IN THE BEGINNING the internet seemed good. “I was in love with the internet the first time I used it at my dad’s office and thought it was the ULTIMATE COOL,” I wrote, when I was ten, on an An­gelfire subpage titled “The Story of How Jia Got Her Web Addic­tion.” In a text box superimposed on a hideous violet background, I continued:

But that was in third grade and all I was doing was going to Beanie Baby sites. Having an old, icky bicky computer at home, we didn’t have the Internet. Even AOL seemed like a far-off dream. Then we got a new top-o’-the-line computer in spring break ’99, and of course it came with all that demo stuff. So I finally had AOL and I was completely amazed at the marvel of having a profile and chatting and IMS!!

Then, I wrote, I discovered personal webpages. (“I was aston­ished!”) I learned HTML and “little Javascript trickies.” …

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“The I in the Internet” (Jia Tolentino, CCCB Lab, February 19, 2020)

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