At the start of these aimless searches, this scrolling movement seems the closest any of us can get to magic on the internet. The scrolling is a pull that emerges and exists only in movement. I feel as though, if I move my fingers fast enough, I can overtake the present and step into the future. And if the search words I type in are dark enough, I’ll be able to continue down the different layers of the atmosphere and then the earth. In the end, I’ll be able to scroll myself all the way to hell.
I like the idea of hell. I like how easy it is to get there. Just by thinking or writing those simple words. In 1998, when I curse loudly in front of the class, I do it because I like cursing; I’ve had years to cultivate the most articulate fucking hells and holy shits. The teacher knows that when I say it the words are capitalised and in a particular font, so I get a written warning. Hell is a sea of written warnings. Hell is the place God doesn’t want to see, or can’t see, or has ignored. When I swear I feel electric. That same year, when I use the internet connection I’ve set up at home, I get a similar feeling, a tingle, as if an electric signal that smoulders in my body has been amplified. I put my hand on the modem and feel the frequencies of the dial-up sound drone through me. Since then I have not been able to separate the memory of electrical shocks from loose terminal blocks and copper wiring in the broom cupboard from my memories of swearing and the descent into hell, and connecting to the internet. I just remember information streaming through the arteries in my wrists.
It takes a while for me to remember this when we first begin the search. It’s been twenty years since I got internet at home, and since then the internet has changed, alongside us. Our movements and rituals across the screen are superficially similar to what we were doing twenty years ago, but the internet has long since shed its mystical skin. The haphazard searches and screen trances that we fell into in the ’90s are now controlled and regulated by more mundane rituals, steady pulses between fluctuating browser banners. The movements don’t lead us down to the underground, but between inbox and outbox, new page loads, post uploads, and new posts in our feed. Venke, Terese and I breathe between applications, we slip in and out of images, as if the internet were no longer a mystical dimension but a rhythmic imitation of life. Above us the algorithms watch over our actions, on earth as in heaven.
But then we really get going, and although we’re distracted, prevented and interrupted, we find the undertow is still there. We can still feel the hatred surge through our veins. We’ve found a direction for our search now, but what follows we don’t know. We’ve stopped switching banners and applications in time with our breath. It’s as if we’re rediscovering the internet and wandering through the ruins of the museum of interrupted connections, outside the all-consuming portals. We’ve yet to find anything else, but we do feel an ever-growing presence. Maybe what we’re supposed to find isn’t a particular place, but a process, a recipe, a code, a combination of keyboard shortcuts, a language. We begin to feel that old sensation of electricity surging from the power grid and into our bodies. Late at night, long after darkness has fallen both outside and inside the apartment because we forgot to turn on the light, we lift our gazes from our computers and see each other’s eyes glow like predators’.
Inside the witches’ den, we scan and scroll our way down, with fingers and noses and eyes and external hard drives. The internet isn’t deep enough. Sooner or later it’ll stop and something else will take over. Hatred glows in the palms of hands hovering above keyboards. That’s how writing begins, I think, not with a document or a text or a word, but with this glow, this prickling.
Dear internet,
The electricity in my hands is palpable now, and I’m starting to remember just how much machines meant to me, how high my hopes for the internet once were. I remember playing pretend-internet on computers as far back as 1989, before I knew it existed.
This internet-before-the-internet game is my first ritual project. I draw the same things over and over again in the application Paint, as if I were waiting for someone else to continue the drawing for me, or with me. I talk to the hard drive when I play games and open programs in MS-DOS.
It’s the same year I get really into Superman 3. I watch the film every weekend. I’m especially obsessed with the ending, where the oblivious bad guy Gus Gorman – played by a tremulous Richard Pryor, uncharacteristically free from profanity – has constructed a giant computer that suddenly breaks free from human control. In the process it attracts several of the main villains into its machine body. It then wraps cords and machinery around the villains, making them hybrid creatures; organic robots in the service of the computer. The villains receive wireless information from the horrific machine through invisible waves through space, or somehow at least they know what to
