort of thing hard and generally unfulfilling. I've met a few people who at least seem to be doing fine with it, but I don't think I've ever met anyone who "likes" it, per se. I suspect what drew so many people to the early internet was the fact that it turned every encounter into the kind you'd expect to have during your first week of university, where you can just turn up in someone's life and start talking to them about modular synthesizers, or BASIC, or whatever it is people talked about in the 90s. That's probably why so many socially anxious people who struggle in real life flourish online.
Similarly, I imagine what makes the modern internet feel so isolating is the fact that those systems have all apparently been rearchitected to minimize the amount of realness in the way we connect with others online. Except in a rare few enclaves, it always seems to feel like you're interacting more with an amorphous blob of people, continually being transformed by the digital invisible hand.
I didn't grow up with computers in the 1990s, but I do try to reclaim that orientation week feeling wherever I can. I might be a long way from capturing it in the physical world, but I do think I've found a little bit of it on the smallnet.
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"Sympathy for the porn bots" was published on 2024-06-01
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