In my last post, I mentioned an external hard drive from the 2000s and joked about how opening your .wps files again is both a tech support thing an an emotional support thing. It’s “digital shamanism” and “Millennial soul retrieval.“
Why open it now, when I’ve carried it through countless moves (including an emergency evacuation from New York City) over the course of over a decade without really thinking about it? It was just sitting in my box of “tech stuff” for years, barely remembered.
One thing that set this off was becoming more organized in general– going through a KonMari tidying ritual and “confronting my past self” through my physical items. The logical next step was a digital KonMari. Then, when I was looking into a good way to back up my files on the 2023 MacBook before getting it reimaged in a few weeks, I decided to get an SSD rather than an HDD because an SSD reads files more quickly.
When it takes several minutes for every single folder to show up in Finder and several more minutes after that for each file to actually open, it’s easy to lose the motivation to open anything you don’t need to access right away for work, classes, etc.
But if you can copy it all onto an SSD just once and then go back to opening your files as quickly as you could when they were still on an internal hard drive, that’s when the magic happens. The question is no longer, “why do I need to open this file?” but “why wouldn’t I open this file?”
Suddenly, everything is fair game and you can pull up AIM chat logs in the “Trillian” folder and start noticing some of the archaic file types and odd names.
Here’s the thing: having the internet in the 1990s and 2000s was like having the collective unconsciousness cracked open silently in plain sight.
Among my files from the turn-of-the-millennium, I found both a compilation of dares from the annual NaNoWriMo “Dares Thread” (where authors would dare each other to do absurd, inappropriate, manic or challenging things with their writing) and a “novel” I wrote in two weeks in early 2004 where I did nothing but stack as many dares from 2002 and 2003 as humanly possible on top of each other to make a story.
What I thought I was doing at the time: “haha, I’m being so random and weird!“
But What I Saw When I Revisited That Novel in 2025 was…
“Oh my God, there was a portal to the collective unconsciousness right on my very own laptop and I had no idea!”
Let’s start with some background here…
- In 2003 when the main Dares Thread I was drawing inspiration from was formed, only 61% of American adults used the internet, and most of that was in the form of dial-up.
- Facebook wouldn’t exist for another year
- There was no streaming services to speak of, but digital piracy was so common and shameless that it was a punchline.
- Saying “there were no content warnings” in 2003 is a gross understatement. In the ’90s, there were malware attacks that caused shocking, disgusting pop-ups to populate endlessly on the screen. Typing in the wrong web address by accident could make people see things they’d never be able to un-see. Top-down censorship didn’t exist, good or bad.
- People were told not to use their real names or reveal who they were. Everything on the internet was completely detached from real life, which meant that self-censorship also didn’t exist.
With all that going on, the internet was full of surrealist humor and completely “random” silliness.
Here’s a tiny selection of the dares people wrote in November 2003:
- Have your first line be “Where the hell are my pants?”
- The physical description of a main character must match that of Harry Potter. Bonus for you if it’s relevant at all.
- Name a character “Cthulhu.” Bonus points if it’s a kid on his first day of school, and the pronounced effect of saying his name is different every time. Lots more bonus points if it’s not fantasy.
- Have one character say to another, “I’ll bet you’re wondering why you’re wearing someone else’s pants.”
And here’s part of the scene I wrote based on those dares:
“Where the hell are my pants?” was the first thing that I yelled one morning when I woke up. It wasn’t that I was entirely pants-less; it’s just that the only thing I could find resembling pants were a pair of moogle boxers I was wearing but didn’t recognize. My closet was utterly pants-less. My navy blue uniform pants were gone, my jeans were gone, my black leather pants were gone, even my underwear was gone. But at least my belts were still there, so I put them on over the strange moogle boxers.
As I was fastening the third belt, a skinny, black-haired boy with glasses entered the room.
“You may be wondering why you’re wearing someone else’s pants,” He said.
“Who the hell are you?” I said, glaring at him.
“I’m Cthulhu, the new exchange student from Galbadia. I’m your room mate for a few months,” he said, holding out his hand for me to shake it. He put his arm back down when I ignored him.
…
“So what the hell do you know about my pants?” I asked.
“Well, I have a little gambling problem, you see. So back in Galbadia I got into this real intense game of poker and bet all my pants. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough pants to pay the guys back. So before they could kill me, I decided to hide out here for a few months and figure something out. That’s when I saw your pants and thought, ‘hey, why don’t I just mail these back to Galbadia?’ So your pants are somewhere in Galbadia Garden. Terribly sorry. But hey, I’ll pay you back some time, alright?”
Dadaism is NOT Without Meaning…
Back in 2004, one of my friends described my style as “literary Dadaism.” I could easily see that at the time.
But when I re-read that part of the story in 2025, my reaction was, “That SOUNDS like a parody of how the banking failures that lead to the 2008 crash and the Great Recession happened… but it was written in 2004! How did that even happen?”
This story got even weirder, as did the dares it was based on. One of the dares was this:
Have a character totally convinced that Microsoft is planning to take over the world using the paperclip shaped Office Assistant. S/he will try convincing others of the scheme throughout the novel. Bonus points if s/he’s right about it. (And we all know s/he is. Double bonus points if this is important to the plot in any way.”
This was from the 2002 Dares Thread compilation…
And yet it somehow predicted the conspiracy theories around Bill Gates that were floating around every single social media platform in 2020-2022.
A scene where I used dares involving a literal iron chef who’s a robot, an overly complicated phone message on a machine, and an interdimensional pizza joint sounded eerily like AI customer service bots in the 2020s. A running joke about sporks turned into commentary on scarcity, austerity, and class dynamics that sounded like the things people were saying in Zuccotti Park in 2011. As much as I found my unhinged teen writing hilarious, I was also a little unnerved by the unconscious predictions about the future.
Why Was a “Crackfic” Prophetic?
I’m not on any level claiming that I predicted aspects of the coming years by myself in early 2004…
In 2003, there were 25,000 people on the NaNoWriMo forums. The point was not to be more discerning or more self-censoring– quite the opposite! It was to kill the internal editor and enter a trance-like state while writing. It was about tapping into the subconsciousness and saying “yes” to the first things that came to mind. Multiply one person doing that kind of mental exercise by 25,000, and then factor in all those people talking to each other anonymously, with no fear of real-life consequences and no top-down censorship.
And that was just one weird corner of the internet during a time when the entire thing was weird… and maybe when I say “weird” I don’t even mean that in the modern sense. Maybe I mean that more in the Anglo-Saxon sense: the internet was wyrd. Uncanny. Predictive. Tuned to an alternate frequency.
And now we’re entering another time period where the collective unconsciousness is showing like that again…