(This is the introduction to a longer essay.)
In early 2002, when I was in the sixth grade, I had undiagnosed Asperger’s, zero friends, and a dialup connection to the World Wide Web. The ingredients were in place for me to forge a second life on the internet — a slow-loading, unreliable life I had to disconnect in order to use the telephone. It was a different, modem-crackly time; Google, though a prominent online presence, had yet to be verbed, and we soldiered on with the construction (don’t laugh) “Let me look that up on Google.” In those innocent years, many of us were still googling things on Altavista, Ask.com, and Yahoo! — then the most popular site on the net. It was in this environment, where videos took four days to download and we learned that free music just sounded better, that I first discovered the magic of online message boards.