The Internet Was Fun Once

If you had to pick, what would be your Golden Age of the Internet? The moment when you thought, oh my god YES, and were hooked. How long did it last? Where was it – what platform or community? What did it feel like? Who did you befriend there? Do you still know them?

I'm asking you because I have a hard time choosing. In my heart, I feel like the answer has to be Flickr, circa 2007 to 2010 or so. That's where I met my best friend, who lives (as she always has) in Australia. But then I flash back to 1992 and the telnet chatroom I spent most of my time in during the winter of my freshman year of college. That was my first online community, where I met people I still know today. Or I think about Twitter in its heyday, although what years that spans is harder to assess. Maybe 2009 or 2010 to 2013ish or later, depending on which parts of Twitter you inhabited and how connected they were to Gamergate, before Gamergate affected (infected?) literally everything. Some of the people I'm closest to today I met during those good Twitter years.

Whenever that moment was for you or for me, I think we can agree: The Golden Age of the Internet is certainly not right now.

Right now I would say the Internet is mostly bad. Everything is very doom and gloom. The news is horrible, the tech is somehow worse despite being more advanced, the economy is tanking, we're all stressed out and overloaded from the firehose of information. Everyone is Big Mad. Super fun! There are certainly pockets where good vibes can be found, but curating positive online experiences feels like it requires way more work and intention. You cannot forget where you are and idly read the comments! (Although to be fair, that hasn't been safe for at least a decade.) Even here I find myself focusing on the bad stuff and writing about what's wrong with tech and the internet. Remember when sex sold? Now it's anger.

In fact, last week I almost wrote about one of the most dystopian experiences I'd had in a long time online. I was scrolling on TikTok, which I do a few times a week during the part of my social media cycle when I remember TikTok exists. I never formed a strong habit there, even though I feel like I find more content on TikTok that I enjoy than on platforms I use more frequently. (I have thoughts about why this is, but I am going to try and finish ONE thought before I get distracted.) There was a cute video of a cute dog, as there often is in my various feeds, and I liked it. I went to the comments – TikTok is weirdly one of the places online where the comments can actually be fun, depending on the post – and this is what I saw.

If you watch this video – and I don't know that I recommend watching it, although it is helpful to do so – you will see me scrolling for quite a while, pausing occasionally to focus on a specific comment. The vast majority of the comments, which even a week ago already had millions of views and likes, seem to be from brands. Lots of brands, all different manner of brands. Utz Snacks, Microsoft 365, Clorox. YouTube! Jake from State Farm? At one point Kotex pops up to make a "luteal phase" joke (in the luteal phase women tend to be moodier and I guess the dog is so cute and happy it makes everyone want to cry). Even typing that last sentence makes me want to throw my phone into the sea.

Sure, behind most of these brand comments is an actual person, although maybe companies have bots running their social media now, what do I know. And yes, brands are everywhere. Not only are corporations people, brands are now our friends. It's inescapable, and it's not even that new. Even in the vaunted '90s when we were all soooo Gen X and thought selling out was lame, the Internet was already rife with brands. Don't believe me? Please enjoy a selection of the finest websites from 1996 and 1997.

Even so! This comment section felt like crossing a rubicon. It was somehow more dystopian than all of the news, and I mean all of the news whether you lean left or right because I keep up on both. Most of that stuff, as bad as it is, is like textbook dystopia. We've seen it. Cruel governments and corrupt officials are a dime a dozen in the history books. But this? Nexxus Hair Care commenting "unbothered queen" on the viral video of a dog? This is new, and it's all our fault. I hate it.

BUT.

That was last week. Last week the vibes were off universally. This week, at least in New York, the weather has been unbelievably perfect, and since I am but a simple creature, everything feels better. Or at least more manageable. So imagine my delight when this week I discovered there's a man named Ander Louis in the Yarra Valley of Australia who is slowly translating Tolstoy's War and Peace into... Australian. Bogan Australian, even.

I can't remember if I've mentioned this yet, and I also can't be bothered to search through my own newsletters to check, but in the last few years I became an audiobook person. This is a big deal to me because for a very long time I deeply disliked listening to other people talk. Like, in the form of news, podcasts, recordings etc (although sometimes also in person if I'm honest). I did not listen to podcasts, and I thought it even less likely that I'd ever listen to audiobooks. I'm still iffy on podcasts – I like some, but I'm very picky – whereas I have whole-heartedly embraced audiobooks. Again, I'm still picky, but I can confidently say I've listened to more audiobook hours in the last year or two than I have music and podcasts combined. And if you know me, this is huge because as equally as I used to hate listening to people talk, I loved (and still love) music. I tried a few books on and off, but nothing captivated me. Then I listened to a fun Richard Osman novel called The Thursday Murder Club. Not only did I love it, it helped me stay so focused on tasks I normally found boring, so I kept going. Eventually, thanks to a friend, I listened to a version of Dickens' David Copperfield as read by Richard Armitage, which made me sob while walking in Central Park, and from there I fell into the wonderful world of Trollope, which is a topic I'll save for another time because I swear this newsletter is about tech.

