In the eighth grade, not long after it first occurred to me that Chloe from the Seventeen chat room might not be who she said, I started making up fake identities. One name I bequeathed myself was Lauren, that of one of the soft-lipped girls I’d sidled up to in the sixth grade. We were all doing it by then: using the internet to try on different selves.
This was the year we moved to Mercer Island. After school, Sophie and I would walk to her house, log in to AOL, and enter chat rooms together. In these chat rooms, we met strangers and told them stories about ourselves. We’d been writing stories about ourselves for years – we both kept diaries – but now, for the first time, we had an audience. On New Year’s Eve in the ninth grade, Sophie had a party – that is, her parents had a party, to which I was invited, along with her parents’ friends and their daughters – and we went online and met a boy named Gene. He said he lived in Seattle and was 18 years old. We decided Sophie lived in Phoenix, a city she had just visited, and was 17. Eventually, we persuaded him, or he persuaded us, to talk on the phone, and we did, passing the handset around among ourselves. Sophie liked Gene best, and Gene liked Sophie best, and in the weeks that followed, they developed a phone relationship. Sophie thought he had a hot voice. She eventually confessed to him that she lived in the Seattle area, too, and the two of them decided to meet – along with me and a friend of his – at the movie theatre in Factoria, between Mercer Island and Bellevue.
When Sophie’s mom dropped us off, a boy came up and introduced himself as Gene. He had clearly come alone. He was not, in person, hot. He was also not, by all appearances, 18. He was closer to our age, it seemed – a small kid with, we thought, a big nose. Sophie told him she’d changed her mind; she didn’t want to go to the movie anymore. He asked her to at least talk to him around the corner of the theatre, in a quieter spot. She said she would, but only if I came along, too.
Gene watched me with hope – and then, faced with my steely expression, something like hatred – but agreed. When we got there, he said she should at least let him kiss her. He’d come all that way. She looked to me. I told him she didn’t want to kiss him. He said she should at least let him touch her. Fine, she said. He seemed surprised. I looked at her to suggest it was a bad idea, but she ignored me. He asked where. She rolled up her shirt a little and indicated her stomach. He reached out with his fingertip and pressed it into her skin. Then we said we were leaving. We went inside and hid in the girls’ bathroom until we could be sure he’d given up.
A neat ending to this anecdote would be to say that after this we never chatted with internet strangers again. But of course we did. In real life, at school, we didn’t have a ton of other friends. The year Sophie and I met, she’d been blacklisted from the clique she’d been part of for having yelled at her previous best friend that she was a bitch. My own social marginalisation had, to my despair, stayed attached to me in the move from Oklahoma to Washington. When a popular boy on whom I had a crush came up to me in the cafeteria to ask me on a date, I said no only because it was so evident to me that the proposal had been a jokey dare. I was right. He turned and went back toward his friends – everyone called them the White Hat Posse, because they wore matching white baseball caps – and they all laughed at my (and maybe his) expense.
I don’t remember if I had, by then, encountered the famous New Yorker cartoon published in July 1993 in which a dog, perched on an office chair in front of a desktop computer, says, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” If I had, I’m not sure it would have resonated with me. The issue was not, I felt, that I was a dog. I was not a dog. The issue was that the internet was the only place where anyone believed me.
The internet didn’t just gift us with infinite access to information and products; it gifted us with infinite access to audience. As the essayist Jia Tolentino writes in “The I in Internet,” “In physical spaces, there’s a limited audience and time span for every performance. Online, your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end.” By the middle of high school, I was no longer deceiving strangers with made-up versions of myself. Chat rooms had become taboo, stained by stories of pedophiles masquerading as teenage girls. My own self-performance, by then, was more nuanced. In real life, Deepa was in and out of the hospital, losing weight and hope.
When I got my first email account, I started regularly writing pages-long emails to Ari Shapiro, my crush with the radio internship. In them, I never revealed much about my sister’s illness, certainly not my own anguish, which I hardly even revealed to myself. Instead, I used my emails as a showcase of cool erudition. Sometimes, Ari would show up on AOL Instant Messenger. If I wasn’t online, Sophie would call to alert me that he was active, and I’d rush to the computer to log on and try to chat with him.
Ari still sometimes stopped by the high school radio station, but I barely knew him in person. Our communication took place almost entirely online. That gave me an opening to position myself however I wanted, and I chose to masquerade as a public intellectual, dropping deep-sounding quotations that I’d pulled from the internet, from philosophers or musicians with whose work I had only the vaguest familiarity; my shtick was to place song lyrics in the subject line, some pop and some obscure, signalling the breadth of my repertoire. My sister, who had deployed her friends to spy on me while she was in the hospital, learned at one point about my pursuit of Ari Shapiro and reported it to my parents, who, in turn, forced me to quit the radio club. But that did little to deter my correspondence – which, in retrospect, had less to do with Ari Shapiro than with the opportunity he gave me to perform a version of myself that needed performing at the time.
