In the middle of my Superman obsession I go to the hospital to visit grandma, who is recuperating after a surgery; various wires and hypodermic needles are connected to her body, saline solution, medication, something that looks like blood. All the wires make me dizzy, and I think about the machine people from Superman 3. Before then, I’ve never really thought about the body as real and mortal; that we also have to be plugged into something and get support to live sometimes.
Does it hurt? Can you feel anything? I ask grandma, as I poke at one of the wires.
I feel for that lady over there, she replies and gestures across the room at a woman in a coma, surrounded by just as many wires and drip stands.
The comment is inscrutable to me, but when I think about it several years later I realise it’s true: they are both plugged into the containers and walls of the hospital. Their body tissue communicates with the wires, with the fluids and the plastic and the metal, perhaps also with each other’s tissue, and even with me as I drink red Ribena from a plastic cup and eat liquorice from the vending machine in the hallway.
As I continue to draw increasingly macabre illustrations in Paint, writing love letters to computers and mocking God with demonic quartertones in the school choir, the modern internet really starts taking shape around the world. Different versions of Russian and French networks have already existed, but this year, while grandma and the other woman at the hospital are plugged into the machines and the walls and each other, various successors to ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Administration) are connected to each other, too, and this larger network is called the internet. The connections are material, but the web is perceived as something else: it’s understood as a virtual dimension where we could potentially contact anyone at any time. Without my realising it, we are connected to a global heart-lung machine, that a few years later will promise to pump our virtual blood between us, unrestricted and uncensored.
The internet was kind of spiritual in the ’90s, wasn’t it? Terese says.
I was looking for someone to talk to, I say.
Me, too, says Venke, the dial-up was like a ringtone. Like ringing God.
The Jesus teens don’t talk about the internet in that way in the ’90s. Maybe they feel that same electric surge through their hands when they fold them in prayer. And maybe I’m looking for something on the network, too, when a few years later I begin to surf the internet and chat on mIRC, first one night per week in a classroom and later at home. It always disappoints me that the ones I’m chatting to are real people from Ås, or San Diego or Johannesburg. Between the chat shifts, I dream up better conversations than the ones that exist in the real logs, and I continue to write to the computer, to invisible partners deeper in the mechanical systems. The feeling in my fingers as they rest on the warm keyboard reminds me of spiritualism. It’s the closest I get to communing with the spiritual realm. The electricity, the network, the connection. The internet is all I need to connect to another world, to disappear into another world, get away, or just feel close to something mystical and impossible. I fantasise about finding my own doppelgänger on the internet, or that I will suddenly be chatting to a version of myself from the future, or chatting to my grandma through the machines. A few years later I will be googling myself to sleep at night in imaginary search engines.
In the witches’ den, with Terese and Venke, I type into the search bar the internet as a spiritual force. I delete it and instead type How the spiritual world is like the internet. I delete this too and write Find God on the internet. I don’t press Search, but I am searching.
Dear God, who art online.
In my witch’s den in Oslo in the early 2000s I study for my bachelor’s degree; I’ve long since become a nerd, like Gus Gorman in Superman 3, only a little more destructive. Of all the students taking the mandatory IT course, I get along best with the program. Not technically – I can’t even make the Word document black – but I’m the one devoting the most time to what I hope is the magic of the machine. I’m the one who fantasises about being an HTML code and being held in the arms of the brackets. I’m the one forever inventing clever and cleverer Alta Vista searches, as if I were flirting with the browser. I’m the quickest at finding smut and illegal MP3s. The rest learn good work methods and routines. I work my way into and down the internet and find Deep Throat and Sweet Movie. Even when I communicate with other people, via Messenger or email or mIRC, I’m mostly concerned with the computer screen and the programs, and later the laptop and the smartphone and the applications. I’m always communicating with them too. I study keyboards and the sound of buttons, I breathe in the electricity, and the eternal scrolling movement makes me zone out long before the internet achieves that seemingly endless stream.
Then the internet grows, and it quickly changes from something deep, mystical and soft, like body tissue, into big, lumpy, stultifying portals and programs. In the computer courses and later in the programming classes, there’s no longer room to search for connection or community through the web and the programs. It’s not about the web at all; the web is invisible, something that just has to
