cybernomads #1: charting the digital new frontier
"long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony"
a nomad has no real home, instead opting to be constantly on the move, historically moving seasonally or on a loose schedule to set temporary roots, sell wares, live off the land, etc. i’m Mauritanian – nomadic culture is in my blood (and apparently, my birth chart, but that’s another day) and bouncing from place to place is part of being a human, yes, but it’s relatively new to be any and everywhere from the “comfort” of your own home.
where do we call home more than anything these days? where do we sell our wares (and sometimes ourselves?) where else but the internet — once a lavish, limitless canvas, today a digital dystopia.
half & half
i’ve lived long enough to live an analog childhood and a digital adulthood. the two wolves inside me are online and offline and i’m not alone — the “go touch grass” crowd and the “extremely online brainrot” crowd are two sides of the same coin yet the former has to tell us to go outside where the latter lives. gen z and alpha live in a world where the internet is the real world.
the internet is our third space, whether we like it or not — outside (and now every goddamn streaming service) is expensive, and everyone i know is on the internet already. even when people throw on a fit to go out, what are we doing? capturing every moment for momentary social consumption, whether it’s snacking (posting to the story) or a full meal (posting to the grid).
to me, the consumption of the content mirrors disordered eating where the lack of intentionality, clean product, and quality is fucking up a healthy diet. i’m not trying to biohack or digivolve or whatever those tech wingdings are doing but rather find out how to balance our online habits for whatever digital world we’re trying to build and what might need to change in our real lives to bolster it.
my credentials?
tf are you, linked in? TSA? i dunno, being online? i don’t know – do i need a certain level of brainrot to continue talking, invisible internet enemy that i’m inventing in my head? yeah, that’s right – i’m making a narrative and you — the reader — are the villain.
i’m being completely unserious but fr though, i couldn’t be everywhere on the internet, in every forum, played every flash game, etc. this history, like most history, is incomplete. only thing i’m an expert in is being me.
anyway, history is written by the victors but let's be real, we’re all a little losers online or are we winners for even having free (terms and conditions apply) speech?
in the upcoming pieces, i’m mapping the trends, the timeline, and the waves of the internet more than anything and encourage anyone to add their own timestamps and frameworks to this piece.
what i hope to build is a narrative – including some political moments, trends, and global touchpoints – to sketch out a map of the history so far of social media. not everyone will have perceived the same things the way i have and that’s okay. if we’re going to build a better tomorrow, online or off, gonna have to listen and troubleshoot today.
without further preamble, let’s get it.
the first age: mainstreaming and mainlining social media
approx 2003 - 2008
i was an AIM kid — i was running through the weirdest and most volatile chatrooms back when rollover minutes were a thing, don’t play with me. when i wasn’t asking jeeves any old thing, i was a T9 terminator, nights and weekends mostly. whole time, I was boosting AOL free trial CDs because the internet at home was incredibly shaky — not just borrowed time, [redacted] time.
NOTE: I don’t know what the statute of limitations is on boosting AOL free trial CDs but i had a connect who kept me connected if you know what i mean.
i learned to traverse a world that my family was trying to shelter me from (don’t let them hear this, but they were kinda right they lowkey ate, i’m irreparably mentally cooked).
the internet was so decentralized back then; you had to use search engines to seek out entertainment, community, shared fandoms, etc in chatrooms, websites, and forums. it felt like an exploration any time you hopped online — a Lewis and Clark adventure come to life which i think makes Jeeves Sacagawea…oh fuck, analogy already on the page, i simply can’t delete it.
i was vaguely aware of Reddit and 4chan and i heard tell of M’ai’spacé, or MySpace as the history books whitewashes it. not only that but Xanga, LiveJournál, even a BlackPlanet — there were little digital hubs that all had their own cultures, languages, and “digizens,” creating names and voices for themselves in their own niche habits and traditions.
a “digital indegeneity” (“indigineity?” or is the root “degenerate” appropriate? who’s to say) seemed to exist where the people logged into smaller niche spaces all knew each other, occupied certain spaces with one another and built whatever felt like community with one another. each site was a story unto itself, a purpose, a system. i romanticize these days, yes, because I was a child and the internet felt vast from behind a QWERTY keyboard.
