As this decade comes to a close, I keep hearing variations of the same nostalgia-tinged question about the internet: “When did we all stop having fun?” In November, the New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to the question. “The Internet Dream Became a Nightmare. What will become of it now?”  one headline ran. The digital edition was published with colorful nostalgic touches like fake pop-up ads and retro mouse cursors. 

In her new memoir, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino tracks down the website she built for herself at ten years old. Using her father’s office computer, she blogged, writing prophetically: “I’m going insane! I literally am addicted to the web!”  

“In 1999, it felt different to spend all day on the internet,” Tolentino writes. “People had been gathering on the internet in open forums, drawn, like butterflies, to the puddles and blossoms of other people’s curiosity and expertise.”

I remember 1999 too. At my London primary school, a Canadian boy, Pierce, told us about Google. “You can search for anything on Google, anything in the world, and you don’t need a web address, you can just use normal words,” he said. “And it will give you the answers.”