Cringe Era

Picking through layers of personal web history

Hello TinyLetter subscribers 👋🏻 I live here now. It’s been a minute. I hope you’re well. Enjoy.

1989

Dad comes home from Radio Shack with a beige desktop Tandy Computer. I’m annoyed, as I asked, and received, a typewriter for a recent birthday. (Yes, I’m not yet a teenager but already an insufferable literary snob.) He sets it up on a particle board desk facing our back window and the giant pecan tree we’d soon lose in Hurricane Andrew.

My sisters and I stand gaping at the screen, taking it all in. A music writing program. A banner creator, attached to a dot-matrix printer, that would feature prominently in our future intra-sibling communications. A program called America Online 1.0.

“Don’t open that!” Mom says. “It calls people we don’t know on the phone.”

I take Computer Literacy classes from a former nun with SAS shoes. The rubber bands in her braces fly across the room when she gets angry, which is often. Something-something Blaise Pascal, cathode ray tubes, cold boot versus warm boot, what does this have to do with anything? I program a Christmas scene comprised of a few hundred colored pixels in BASIC, a red candle surrounded by holly.

My parents get their real private school money’s worth via Mavis Beacon, whose open-apple-q refrain haunts me: Do you really want to quit Mavis Beacon?

Mavis, if you’re reading this: I’ll never quit you.

1994

I sit with a giant tumbler full of Diet Coke and ice in front of our PC at the new house flirting with Kerouacesq [sic] in an AOL chat room, who signs off to go to a Violent Femmes concert. Then I spend a few hours composing a heavy-handed, 5,000-word email to a faraway boy at his .edu. My internet is a flat Pangaea comprised of AOL’s multiple-choice news portal, chat rooms organized by interest—or preferred lurking—area, and 1:1 conversations with people I already know.

The exception is a stranger I stumble into somewhere, who sends me bootleg Girlysounds cassettes in the mail, one fan to another, when that kindness still existed. She is officially the first person to cross from cyberspace into my physical realm, though we never meet, and I don’t remember her name. Mom tossed the tapes after Dad wrecked the Volvo into his office, a funny-sad story for another time.

1997

I stalk various men through Telnet PINE, a retro green-and-black command prompt situation, able to figure out which computers they are logged into on campus by server name, then mysteriously stroll by. The function is, aptly titled, “fingering.”

I write other peoples’ emails into my creative nonfictional pursuits. I write fiction that isn’t really fiction for my fiction class and get betrayed by a woman from Oklahoma with vocal fry, before vocal fry had a name, was made fun of, or was ultimately reclaimed by various buzzy media outlets as a feminist signifier.

At some point I think, well, I could keep reading George Landow, and fooling around with the Grammatron, and comparing hypertextuality to Oulipo, or I could get a job at a damn startup. I get a job at a damn startup.

1999

This personal history isn’t about my experiences with technology, or even my career working in technology. It’s about my eras of writing about myself on the internet, in a sort of vamp to the first post I’m going to shoot out on this here Substack. So let’s refocus.

I’m sitting at a tiny table in a living room painted Grimace-purple next to my roommate’s world map and ice-climbing crampons. It’s a sixth-floor walkup on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, only reached by me, her, and the well-tipped delivery guy from Burritoville. A tiny modem card, or whatever they were called, connects one side of a phone jack, via a long cable, to our wall jack in the kitchen, where I’ve unplugged the cordless phone with a built-in answering machine.

I log into Diaryland and write a first post titled, “I Think I Cut My Foot,” comparing that moment, which I don’t really recall, to a long-ago New Years’ Eve foot cut that involved a broken Pyrex measuring cup and various C-PTSD coping mechanisms, back when they were just My Life As A Child.

I add a guestbook to my diary—we didn’t call them blogs yet—to see if anyone who pops in wants to make themselves known. It’s the only way to figure it out; there are no stats. Google doesn’t even, um, exist yet, y’all.