i know, nostalgia is a “progress killer” and “go to the past but no one is there” but if we obfuscate the lessons of the era by making the lens through which we view it rosier than reality, that’s the problem. it’s the same issue with MAGA, they “ignore” what didn’t work and revel in the simplicity and false harmonies of yesteryear.
but keep it a buck, back then…the internet felt like an escape into a different world because there was a general sense that we were approaching each other from a space of yearning for community, for comrades, for commiseration with specificity, intentionality even. co-existence.
the .com boom
the 2000s marked an era of a massive internet explosion — was your shit even popping without a .com at the end? we’ll even take a .biz, shit, a .net!
websites looked different but served different purposes — they were a hub for something particular, islands with specific goods and services, and we huddled around those sites, building the companies both on and offline. where people congregated, whether it was a comment section, a WordPress site, or a customer review section, became the proto-social media environments that started to boom around ‘05.
it was a wild west of sorts and there was a digital sense of manifest destiny that was beginning to blossom, for better and for worse.
early 2000s: AIM
AIM felt like going to a house party where every room had a niche theme. yeah, it was one of those 18+ clubs where everyone was simultaneously too old and too young to be there and it drew some creeps (activating Chris Hansen) but it was a party you could go to and leave from the comfort of your own home. opening up a chat window was like sneaking out of the house to go to a strange party, full of masked guests.
2003: 4Chan
4Chan’s lax moderation created some of the worst libertarians you’ve never met (good for you) BUT it did technically birth the first memes including the rick roll and contribute to leetspeak (iykyk). memes used to last weeks, months even — today, a meme has a calendar day (“demure” and “chill guy” got packed tf up sooo quick).
Anonymous, the decentralized global hacktivist community was born on 4Chan starting as asshole pranksters then evolving into a continued mission to keep the internet free-flowing, supporting movements like Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and pro-free speech movements all around the world — intentions good, executions biased and often tainted by the some of the people behind the keystrokes.
even with these contributions, 4Chan wasn’t really a party i wasn’t banging with — it seemed to be the breeding ground of egdelords, racists, and homophobes who hid from coming out of their klan closets. still, a party of sorts, touching the darker corners of society with r*pe jokes, p3dos, and self-proclaimed truth-tellers — today we’d call that a “r*publican party,” if you will (and i won’t and i didn’t).
2003: Myspace
Myspace a place where the party could be customized, the party was really all about you — should have been YourSpace imo, but that’s revisionist history.
the HTML coders could make their own sites with themed backgrounds, personalized songs upon entering your space, it was your top 8, your status, your likes — social media became more individualized, mirroring an individualized culture in the West before spreading more worldwide.
we peaked with Myspace — people learned how to code, you could customize almost everything, and the Top 8, while at the least silly and the most extremely political, made a statement about who we considered in our personal circle whether that was my good friend Ariel or my close and personal confidant, Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas (haven’t talked in a while, I hope she’s well], or the whole of the My Chemical Romance band (love y’all so much). it was the first “close friends.”
some people today could learn about having core community and levels of friendship and 8 gave a lot credence to intentionality when it came to developing types of relationships and not simply followers.
2005: Reddit
Reddit felt like a bulletin board of discussion topics that you could opt into and out of using upvotes and downvotes. it harkened to forums of the Roman Empire – very thumbs up/thumbs down Commodus in Gladiator but all of us were emperors, choosing what culture rose to the top and what sank to the very bottom. like the party of AIM but less private, more for the world to see, like Diet 4Chan with stronger moderators and chaperones in each subreddit.
2006: Facebook
you know, the one from that Aaron Sorkin movie with that *NSYNC guy and spider-man, yeah that’s a real thing and not just a marketplace/AI museum! it opened up it’s doors from just college kids to everyone. people weren’t just in your top 8 but they were your actual friends — they were your distant relatives, your coworker, your biological father, truly anyone could be found! and so could you!
your relationship status could be “complicated” which meant everything from a delulu one-sided fantadream imaginationship to a torrid love affair that’s ripping your heart asunder to a situationship (before we had that nomenclature, of course).
you had a wall where any and anyone could tag it — a sort of digital yearbook where no one ever graduates, everyone is hanging out with or without you, and your entire life (friends, family, coworkers, exes, besties, everyone) could be online with you, every single bit of you.
social media here went from being small town to small town to a Mark Zuckerberg accidentallying himself into becoming the Robert Moses (notorious megabastard) of the internet, connecting the internet superhighway to everything, running through niche communities, absorbing the functions of other sites, and ultimately becoming the home of what was supposed to be an immortalization of our entire existence. a proposed digitopian metropolis, transcending the physical and allowing the digital astral projections of our personhood to connect to a series of other partially projected satellites.
people in real life didn’t come and go, they came and stayed, and even overstayed. they came, overstayed, and brought others to the you you you party and even when it was 🎶closing tiiime, they stayed, always having eyes over your moves, 10 years after you had to jazzy jeff them out of your real analog life.
