When I lived in Bellingham, Washington, in the 1990s a former graduate student recommended me to Microsoft as a columnist for their fledgling streaming service, the Microsoft Network. Maybe “streaming” is the wrong word. Nothing streamed in 1997. It trickled at best with dial-up service, and if you had 40 megabytes of storage on your desktop, you were rocking it. The “network” was more like a webpage with various “channels,” and each channel had a different columnist who would read a short article to subscribers. I remember there was a sex column, but I can’t remember any others except for my own. My beat was to cover all the weird corners of the Internet in a monthly column called “The Fly.” Yes, I was “The Fly,” and a photographer took many photos of me dressed in a black leotard with some kind of eye mask (but not a fly mask as such, thankfully) crawling on a web (the World Wide Web, obviously). It was a ridiculous outfit and I felt ridiculous, and I whined to my editor, Martha Brokenbrough, about it (Martha has since gone on to be a successful author of children’s, YA, and adult books). She was pretty even-keeled, but I annoyed her so much that day that she told me I could just go back to being a mild-mannered prof instead of a superhero if I wanted (or words to that effect). I still have a Polaroid of me in this outfit somewhere, and maybe someday I will reproduce it, but not today.
For the next year, I roamed the Web for oddities, and I found them aplenty. I recorded my podcasts (that’s what they were though we didn’t have a name for them) every month at the Microsoft campus and I knew that they were good because Martha and the sound engineers would often laugh and spoil the recording so I would have to do it again. But I didn’t mind. I was The Fly. As much as I enjoyed roaming the Internet, I also enjoyed my glimpse into the furtive workings of Microsoft. While the campus felt bright and cheerful in every particular, I remember Martha once whispering to me at lunch in the cafeteria because she didn’t want anyone from another team to know our secrets. Did we have secrets? Maybe, but I was just a dumb fly buzzing around.
Among the memorable sites I visited:
I attended the first wedding live streamed on the Internet. This was a wedding in Israel where they set up a small camera on a tripod so that an international audience could view it. About ten minutes into the wedding, someone knocked over the camera and it stayed that way with a view of the assembled footwear.
I had a pet Dachshund at the time, and I discovered a memorial web page for Dachshunds, a wonderfully schmaltzy site full of proud chested wieners looking meaningfully at the poems and other homages of their bereaved owners. I suppose I’m revealing a bit of a cruel streak here, but in my defense, the page was really schmaltzy. Still, sorry for your loss, man. Miss you, Milo!
I introduced myself to a primitive porn bot as a fly and asked if it would be gentle with me, particularly my wings. I wish I could remember more of the conversation that ensued as the bot earnestly (it seemed to me) tried to adjust its erotic patter to accomodate an insect.
Your wing is massive!
Which one, the right or the left?
It’s the perfect size for me.
But which one do you prefer? I think the left is too diaphanous. It makes me look weak, I think.
You’re so strong.
I had an intriguing but somewhat testy back and forth with an early blogger who was sharing her diary with the world. In 1997, this was a pretty rad idea. I wanted to know why it was important for the world to know that she took her dog to the vet for his annual rabies shot, what vegetables she bought on sale at Piggly Wiggly, and how she and her significant other disagreed about Titantic. She hated it. He loved it. At the time, these musings felt uninspired and self-indulgent to me, but hey, that was a different century when we all weren’t as important as we are in this century. Now people share their everyday lives by the zillions on camera, but at the time, I was curious about the compulsion to share one’s private moments so publicly and the desire of thousands to read about those quotidian moments. With the advent of social media, the question might be turned on its head: why wouldn’t you want to share every moment of your day with everyone else? Are you even alive if you don’t? If that sounds like a criticism, it’s not, or not completely. I often question my own reliance on social media.
In 1997, the Web was still a novelty, and so my role as “The Fly” seemed the perfect gig for me to explore this new world. One episode I still think about quite often was when I contacted a webmaster at a commune in Missouri. The idea of a commune with a webmaster seemed hilarious to me. Communes were supposed to be populated with back-to-nature hippie types who rejected modern technology. I immediately started asking rather cheeky questions of the webmaster (there was no video link and this was all done via email) and they responded for a while until they grew annoyed and cut me off. I wasn’t a total jerk though my Fly persona seemed gave me a little jerk license that I wasn’t always fully aware of at the time. The webmaster of the commune loved the Internet, was enthralled by it, thought it was the best thing to ever happen to humanity. I questioned this and asked if they could imagine a down side?
No, they answered emphatically. There is no downside to the Web. It is the most democratic tool ever invented and it will revolutionize the way we interact with one another in a completely positive way.
I think about this comment fairly often when I read about the latest conspiracy theory amplified by the Internet and all the many ways in which our lives have changed, not always for the better, as a result of this web I crawled through back then, thinking it was all fun and games. I wonder sometimes what this webmaster might say now in answer to my question, just as I think about the colleague who asked me around the same time what I thought the biggest issue in America was. I told him that I thought that race was the biggest issue and he looked at me derisively and said, “No man, it’s class.” He was a white Marxist, so yeah.
After barely a year, Microsoft shut the channel down completely, no explanation given. Somewhere in the Microsoft vault, in some dusty Internet archive, maybe my Fly columns still exist. I’d love to see them again, but who to ask, where to visit? I was sad to let this gig go, but I recovered quickly, and I went on to live my life, which I sometimes share with others and sometimes not. But these things bob into consciousness from time to time and sometimes I’d like to go back and have that conversation again, see that website again, knowing now what I didn’t know then.