Mark Zuckerberg was in high school around the same time as me, and his formative experiences with the internet also took place on AOL Instant Messenger. His hometown in Westchester County, New York, was across a bridge from where all his friends lived, so instead of hanging out in person after school, they’d hang out on Instant Messenger.
“My friends and I spent a lot of time curating our online identities,” Zuckerberg would remember later in a Facebook post. “We spent hours finding quotes for our AIM” – AOL Instant Messenger – “profiles that expressed how we felt, and we picked just the right font and colour for our messages to signal what we wanted about ourselves.”
Once, he built a custom instant-messaging platform – he called it ZuckNet – that his father, a dentist, could use to communicate with colleagues at his office. “Those early projects and experiences had a lot of the seeds of what would become Facebook,” he wrote. “Since early on, AIM shaped a deep aesthetic sense that the world works better when we can all connect and share. I’ve lived these ideas since I was a child, and I still believe them deeply today.”
I, like Zuckerberg, was an ambitious child of the 1990s. When I graduated from high school and went to Stanford, I immediately signed myself up to write for the campus newspaper. By my senior year, I was the managing editor for news for The Stanford Daily, and so, when Zuckerberg opened Facebook up to Stanford students in February 2004 – it was the site’s third campus after Harvard, where Zuckerberg had gone to college, and Columbia – I edited the Daily’s article about it, written in early March by a reporter named Shirin Sharif.
“I know it sounds corny, but I’d love to improve people’s lives, especially socially,” Zuckerberg told Shirin. He’d recently been called before a disciplinary board at Harvard, according to The Harvard Crimson, after taking photos from Harvard dorms’ literal facebooks – physical catalogues of residents – and building a site where people were shown side-by-side photos and asked to judge the subjects’ hotness. It seemed that the trouble had humbled him. This time, he said, “I really went out of my way to build robust privacy settings. People haven’t really complained much about privacy at all.”
Zuckerberg, noting that it was costing just $85 a month in server costs to run Facebook, also told Shirin that recouping the investment wasn’t an urgent priority. “In the future we may sell ads to get the money back, but since providing the service is so cheap, we may choose not to do that for a while,” he said. One month later – according to a media kit posted online by Digiday – Facebook’s chief financial officer at the time, Eduardo Saverin, was pitching a New York marketer on the opportunity to target ads on Facebook based on users’ “Sexual Orientation,” “Personal Interests,” and “Political Bent,” among other factors. The first page of the media kit featured a quotation about Facebook: “Classes are being skipped. Work is being ignored. Students are spending hours in front of their computers in utter fascination. The facebook dot com craze has swept through campus.” It was from the beginning of Shirin’s article.
Saverin’s pitch to advertisers was prescient, if aspirational: while Facebook didn’t offer detailed ad targeting at the time, it would within several years, as people increasingly deployed their own personal information in service of their profiles. Alongside our article, we had printed a chart in the paper showing Facebook’s user numbers in its earliest days at Stanford: on its first Thursday, three people; on Friday, 13; on Saturday, 28; and as of the Thursday a week after its launch, 2,815 people. Some students had resisted, at least at first. “It’s a system designed for people who feel insecure and need to numerically quantify their friends,” a senior named Alejandro Foung said in the Stanford Daily article about its launch. But most, myself included, were enraptured. “Nothing validates your social existence like the knowledge that someone has approved you or is asking your permission to list them as a friend,” a sophomore named Mike Rothenberg, who’d already collected 115 friends, told Shirin. “It’s bonding and flattering at the same time.”
If Rothenberg’s name sounds at all familiar, it might be because he went on to become something of a public figure. He’d been raised in a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses in the town of Georgetown, Texas, best known for being one of the places where Varsity Blues was filmed, and distinguished himself by participating in Math Olympiad competitions, according to a Wired article about him. “No one in my family has any money,” he would later tell TechCrunch. At Stanford, he ran a speaker series where he hosted entrepreneurs on campus, including Zuckerberg himself. Zuckerberg also became a fixture at parties at Rothenberg’s frat, Sigma Nu, where, one day in Rothenberg’s dorm room, he met Kevin Systrom, one of Rothenberg’s frat brothers and a future co-founder of Instagram – which would later become a Facebook acquiree.
Excerpted with permission from Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, Vauhini Vara, HarperCollins India.
