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Growing up in the early 2000’s was an intriguing time to have unsupervised internet access. Not long beforehand, The Adults™ thought the entire world would blow up because computers weren’t built to process the date 1/1/2000, and in class we had lessons about how to use Google, which was new information to the teachers themselves. It’s safe to say that most people didn’t fully understand what the internet was like, and parents were equal parts overprotective and underprotective of their children using the most chaotic invention of all time. 

Like the way scientists say that 95% of the ocean is unexplored, I would be willing to bet that 95% of the internet is unregulated. That is the magic and the mystic of it, but it’s also deeply concerning. To build on Culture Vulture’s recent piece about the internet as a third space, I would like to spend some time reflecting on how sometimes, that third space was an asylum.

At the beginning of it all, the internet was mainly used by scientists to communicate research with each other. Somewhere in between then and now, its primary use became cyberbullying 13-year-olds thanks to the invention of the (Latvian??) platform, Ask.Fm. 

Ask.Fm was essentially an anonymous Q&A website where you could verbally attack anyone you had ever met without any repercussions or consequences. It was a plague that swept schools and set the gossip mill on fire. Whether you received heaps of questions (about how many people you’ve hooked up with, about who you hate at school, about how big your forehead is, etc), or if you got no questions (loser), Ask.Fm packed a punch on your self-esteem. 

The main issue was that these messages could be completely anonymous, and thus spawned a whole generation of keyboard warriors. Ugly, manipulative, and inappropriate messages made their way into the light, and people couldn’t seek actual help because it was largely untraceable. In the wake of a number of tragic suicides attributed to relentless online hate, Ask.Fm tightened up its policies: they hired a moderator, created a report button, and required an email address upon sign-up.

These days it seems wild that those things had to be put in place, and weren’t a part of the original platform design. However at this point in time, the internet was still the wild wild west. The fact that Club Penguin (which had privacy settings galore, to the point where you could sometimes only communicate with the pizza emoji) was banned in 2008 at my primary school, but Ask.Fm was fully permitted at high school in 2012, goes to show that your internet safety was left almost entirely up to chance - and the Harmful Digital Communications Act wouldn’t even exist in NZ until later in 2015.

Speaking of untraceable, another corner of the internet was flourishing during this time period: Omegle, which only just shut down last year.

I can’t believe how commonplace it was for underage kids to log on to Omegle.dot.com, be greeted with a wide selection of paedophiles, giggle, and log off. (Or at least, I hope we logged off. Unfortunately, some people spent a large portion of their young lives being groomed by disgusting and nefarious creeps on the internet without realising) it. It was the 2000’s equivalent of prank calling, or ding dong ditch, except with significantly more ding dongs than any 14-year-old should ever be seeing.

In an article that the Guardian wrote farewelling Omegle and its trauma, they explain, “Children always think they know more than adults, and at the time, in terms of the internet, the reality was that we did. It was a bizarre contradiction – sitting in school assemblies while teachers warned of the danger of talking to strangers on the street, or of a “white van man” who might be lurking in the area, all while we had direct access to potential predators from our bedrooms.”

One memory of Omegle is burnt into the back of my brain: A large group of us in the common room, met with a range of foul men to chat to, one of whom wistfully typed into the chat, “It’s a garden. Of pussy.” (OK Nabokov!!! The imagery!!) Side note: in the Guardian article, someone also referred to Omegle as a “a carousel of penises.” So what do you choose - Carousel of Penises son, or Garden of Pussy daughter?

If you weren’t being cyberbullied or groomed, maybe you were on Eating Disorder Tumblr instead. While scrolling through your dashboard to look at One Direction edits, gifs of eyeshadow pallets, or soft grunge oil spills on the concrete, you may have also come across a series of ill young women talking about their “goal weights” and posting photos of their ribs as thinspiration. The “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” era was in full swing, and on Instagram you could even see what your friends were liking, which unfortunately, may have been diet tips about how you needed to eat 40 bananas a day, and absolutely nothing else. Even in 2018, which feels far too recent, Kim Kardashian was making bank by selling young girls laxatives and pushing appetite suppressant lollipops. 

Nowadays, Instagram has controls where you can ‘turn off’ ads about weight loss and hide certain words. They have put policies in place so that account owners under the age of 18 are restricted from seeing posts that promote weight loss products or cosmetic procedures, thanks to people hounding them for these policies, like activist Jameela Jamil (although how effective these policies are is another question entirely.) 

Now, I am someone who thinks it’s easy, and in fact, lazy, to categorise the internet as something that is exclusively evil. I am a firm believer that if the internet did not exist, we would simply find something else (and potentially worse) to be rotting our brains with instead, as humans are wont to do. But in saying that, the fact that our online environment was almost completely unsupervised and had little to no rules had a massive impact on many people’s well-being. 

When Omegle shut down last year, the creator, Leif K-Brooks, wrote a statement that resonated with me. He describes the Internet as simply another way of experiencing “real life,” explaining that “If the Internet is a manifestation of the “global village”, Omegle was meant to be a way of strolling down a street in that village, striking up conversations with the people you ran into along the way.” 

It’s not the medium’s fault that it was used by bad people - the root cause of any of the issues in this piece are, unfortunately, human. The internet simply exacerbates offline problems as people struggle to differentiate “what’s real” and “what’s online,” and the disconnect that occurs when both of these things are true.

Leif goes on to explain, “I was under no illusion that only good people used the Internet; but I knew that, if I said “no” to someone online, they couldn’t physically reach through the screen and hold a weapon to my head, or worse. I saw the miles of copper wires and fiber-optic cables between me and other people as a kind of shield – one that empowered me to be less isolated than my trauma and fear would have otherwise allowed.”

It’s this tension - the internet being simultaneously safer and more dangerous than real life - that’s so difficult to balance. As Tyler the Creator once tweeted:

Now, I know, the answer is not simply “walking away from the screen” - It is A), media literacy, and B), regulation. 

The entire internet is built on confusion and contradiction. Your favourite influencer is probably breaking a large number of copyright laws every day without even realising it. The rules around what counts as an “ad” are unclear and unmonitored. We don’t know the extent to which our digital footprints will screw us over, and you can invade someone’s privacy to the nth degree without it counting as stalking. I will open my Instagram feed to be met with graphic posts about sex toys, but all nude art was banned on Tumblr. OnlyFans can be ‘broken’ by non-sex workers like Bella Thorne, but deepfakes can be made of anyone and have a lasting impact. Your mum can be scammed by an AI-generated video of Jennifer Aniston selling iPads. Mommy influencers can destroy their children’s lives without handing over a cent, and weight loss ads follow you around no matter how many times you click “not interested,” and “see less.”

The internet is probably my favourite place on earth, but it’s not a utopia: it’s the asylum where they raised me. 

who wrote this?

Bryer Oden is a writer based in Wellington, NZ. She loves to use her Master’s in Linguistics and BA in Media Studies to focus on the way we use language online. Her passions are body politics, pop culture, food, and feeling nostalgic about Tumblr in 2014. You can find her being chronically online in the following places: @healthsensation on Instagram & Tiktok for Food recs, Cheap CBD Lunches and Scone Reviews, or Bryer Oden on Substack and Instagram for more writing xxx

want to be published in culture vulture?

if you’re a pop culture/ internet writer and you feel like you’ve got something to say that fits with our culture vulture vibe, send me a draft to luce@shityoushouldcareabout.com and I’ll see what I can do 𓆩♡𓆪

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