Hitchcock’s Rear Window allowed a man to view the lives of his neighbors from his own apartment and Zuckercock’s Facebook allowed all of us to be in everyone’s business from anywhere, all the time, always. worse still, it normalized it.
you see, we perform ourselves differently in different groups of people — mosque or church you is probably not the same as girls trip/guys trip you or work you or apple picking you or horny you — this is natural. what isn’t natural is trying to be any, all, or none of those yous all at once on one platform or to be expected to be any and all of those things by the “audience.” that’s a schizophrenic performance of self, akin to taking two dates to a dance except it’s not the same you on each date it’s multiple yous. multitudes?
the Goffmanesque front stage became cluttered, a mess of a performance that is more a slave to audience expectation or desired projection than a true expression of self. every post is edited, filtered, changed, corporatized, copy edited to meet a specific audience, whether it’s an audience of tens or of millions. it’s exhausting but even worse, it’s convenient.
an inconvenient convenience
convenience isn’t necessarily a bad thing — we all deserve some ease but everything being in one place causes us to be lethargic, lazy, consumers, unable to go down the street if that item could be droned to us by Amazon.
what happened to the days where we sought out community, sought out friends online, hunted for niche information, gathered the information and actually talked about it? it’s all spoonfed to us for years on Facebook amidst a barrage of SuperPokes and Farmville notifications.
we don’t go anywhere, the “truth” came to us. people built miniature digital empires off of the truth, or rather, their truth. groups formed, pages had millions of likes, conflict drove traffic and traffic drove clicks, and people grew tired of the constant clicking of the city, all the while still clocking/clicking/logging (clogging?) into the Facebook factory every day, the people yearn for updates. the internet was a business and a business in this rapidly decaying capitalist enterprise meant one thing — competition.
2007 - 2015 – digital renaissances, cyberimpressionism, expansions, contractions
other social media sites didn’t even want to compete with facebook, they spoke to a completely different type of audience. they knew humans were not a monolith and had other needs, other wants, desires. the only thing we had in common was really the potential consumption of this new landscape.
2007: Tumblr
Tumblr was for the artsy girls, the if you know you know niggas, the mysterious, the horny, the queer (but ain’t know it yet) — it was like a bathhouse or social club where tastemakers made taste in a more private and surreptitious lane. it felt like a preservational space for a specific echelon of creators, a vibe curator’s (or a vibrator if you will) space, a visual and linguistic DJ set of takes, tasteful nudes, and elevated dialogue, like an anti-4chan in ways.
2008: Twitter
Twitter felt like the entire world while actually never quite reaching the subscriber heights Facebook did. Jack Dorsey was creating a microblogging community where people adhered to Occam’s razor, keeping the words to 140 characters, becoming the sole of wit – an international playground where the topic of the day was fodder for someone to get to the top of the trends by being funniest and fastest and the reward? sweet retweets, luscious likes, and followers.
it’s where Discourse™ got done, digital empires were built, niche micro-communities found each other again, and it became a new frontier for on-the-ground independent reporting, social justice, and collective mobs (charge that word how you like) who rallied around topics/events of the most poignancy or the most pointlessness like clockwork. it was 24-hour news but we were the anchors, sports, investigators, daytime talk show hosts, media critics, etc — we were reporting for ourselves on ourselves.
a Twitter drought had us scrolling, fiending for content on the refresh and if there wasn’t any we’d create it. people would create controversy or bring up old ones to restore the feeling. a good day on Twitter felt like a high school cafeteria, buzzing with orneriness — modern medicine could never replicate the feeling of a pure hit of Twitter schadenfreude.