2001

I’m sitting again with a giant Diet Coke in front of a slightly better PC at my parents’ house. I had quit my job to study in France, lost the grant cause of 9/11, and subsequently got stuck in Louisiana on what was meant to be a farewell visit.

Diaryland is my only land. Out of ideas, I reach for the most obvious possible source of inspiration: Diet Coke. A man, with another personal website, on his own domain cause he’s a web guy, emails me. Subject line: “Right on to your right on.” One aspartame addict to another, an epistolary romance blossoms.

After several months of daily correspondence, I propose a meeting. The night before I pick him up at MSY, he sends me a photograph, so I’ll know what he looks like. I’m too afraid to open the attachment and forward it to a friend while drinking a not-recommended amount of gin. “It’s fine,” she says. “It’s a photo booth picture, like for a library card or something. He’s a redhead.”

Another Diaryland friend visits me from Chicago that summer. We take photos on my first-gen Sony Cyber-shot. Here we are, drunk at Galatoire’s, drunk at the R Bar, hung over at the jewelry store in the French Quarter where I worked.

2003

The redhead helps me pop up a proper blog, a term we use now, thank you Rebecca Blood et. al., on my own domain with some code he had laying around the house. The house is a two-bedroom floor-through in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn whose rent will make you spit, so I won’t reveal it.

I pitch a David Lynchian weather forecast to Gothamist, and Jen says yes. I am briefly a member of the NYC blog media zeitgeist. I convince designers, whose Diaryland diaries and blogs I’ve scoped for years, to illustrate the weather, for free, for fun. One morning, I wake up and find ants crawling through the keyboard of my white Macbook. Like a mailman, I find a way to get the forecast out, come rain, sleet, snow, or insects.

My MFA thesis advisor is roommates with Choire. I introduce myself by my Diaryland handle, reference Eastwest.nu, and we laugh with joy! An internet person in real life! The few, the proud! I almost burn down their East Village apartment putting a cigarette out in a styrofoam cup. Will I officially cross streams and join the blogerati? Or will I stay at the online community for teens and write quizzes about the history of 7up so Lollipoppee can earn a new badge and DPSU can feel happy about the money they gave us?

The Lost Years

Drinking, working. A dark tunnel. A bad relationship not worth writing about, online or elsewhere. Few records exist beyond a lonely Tumblr with a half-hearted curation of nothing much. He took all the photos on his fancy digital camera and left no trail behind.

My boss—I work in PR now— thinks we should start selling social media services to clients. I break out in hives, eyes rolling all the way to the back of my head. I can think of nothing worse, nothing more polluting to my native land, than helping brands behave like people on the internet. Not on my World Wide Web, bitch! I already have a private Twittr but begrudgingly start a professional one under my real name, the first time I dare step online as myself, Leslie Campisi, woman, human, person before you now.

How had I postponed flattening my on- and offline identities? By turning my nose up at Facebook a few years earlier, the same way I attempted to reject the Tandy as a child. Be ‘myself’? Darling, this is the internet.

Too little, too late, kid. We lost.

Cringe Era

Twitter’s dead. LinkedIn is the new Facebook, a TJMaxx hellscape with too-bright lights and shoddy, pawed-over merchandise. You hope no one sees you there, but they always do. Instagram is an illicit drug that will inevitably kill me. Medium? Forget it. There are no blogs. But, look on the bright side: There are Substacks.

I always read the word “Substack” as “Smokestack,” which delights me. I see a cityscape of little chimneys poking out of the tops of buildings, puffing away. But then I squint and wonder, is this a clever take comparing the transition from cottage industry to Industrial Revolution, to the way people used to, like, write online about nothing, for fun, to express themselves, to explore their identity, and to meet people twenty years ago, and…now it’s a forced capitalist work camp? Will this metaphor hold? Who is Dick Van Dyke in this metaphor?

We’re typing and typing and sending out our little missives and get-rich-or-die-trying as the Substacks puff, puff, puff away. And as for me, your village elder, She Who Ruined Relationships by Writing About People Online Before Some Men I Date Were Even Born, well,