Anyway, after I finished a series of Trollope novels (the Palliser novels), I decided I needed a break from books with very long fox hunting scenes, and I started listening to War and Peace (this was before I knew there was a wolf hunting scene). I'd never read any Tolstoy and I'd always wanted to, so I thought, why not an audiobook, especially since there's a good translation read by Thandiwe Newton, whose mellifluous tones could make anything enjoyable. And enjoy it I have! So much that I often find myself wanting to talk about the book. But I only know one person I can reliably text about War and Peace, and I already pester that person more than seems fair. So I do what any other person might do in the modern age: I poke around online.

In my searches, I have of course discovered plenty of online activity related to War and Peace. Notably, there is a Reddit group called A Year of War and Peace that is dedicated to, as you might have guessed, reading roughly a chapter of War and Peace a day for a year. From what I can see, it's been running since 2018 or so. I haven't worked through the lore of the group yet, so I don't know who founded it, but I do know that a guy named Brian Denton did his own A Year of War and Peace on Medium in 2016, and his related post is linked in each day's Reddit post. He may be one of the mods of the Reddit group, and maybe I should have figured that out before I wrote this but YOLO.

I am not a member of this subreddit and have not taken part in this year's conversation. I haven't even spent that much time reading any of it, just an occasional glance at people's thoughts, in part because I'm reading (listening) in a different timeframe. This week I'm almost at the end, so I once again went online for some reason or other, ended up in the subreddit, and saw what I had missed on my previous visits.

Now, as you know, War and Peace is a very, very, very long book. The audiobook alone is 60+ hours. You might not know that Tolstoy revised and rewrote it at least seven (7) times – which he did BY HAND – and also that his wife had to recopy it each time. So this translation, given that it's a passion project by our new friend Ander (I messaged him through Reddit so I feel comfortable saying that), has thus far only covered Books 1 and 2. For the uninitiated, there are 15 books, plus two (2) epilogues. Ander started this project sometime before 2019 I assume, since that's when he published Book 1.

When I saw this, my first reaction was obviously to laugh. I feel that is the correct reaction. Setting aside the value of making literature more accessible through translation, this is just delightful and absurd. And since it made me laugh, I thought, maybe there's someone out there who might also enjoy it. By someone, I was expecting perhaps a handful of people to chuckle. Instead, this happened.

I mean, it's not a massive viral moment, but that's a good number of people being amused by Tolstoy. And the comments were, by and large, delightful as well. Lots of joy and laughter, lots of funny comments, lots of people sharing other fun translations. More than one person expressed a weird sense of faith being restored in humanity. Someone even commented "Anatole is a dick tbh," after reading the excerpt below, and you know what? I spent half the book wanting to say that to someone! He really is!

There is at least one person who is not amused, but in his defense, he works in Australian localization and also works as a translator. I will not screenshot him as I haven't asked for permission to do so and it's very early morning over there, but his assessment was that this translation is "cringey and even patronizing." He said that, according to him and his colleagues, "it looks like the result of someone prompting AI to write W&P in Australian, complete with the tired cliches. It's in the Aussie equivalent of Mockney." I've suggested he give some helpful feedback to the author, who does seem to be doing it sincerely (as well as for a laugh) and without the use of AI (since he started before 2019). Will report back on how well that goes over.

Although of course now I'm wondering if I'm a jerk for finding it funny, but too late I guess!

As a result of all this, I reached out to Ander, to let him know about this mostly positive response, and to ask if he had a non-Amazon link. He was shocked and, again, delighted. He'd put the project on the back burner since it hadn't, you know, exactly taken off. I think there were more positive comments about his efforts in that one Bluesky thread than in the past decade combined. Someone even called him a fucking legend, which I suggested he use as a pull quote on his next cover.

This whole experience – the discovery of the book, the laughs I got reading the excerpts, the joy everyone shared when I posted it on Bluesky, the feeling of connecting over something fun for once, the creator's surprise, even the (probably very fair) assessment of the translator/Australian localization expert – was like a wormhole back to a different Internet. A better, more human Internet. A real throwback, aside from the almost palpable sense of relief I felt from people who were glad to have something unexpected and fun in their feeds. Because the Golden Age of the Internet, whenever and wherever that was for you, wasn't perfect. People disagreed, sometimes very intensely, and bad things happened. But the scale was tipped waaayyyyyy more toward the good for much more of the time.

Out there on the Information Superhighway, people are still doing their own thing, working on projects that few people will ever see or care about, updating websites and carrying a little torch for whatever it is they love and want to share. Seeing that torch flicker in the darkness and then connecting over it like actual human beings, however briefly – Anatole is a dick tbh – was like a balm. It was the online equivalent of this incredible weather, the soft warmth of spring that makes you smile at strangers and feel even a sliver less hopeless about everything. Just like A Year of War and Peace, just like War and Peace itself, and certainly just like the history Tolstoy writes about, everything is cyclical. We've been here before, and we've survived by finding our way back to our humanity.

Well, okay. We haven't been here when "here" is an entire comment feed full of brands. Seriously, that shit has got to stop.

Until next Wednesday!

Lx