I have been on the internet since about age eight. My first distinct memories of it take place in Costa Mesa, California, logging onto America Online from my dad’s office computer and playing Scrambler in AOL chat rooms. The only thing people asked you for was your A/S/L (a little horrifying in retrospect, but 1997 was a different time – or, at least, it certainly felt like it) and all that mattered was how quickly you could reArRanGe a bUncH oF leTtErS. There wasn’t a lot of creativity involved beyond inventing my first screen name, but one thing was for sure: the more of the internet I experienced, the more I absolutely loved it.

Designing my first Geocities website on the family PC and using it as an online portfolio for my would-be novels (so many would-be novels). Graduating to having my own PC, in my own bedroom, where I lived my best life on Neopets and built out websites for my Redwall-themed RPG guild and personalized my pet’s pages with pastel hex codes and a healthy dose of Comic Sans. When Myspace arrived on the scene, I dove right in, coding and curating my profile page down to the <p>’s, because why wouldn’t I? A shiny new place to express myself while forcing people to listen to the dulcet tones of Rivers Cuomo as they scrolled through my About Me section? My friends, the absolute dream.

For the most part, in the intervening years from those eclectic little slices of the web right up through recent times, I still have mostly loved the internet. As someone with almost exclusively long-distance friendships, the internet was an integral part of my early adulthood – the whole humanity-changing access to an endless stream of information part notwithstanding. From Sacramento to Norwich, San Diego to Santa Ana, San Jose to London, the existence of the internet and the prevalence of its offspring social media made my twenties possible. 

This was, it feels important to note, before social media was so obviously commodified, when the groundwork and data collection for that commodification was still being meticulously laid and covertly hoarded. I saw my various profiles as easier ways to stay in touch with the world. Rather than updating a website or a blog, I could just have a social media account. It meant less writing, but what started out as a con of these accounts quickly became a very clear perk: their convenience, which only ever increased as more app updates arrived, was unmatched. Social media took a multi-step process that often involved several creative decisions (posts are serious business) and more than one session of staring at a blank Word document for thirty-plus minutes and reduced it to, at its simplest, three clicks or taps, from posting to posted. 

The result of that aesthetically-pleasing convenience? The last 12 years of my life as documented online on my Instagram, and up until about 2019, on my Facebook as well.  

Now at this point, well into 2024, Instagram has been a highly profitable marketing tool for many years. I am not naive, and this is not new information. But it’s been either enjoyably so (I do love pretty things and do not mind them being advertised to me) or easily avoidable, so it’s never stopped me from using it.

As I continued to scroll, there were obvious advertisements. Then there were slickly sponsored posts. And then there were so very many attempts to make Instagram into TikTok through reels and search page updates. Still, in-between all of that, there remained photos of my old friend’s sprouting spring garden, stories from another’s trip to Vietnam with her family, posts with another’s job announcement or their walk to work or their latest curbside find. They all came together to make Instagram worthwhile. The good always outweighed the bad.   

Then, about two weeks ago, I tapped the search icon so I could look up a specific account…and something new happened. Where previously a harmless magnifying glass had sat, a blueish non-M now swooshed and swirled. When I typed in my search query, I suddenly found myself not in a sea of near-match account names (because I can never remember how to correctly spell usernames), but in conversation with a robot.

Instagram had replaced basic search with Meta AI. That was my last straw. 

I could handle the ads. I had managed my impulsive purchase habits and made my account private when I got tired (so tired) of blocking porn bots. I gave up on ever being able to afford the suggested content because the algorithm, smart as it was, never picked up on the fact that this gal cannot afford a $348 chartreuse dress (as much as she desperately would love to). The invasion of something that I have struggled to get behind since its inception, that has been nothing short of pervasive in every section of the web and its online watercoolers, was too much.  

All I want from Instagram is to share my life and see my friends’ lives. Meta AI had no place in that purpose, no business in my search bar. Seeing it there, realizing how little choice I had in this social media app with which I was daily choosing to engage, made me sit back and really reassess my online presence for the first time since, well…quite possibly, since 1997.  

I still haven’t fully decided how I’m going to portion off my use of Instagram. There is no alternative to replace such a widely used way to stay in touch with the wonderful humans I’ve met across my many jobs and even more many moves. Right now, it would feel like a real loss if I just shut it down and stopped participating.  

But what I can change about Instagram is my own intentionality. After a lot of thinking about what that might look like, I arrived here, at the dusty old URL that I have on autopay and so continue to accidentally pay for and might as well use. Instagram will remain a place where I go to find others. But I am going to try and make my own Instagram simply a jumping off point for here, where I am investing in my own little space on the internet. I have downloaded all my photos from my Instagram account in case it disappears off the face of the planet tomorrow, and I’m going to try and be more intentional about what I upload. Ideally, most of it will land here instead.   

The truth is, I am aware very few people end up on this website. I often joke that I don’t have a readership and that I’m just writing for myself. But what is also true, and I also say every time, is that I don’t really mind. I enjoy having a website for the same reasons I enjoyed having a five-colored room in high school, for the same reasons I enjoy getting tattoos, for the same reasons I enjoy decorating our home. It’s a form of self-expression that I really value and have valued for twenty-seven years. Sure, this is a bit more involved than typing my A/S/L into a chatroom and playing internet Boggle, and maybe it’s a bit weird that I’m sending this self-expression out into the void for pretty much any human to read. But I get to pick the bits I share, sharing those bits makes me happy, and honestly – who doesn’t just love a pretty thing? 

How we connect with the internet and with social media is one of the many unforeseen challenges modern humans have been blessed with confronting, and frankly, it sucks. I am so over Facebook it hurts, but I can’t delete my account because I’ve been seduced by Facebook Marketplace. I just wrote an entire post about grappling with the trials and tribulations of Instagram, involving many thoughts and initiatives, none of which involve deleting that account either. Even my Tumblr, derelict since 2018, I hang on to – although that one is more like a very specific shrine to the years I spent alone in my twenties, and less a place I actively spend time.  

The internet, for better or worse, is currently inextricable from this millennial. Time to at least try and make it for the better.