Twitter felt like the america that schoolhouse rock told us about, multicultural melting pot but mixed with the america/world we really are — fraught with unresolved conflict, stubbornly holding an old world and a new world together like spider-man, and equal parts hyperbolic, ironically detached, emotionally invested, and self-centered. and if you did it right, you could become a brand.
this was incomprehensible at the time but brands cosplayed as people and now people cosplay as brands, every tweet a campaign , every retweet an endorsement– more on this later.
2009: Instagram
then came Instagram and it was just photos. no long talk, the photo was already worth a thousand words (today, a thousand slides). the age-old “song lyric to encapsulate my mood” as a caption to a photo reigned supreme, geotagging the pic was a flex, and it began to clone other apps with messaging capabilities including “stories,” photo sets, and videos before it just became a suburb of Facebook when Meta acquired it, adding it to the roster as a part of Zuckerberg territory like Guam or Puerto Rico.
2011: Snapchat
Snapchat was all photos with text add-ons but with the added allure of disappearing after it’s viewed. the permanency of posting on other sites made snapchat stand out but also became a space for rampant “consequenceless” activity. shooting off a quick nude and cheating found a new home – snapchat could have been called “sneakylink” lowkey. the novelty of talking to people and the messages disappearing was the appeal, and the messiness of all that entailed followed it. clean, simple, fun.
2014 — “pax technologica”
the internet is at its most harmonious — the new digital frontier ran smoothly and everyone had their place. much like pax britannica, this was a manufactured peace with a clock on it — behind the scenes, the online spaces were either working with each other or slowly starting to consume one another. the internet was industrializing, turning more and more into a business space which meant that the sites began to serve capital and political interests rather than their intention — connectivity, communication, convenience, and community.
traditional media adopted the language of social media into the conventions of their medium — social was just an arm of the mass communication machine, a tool to comment on the goings-on of the bigger titans of storytelling.
this piece isn’t about all the giant streamers in film, tv, or music — industries i work in too — but make no mistake, they play a giant role in how social media became the eyesore it is today — they are the very fodder that we comment on, creating and recreating situations for us to feed their machines.
power to the people
this era saw the rise of social media as activism – slacktivism to some, a loudspeaker for others. events including but not limited to:
student protests in Austria, Toronto, Germany, etc
Occupy Wall Street
the 2011 Egyptian Revolution
numerous coups d’etat
Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Mike Brown, and Oscar Grant
witnessing of Israel’s war on Gazans in 2008, 2012, and 2014
Sandy Hook, Aurora, and a new rash of mass shootings in America
social media gave people a mouthpiece that countered the major media outlets in one regard: it was the voice of the people. Barack Obama was the first politician who understood the power of social media as a tool for grassroots organizing en masse. i know this because when i was a kid, finding out that a potential president was on Twitter felt huge — less of a post-racial joy and more of a “he be posting too??” joy.
an understanding of this new media environment was essential to any sort of success in connecting directly with the people whatever the intention of that connection — it was a ploy that won Obama his back-to-back terms while other more sinister rumbling from the racist, xenophobic skeletons in america’s closets reared their ugly head, looking for their own, anti-progressive messiah…
hyperbolic expansion
i don’t know how to put this. we used to just say…things. this is uncorroboratable because i nuked my Facebook in 2019 but does anyone remember when we used to just be like “i’m in my basement” or “i’m at the movies.” mid-aughts till like 2011 — simple, clear, not laced with some quadruple meaning. the most digital manipulation people would do is post song lyrics so people (and most time's one person) would see their spirit and not their friend count.
the creative reactions of the girls and the gays keeps me gagged so keep it up — they’re discovering new ways to say “i like this,” horizons that i ain’t know existed tbh. but it feels like these days we have to pass through multiple levels of ironic attachment, sarcasm, meme history, 3 levels of bias, decontextualized news, and unverifiable sources just to get to the point. but at the beginning, it was so simple…
the birth modern extremely online™
so, let’s review:
4Chan is for edgelords, rabble-rousers, and some racists
Reddit is the people’s forum™, democracy made manifest
Myspace is the you™ social media
Facebook is the everybody™ social media (an everyone you’ve ever met jambalaya)
Tumblr for the lover girls, the gays, and the cool guys (future creative directors)
Snapchat’s for the sluts (and good for them)
Instagram for the flicks
Twitter’s for the people™
oh hey Vine’s here too! and YouTube look how big you’ve grown. LinkedIn, put ‘er there.
so ends the First Social Media Age. deep exhale.
next: the second age aka the endarkenment™