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In early 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was just beginning and nobody had any idea what was going on, when people were working from home, staying in, just generally trying to be safe, the Internet Archive opened up its deep archive of scanned books to allow anyone to take out a copy. This was, perhaps, ill-advised: to the publishers, and a certain segment of published authors, this looked a lot like a flagrant form of piracy. It only lasted a few months, but it turned the publishers' lawyers loose, and a group of them launched a lawsuit to put a stop to the Internet Archive being able to lend its books like a library.
In early 1996 I was fifteen years old and finding my way through the darkest part of my life. A year of being bullied, mocked, shamed, and humiliated culminated in a psychotic break and an attempted suicide that was stopped only at the last minute by someone close to me. I don't talk about this much, even though it's maybe the singular set of events around which my life has turned. No matter what else I do, this will always be part of what defines me.
I'm cagey about what I want to say here. I've been cyberstalked in the past. I don't use my real name on this capsule but operating off what's happened in the past, I still assume I'm being read. So with that out of the way, I'll just say that writing, and the online world, have been vital to my day to day life, and sometimes to just staying alive. An alternative. A place in which I wasn't myself. In the mid 90s my online world was still mostly BBSs, and I lost myself in that dying world. Door games. Message boards. FIDOnet and WWIVnet. When I logged off I wrote little games in BASIC and Pascal.
Around 1996 I first got online. I had a 486 with 4 megs of RAM and a 33.6 modem. Windows 3.11; IE 3; the web was slow. And it was beautiful.
I searched using Webcrawler. I tried URLs I found in Internet World. Armed with a copy of "Netscape and the World Wide Web for Dummies", and enamoured with what my friends were doing, I made myself a website at GeoCities. I've got a good memory for my past URLs, but I can't remember that one, just that it was in the TimesSquare community. It was green text on black. I actually had spinning skull gifs. It was incredibly sweet.
My website was first about what me and my friends were doing (emulating NES and Gameboy games, revisiting a childhood that at that point was barely half a dozen years old). But at some point late in high school, things pivoted. My family got a better computer. An AMD processor, 128 megs of RAM, Windows 98. A cable modem! A quantum leap forward from my old 486. I could download music! I could load pages in seconds! And most importantly, I could chat with my friends on ICQ.
If I sat down and took notes I could probably write whole essays on the importance of that chat client for me, but in the context of this entry, I'll just say that one of the inflection points of my life came when a cute redhead from New Mexico and her friend from Bowmanville found me via ICQ's random chat feature.
Just before that point I'd discovered in my web wanderings the online journal of a Swedish poly anarchist. I was taken by the great mess of his life, and that he'd think to put it all online. Why would you do that? Strangers could read it! I couldn't look away. I checked back every week. And when the two girls and I started chatting and became close friends (I still regularly text with one of them, twenty five years later), I found out they both had these online journals. So did all their friends. Something in the air. I made one of my own.
At first I hosted it on my GeoCities site, then moved it to another site, but there was a major problem with this: people I knew IRL knew about these sites. So people at school would ask me about my journal. I was outgoing online. I'm quiet otherwise. So I'd tighten up. Be careful about what I said. What I was writing was inconsequential and forced. I knew this thing was going to have to move.
This wasn't a problem. Fortunately, in that burgeoning scene of teen journallers, there was a subset who could afford to buy their own domains. To offer hosting. If you had your own domain, you had Status, and being hosted by someone, having your journal plucked out of the muck of Altern or GeoCities or AngelFire or any of the other free hosts, gave you a secondhand kind of status as well.
For years I wrote down my days in plain HTML, typed them up in notepad, double-checked them in Netscape, not unlike what I'm doing now with vi, amfora, Lagrange. My site bounced around: the aforementioned Altern, then to a free provider based out of Portland, then at other people's domains. My site stuck out: mostly just plain text and frames, little in the way of images; I didn't have the knack a lot of the girls had for putting together a flowing, beautiful site. But I could write. Not especially well, but not poorly, and well enough that people would sign my guestbooks and tell me they loved my journal and poems. I had my real life, where I went to high school, then university, worked towards a degree, came home exhausted at 10pm and had a Heineken before bed. And I had my online life, lived in what time I could put together outside of the things I was supposed to do, where I chatted with people across the world and wrote down my days.
A lot of things ended that, LiveJournal being the most obvious, as we moved from sites we designed and updated ourselves to posts typed out in text boxes. But at the end of that time, as I was moving over to LJ, people found my site again. I'm not sure how. Google then was nascent. I didn't use my full name, just my nickname. But while I guess I was identifiable, I was hard to find. If you wanted to find me, you had to work. And they did.
This was chilling and I took down my site shortly thereafter. We didn't have Dropbox or Drive or private repos or other means of backup. We didn't even really think of backup, our sites having a kind of ethereality, especially against the long run of our lives. But though I didn't realize it then, something else was working in the background, spidering my site.
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine holds snapshots of websites that it's crawled since the late 90s. I've always kind of known about it, but didn't really sit down to see what it had until the 2010s. And I was amazed: my first websites outside of GeoCities. The ones I put up at various ISPs. And the one I made during the years I chatted with people all over North America and the world, as we wrote our journals and put up our poetry, photos, and art.
I moved several times (the Wayback has copies). I took certain things down (the Wayback has copies). I've put together an incredibly complete picture of what I was doing at this time by downloading all the files and putting them in a private git repo. My old journal entries. My terrible poems. And I come back to all of it periodically. Sometimes from nostalgia, but sometimes to look for answers to certain questions. Being able to revisit your past self is fascinating. It's vital. And without the Wayback Machine I'd only have a faint idea of what I was talking about back then, of who I was.
The Internet Archive has lost its first fight to scan and lend e-books like a library
Internet Archive: The fight continues
Yesterday, the Internet Archive lost its lower court decision, with the judge ruling in favour of the plaintiffs. The Internet Archive has promised to appeal. This is clearly just the first stage of the fight.
What's uncertain is how this will affect the Internet Archive if they ultimately end up losing and exhausting all avenues of appeal. I've been wondering this a lot the past day. Will there be a fine. Will they be able to afford it. Will it force them to shutter, or sell off their services. And selfishly for me, will the Wayback Machine still exist in its present form: open to all, unpaywalled. Will it be there for everyone else. For the person who needs it as badly as I did. For the person who wants to find out who they used to be. Who want to know how they became their current self. Finding their way back to what they were thinking at the time. Through a labyrinth of text. To entries like this.