Internet

I take great – if possibly misguided – pride in being pretty much the same person now as I always was. Me when I was nine and when I’m 31 are rather too close to being the same person. When people tell me they used to love certain TV shows and then grew out of them, it always puzzles me – with the odd exception, if I loved a show when I was younger, I still love it now. Sure, my tastes have widened since I was younger – I used to dislike Press Gang for fuck’s sake – but very, very rarely have they shrunk. I’m the same person – why would I suddenly decide I disliked something?

Yet, there is one exception to recognising myself as the same person, one piece of history which I look back on with absolute horror: my old blog, which I ran around 2004-2005. It makes bizarre reading now in one sense, in that a lot of what I say is ideally suited these days to Twitter but feels a bit batshit insane on a blog – but hey, it’s still recognisably the same person.

Then, occasionally, there are posts like this one. Yes, that would be me giving personal details about exactly how badly my job was going on the internet, to anyone who cared to drop by, almost LIVE AS IT HAPPENED. There are a few more if you root round for long enough.

Now, I happen to utterly love my current job – and I’m far enough removed from my life working at makro not to worry about linking to that piece now. But even if I didn’t love my job, I wouldn’t even vaguely contemplate complaining about it on the internet these days. What the hell was I thinking? Why, in the name of holy fuck did I think that that was a good idea in any way whatsoever? Did I think the internet was my own little private place where nobody but me and a few close friends hung out?

Reading this stuff makes me feel completely distanced to myself. I just don’t recognise the mindset that made me put that kind of thing online. For someone who still makes the same excited noises as they did when they were nine, it’s an incredibly odd feeling.

I am not an internet celebrity.

Still, type my name into Google, and – if you can get past cameramen and trumpet players – you can find a fair few traces of me online. There’s this site, where I bang on about nonsense. There’s Noise To Signal, where I used to bang on about nonsense. There’s Ganymede & Titan, where I bang on about Red Dwarf-related nonsense. And so on.

Now, I used to go to school with someone who was pretty similar to me. Not identical – he stuck his finger in places where I could only hope to stick it at that point – but we liked a lot of the same things. He was cooler, though. He had his own shed. He was a far better programmer than me (as in, he wrote things that could do more than play a CD roughly half the time you pressed the play button). Sure, I once beat him at a calculus question, but that was about it.

I lost touch with him years ago, but I sometimes wonder what happened to him. So occasionally, I type his name into Google. And what do I find? Precisely nothing.

This is something I come across time and time again. All the people I used to know – the nerds, who you’d think would have a fairly widespread net presence – I can find nothing. There are people I would expect to have reams and reams of blog posts attached to their name, or writing for some website or another, or even just have a page which listed a few electronics projects they were working on… but I can find absolutely sod all. And from conversations I’ve had with other people online, it seems I’m far from alone on this – a lot of old friends they would have expected to have a presence online have just disappeared into the ether.

What happened to them?