Goodnight Meme

An internet It Girl logs offfor good.

- Honor Levy

On the internet, everything is forever. At least that’s what we were told as we sat in the library for grade school web safety seminars. Forever sounded nice to me, like something magical, the end of a fairy tale: They lived happily ever after, forever and ever—but this was a bad forever, the librarian said. Once it’s out there, it’s out there, and it’s coming back to get you.

My parents were Gen X tech-savvy, and street-smart enough to install parental controls, ban me from creating a Myspace or Facebook account, and disable the free chat feature on my Club Penguin. There would be no talking to strangers if they could help it. They tried to instill in me a distrust of corporations and a disdain for people who made posts about their mundane lives. So I just clicked around and consumed and consumed. This was long before the algorithms were strong enough to lead you down a set ideological path, or toward the mind-numbing avant-garde popular content of today (like the Elsagate videos, dark content seemingly geared toward children, and the terrifying Skibidi Toilet web series). Being a kid alone online was exhilarating, but the world inside the computer felt fraught, small, and in need of constant attention. Virtual pets starving from my lack of regular logging-on haunted my dreams. My igloo was bare and my penguin naked, so embarrassing.