Today’s review is of Escape, by Marie Le Conte, who has graced these pages before. This book has been on my to-read list since it first came out, but for one reason or another it had not yet made it to the top of the pile.

The subtitle is “How a generation shaped, destroyed and survived the internet”. I am just a few years older than Marie (honestly!), but those were pretty crucial years. Although I was online by the same age Marie was (mid-teens), the Internet I was on was very different from hers — partly in terms of platforms, and partly in terms of who was on them. This is a theme that Marie explores throughout the book: what did it mean to grow up, not just online, but in a particular moment when platforms like MySpace were there exclusively for people like you?

The Internet had always had this twilight zone nature, made explicit in John Perry Barlow’s famous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace and its conviction that cyberspace somehow did not lie “within the borders of the nations and governments of the real world”. That notional independence is of course laughable today, as Marie acknowledges readily, but there was another important distinction. I was joining an Internet, and particularly Usenet, that had Elders. There were already rules and etiquette to learn and abide by — and in the sorts of corners I frequented, deliberate and curmudgeonly technical barriers erected to keep out hoi polloi and those of us who arrived in the wake of the September that never ended. MySpace and the other new platforms did not have any of that, and so Marie and her peers had a space all to themselves and were able to make their own scene from scratch.

On the Internet, nobody used to know who you were

One aspect of Marie’s experience that I do recognise is her lament that, on the Internet of our youth, “you did not have to be all of yourself all of the time”. The mega-platforms that we deal with right now, in their dual nature as social networks and adtech profile vendors, have a vested interest in capturing all facets of a single user, and not allowing a single user to manifest in different ways at different places and times. Mark Zuckerberg himself has said that “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” A lack of integrity, if you please!

In the halcyon days of the pre-Zuck Internet that was absolutely not the case. Many if not most of us were anonymous or pseudonymous, with different aspects of our identity on display at different times. As I wrote in the context of interoperability between different social networks, collapsing that context can be a very bad thing for users:

People do want to partition off different parts of their identity. Maybe on Facester Alice presents as a buttoned-up suburban housewife, but on Twitbook she lets her hair down and focuses on her death metal fandom. She would prefer not to have to discuss some of the imagery and lyrics that go with that music at the PTA, so she doesn’t use the same name and keeps these two aspects of her personality on separate networks.

As Marie notes: “There is nothing quite like the feeling of being among your people”. However, we are not always the same person at all times and to all people. She has an extended riff on giving a best-man speech and wanting to know who is in the audience. Only the blandest of jokes are appropriate for all audiences at all times, but among our own people, we can let our hair down a little more. This is not (just) about hiding unacceptable opinions in the shadows; sadly, the Internet has also enabled plenty of that. It’s more that (we hope) our own people will have more context about us, so that if we say something that can interpreted in different ways, they will know how to weight the fact of who said it, where, and when.

The problem is that today’s Internet is not the Internet that either Marie or I grew up with. The rise of mega-platforms means that “This is the internet and nothing is ours; we base our conversations, identities and relationships around shared words and memes, but it can all get away from us at a moment’s notice.” Our (singular, unified) identities are now built up to a huge extent on these platforms, which is why it was such a wrench for me to leave Twitter after 15 years — and why, I presume, Marie is still on there.

There is are a couple of other generational divide in the book. At one point, Marie describes losing emails from a past relationship to the vagaries of the cloud; I lost my own old love letters to obsolescence of physical media — DDS tapes and the drives to read them, to be specific. “It becomes clear that none of this ever truly belonged to us”, as she puts it.

Finally, Zuckerberg rears his ugly head once more, as his I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-Twitter, Threads, adds a green “online” status indicator beside people’s names. This is a further demonstration that, as far as Facebook is concerned, being offline is an anomaly. Back in Marie’s and my formative years, the Internet was tethered to a wire, and when you walked away from it, you were AFK until you returned. In retrospect, maybe it was not such a bad idea to tie it down so it couldn’t follow us everywhere.

Perhaps in some sense the old ways are best? And in fact the quotes from Marie’s book that I have included above are copied from smartphone camera shots of an imperfectly-bound physical copy, which even had some page edges uncropped for extra old-school authenticity. The review is posted on an old-school blog, one that has survived several platform migrations thanks to the fact that I pay for my own domain name and do not rely on the continued goodwill of someone else’s platform for the continuity of my own.

Anyway, a fun read, confessional and enlightening, that at some points made me feel very old but in which I also recognised a lot of my own experience.

🖼️  Cover image from Waterstones