And paradoxically, because they didn’t know me, they knew me far better than anyone in my real life. I remember one evening, in an instant message conversation, I told my CompuServe friend Marie about the “night feeling.” The night feeling was my private name for the wave that crashed over me most school nights when I got into bed. My stomach would tighten and I’d feel the worry radiating out from my belly button. I’d never told anyone about the night feeling, and my heart was racing as I typed. Marie responded that she also knew the night feeling, and that she sometimes found comfort in listening quietly to her clock radio. I tried that, and it helped.
But most of the time, my Teen Forum friend group did not share our secrets. We shared inside jokes, and learned/built/borrowed/created together. By the summer of 1993, the CompuServe Teen Forum was a vast universe of mythology and references, from jokes about the TV show Barney & Friends to endless acronyms and abbreviations. The internet was still just green letters on a black screen, so we couldn’t use images, but we arranged text characters into shapes. The idea of ASCII art, as it is known, had been around for decades, but we hadn’t been around for decades, and so we felt like we were discovering it as we built everything from extremely simple images—like :-） for example—to ridiculously complex （and often obscene） ones. I don’t recall using a word to describe what we were doing, but these days we would call this stuff memes.
That summer, with school out of the way, I was able to devote myself full-time to the Teen Forum. I even got something called an email address—a series of randomly generated digits @compuserve.com. Back then, the internet charged by the hour, which became a real issue because I wanted to spend every hour on it. Now it was my parents who complained about the phone line being tied up. They loved that I was making friends, that I was writing and reading so much, but they could not afford a one-hundred-dollar monthly internet bill. At this point, a lifeline appeared when I was “hired” as a moderator for the Teen Forum. The payment came in the form of all the free internet I wanted, and I wanted a lot of it. CompuServe even paid for a separate phone line so I could be online constantly. If a single event in my life occurred outdoors that summer, I do not recall it.
* * *
I fear I’ve been romanticizing. The early-nineties internet had many of the problems the current internet does. While I recall the Teen Forum being well moderated, the same racism and misogyny that populate today’s comments sections was prevalent thirty years ago. And then, as now, you could fall very far down the rabbit hole of the internet’s highly personalized information feeds until conspiracy theories began to feel more real than the so-called facts.*
I have wonderful memories of that summer, and also traumatic ones. A few years ago, I ran into an old friend, who said of our high school, “It saved my life. But it also did a lot of other things.” So, too, with the internet.
These days, after drinking from the internet’s fire hose for thirty years, I’ve begun to feel more of those negative effects. I don’t know if it’s my age, or the fact that the internet is no longer plugged into the wall and now travels with me everywhere I go, but I find myself thinking of that Wordsworth poem that begins, “The world is too much with us; late and soon.”
What does it say that I can’t imagine my life or my work without the internet? What does it mean to have my way of thinking, and my way of being, so profoundly shaped by machine logic? What does it mean that, having been part of the internet for so long, the internet is also part of me?
My friend Stan Muller tells me that when you’re living in the middle of history, you never know what it means. I am living in the middle of the internet. I have no idea what it means.
I give the internet three stars.
ACADEMIC DECATHLON
BEGINNING IN TENTH GRADE, I attended a boarding school in Alabama, where my best friend, Todd, was also my roommate. He would often say that late at night, when he was trying to fall asleep in our air-conditionless dorm room, I turned into a stream-of-consciousness novel. I’d tell him everything—my every interaction with my English class crush, including selected quotations from the notes she and I exchanged; the reasons it just wasn’t possible for me to turn in the paper I had due for history; the weird ache I always felt on the outside of my left knee; how nervous I’d been smoking a cigarette behind the gym because someone got caught there last week; and on and on and on until finally he would say, “Seriously, Green. I love you, but I have to sleep.” We were not afraid to say “I love you” to each other.
Here’s my favorite story about Todd: In those days, the SAT was offered only every other month in Alabama. Todd and I managed to miss the last local SAT test before our college application deadlines, so we had to drive to Georgia to take the test. After a road trip and a night in a Motel 6, we arrived bleary-eyed at the testing site, where I struggled to concentrate for four endless hours. When the test was at last over, I met back up with Todd. The first thing he said to me was, “What’s ‘ostentatious’ mean?” And I told him it meant, like, “showy” or “over the top.” Todd nodded subtly to himself and then, after a second, said, “Cool. I got them all then.”
And he had. Perfect score on the SAT.
* * *
It was Todd who had the idea for me to join the Academic Decathlon team, although at first blush I seemed a poor candidate. I never excelled academically, and took some pride in “not fulfilling my potential,” in part because I was terrified that if I tried my hardest, the world would learn I didn’t actually have that much potential. But in my poor grades, Todd sensed an opportunity.
Academic Decathlon, sometimes known as AcaDec, features ten disciplines. In 1994, there were seven “objective” events featuring multiple-choice tests: economics, fine arts, language and literature, math, science, social science, and a “Super Quiz” in “Documents of Freedom.” There were also three subjective events graded by judges—an essay, an in-person interview, and the performance of a speech.
Every school’s AcaDec team has nine players: You get three A students, with grade point averages above 3.75; three B students, with GPAs above 3; and three C students, whose GPAs are 2.99 or below. For all you non-Americans out there, that means three of each school’s players get excellent marks, three get good ones, and three must be . . . fairly bad at school. I, as it happened, was terrible at school. Todd believed that with his patient instruction and my awful grades, he could mold me into an Academic Decathlon superstar.
And so beginning in our junior year, we studied together. We read an entire economics textbook, and whenever I found part of it inscrutable, Todd would frame the topic in ways that were comprehensible to me. When we were learning about marginal utility, for example, he explained it to me in terms of Zima.
Todd would tell me, “Look, you drink one Zima and you feel good. You drink two, and you feel better, but the added benefit is smaller than between zero and one. The additional usefulness of each added Zima gets lower and lower until eventually the curve inverts around five Zimas and you throw up. That’s marginal utility.”*
So we learned economics, but we also learned art history, and chemistry, and math, and much else. Through studying for Academic Decathlon, I learned about everything from the Indus Valley Civilization to mitosis. And thanks to Todd, I became a very capable Academic Decathlete.