Introduction to a collaboration between Ashutosh Joshi and myself.
I met Ash in Jodhpur, as some of you may remember from my post (if not read it now, it’s one of my better ones) back aways. He set up his substack shortly after our meeting and is already heading for 1000 subscribers, plus he has written and self published an excellent book - Journey to the East - about his walk across India which you can buy by clicking the link.
Ash, being young and nimble of mind, discovered you can collaborate with other writers on here and suggested the subject of life before the internet for me, and obviously life after for himself. Other people are being invited to muse on this subject too. Frankly I could write a book on it (there’s an idea?) but below is an attempt to put the birth of the internet as we now know it into the context of my day to day reality at the time.
There is no way now to reverse it, too late to put in place safety mechanisms to stop the dark side emerging as it has, or give it a place side by side with the old fashioned way of learning and being in nature. It has given so much to us, not least platforms like this, but also takes so much away.
Ash’s view of the world is not only from a different generation but from a culture totally different from mine. I look forward to reading his take on this subject, and the other collaborators he has invited, but for now here is mine.
Hello! Exciting Announcements for The Book of Ptah!
I am introducing a new section where YOU can become a part of this Substack. I’ll be featuring guest posts that align with the spirit of this space.
The first guest post is by Betty Marmalade and there are more to come.
Much like the endless toil of Sisyphus, forever pushing the boulder up the hill only to see it roll back down, our experiences with the rise of technology and the internet mirror a similar journey. The pre-internet era felt like a time of simplicity, an uphill climb grounded in tangible connections, physical books, and face-to-face conversations. Each generation had its own unique struggle and its own moments of fleeting accomplishment, much like Sisyphus with his stone.
As I invite you to contribute to Sisyphus’ Journey, sharing stories from before the internet and your early digital days, there’s an opportunity to reflect on the ways this "boulder" of technology has reshaped our lives. Did it open new vistas, or did it feel like a relentless cycle of scrolling and searching, always seeking meaning, only to have it slip away again?
Your contributions will be personal, rooted in your own experiences—offering wisdom to my generation. In a way, we are all on this Sisyphus’ journey, facing an ever-evolving landscape of innovation and loss, progress and nostalgia, continually pushing forward while looking back at what once was.
Maybe we end up learning something from each other.
Life Before the Internet.
When was that exactly? Before 2000? 1999? 1995? I honestly don’t know, but obviously I will now look it up because I have at my, literal, finger tips the means to find answers to everything, well, everything that has been documented by humans for whatever reason.
Ok, so I looked. Lots of words and swimmy eyes almost immediately but it seems that it started as far back as 1959. For home use it was early 90s, with dial up and then broadband. I remember getting my first email account set up on my brand new Dell computer in the flat I shared with my three year old son, and that distinctive, distant sounding binkling that signified logging on. Dell was a sideways move in an otherwise Apple Mac addiction. I find Apple more intuitive and you get less junk. That said I dislike the corporation intensely, along with all other corporations who exist purely to make money for shareholders with little or no concern for the end users or, more importantly, the planet. The end users do actually have choice, the planet does not.
So, back to pre-internet days. I yearn for them, in the same way I yearn for warm, sunny summers and crisp, clean and cold winters. Is it pure nostalgia? Looking back with rose tinted glasses? I don’t think so, not entirely anyway.
We all look back to our childhoods, those of us who were lucky enough to actually have had one that is, with a sense of nostalgia and wishing to go back to when things were simple. Someone bought your clothes for you, put food on the table at a certain time, school was a drag but it’s where all your friends were.
I was born into a large, unruly Catholic family in rural Yorkshire with, as my brother describes them, complicated parents. But when I was very young I had no concept of complicated. Reality was the now, the hugs, the cuffs from big brothers, the food, the noise, lovely hand me down dresses from my posh cousins and lovely hand me down scruffy jeans from my brothers, the routine of home and church.
We were not allowed comics, except on train journeys, so I read books. I read every single one of the Andrew Lang fairy books and entered that world of kings and giants, princesses and goblins, evil stepmothers and impossible tasks set by entitled demagogues followed by swift and violent justice dispensed by the smug prince or witch with absolute focus. The illustrations by Henry J Ford are some of the most detailed and wonderful I have seen anywhere.
My brother Luke rather obnoxiously read all three of the Lord of the Rings trilogy by the age of 10. I still haven’t managed it, but this is to illustrate that that is what we had to hand as a middle class, bookish family. There were other books, more ‘modern’ ones like the Family from One End Street (I was intrigued by the idea that houses could have numbers as we didn’t have one, nor did any of our neighbours) by Eve Garnett and Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfield which has an enduring place in my affections for the fantastic characters and plot lines.
We did not have a TV until was about eight. We finally got one as a gift from Germaine Greer. She and my mother were on a panel for something or other (no doubt a Catholic thing as that was GG’s origins too) and while chatting about personal stuff afterwards Mum told her about how we were given a choice between having a swimming pool or a telly, and it being summer naturally we chose a swimming pool. It was one of those tin sided things that you bolt together and line with pale blue plastic. It was fantastic for making whirlpools, but then came autumn.
GG was treating herself to a colour TV so offered to send us her old black and white one. We were transported with joy. The huge box arriving, being opened, the TV being placed on a shelf in the play room and worshipped by bug-eyed children. Mum bought the Radio Times, a habit she kept up until her death at 97 earlier this year, which then only had BBC listings, and circled the things we could watch. One thing per day. So if we wanted to watch Top of the Pops and the Goodies which were both shown on the same night we would sit around the back of the shelf where the TV was and listen the music, sneaking peeks as and when, and then fully watch the Goodies because who can resist such madness, especially when it involves a giant kitten. We were not allowed ITV because of the adverts.
So this was my childhood. My teen years were disjointed in many ways. I wandered through them via various schools, living between my family’s new home in Scotland and my cousins’ home in Surrey when not at boarding school. I have watched films where teenagers are forever on the telephone to each other after school, sometimes even having their own phone in their bedrooms. I did not do this and felt no need to. Occasionally I would be in touch with school friends by telephone in the holidays, but my main method of communication was by letter. It is how everyone I knew communicated. Even when there wasn’t much to say, not unlike those phone calls I am guessing. A school friend had a typewriter at school which I loved to write with, it somehow gave me more freedom with my words. Eventually I got one of my own, given to me by my brother who had been given it by his boss at the Press Association when they upgraded their equipment. It was huge, bulky and incredibly heavy. I loved it. I took it away to art college with me, and lumped it around various bedsits and shared houses along with an old radiogram I had picked up in a jumble sale. They were my two pieces of furniture. I don’t know what happened to either item.
As I grew older, finished college and moved to London a natural kind of shedding of people I had known began. Not intentionally, it just happened. A letter would go unanswered, another house move making traceability harder, new people entering, new interests and perhaps even love, which, as we all know, obliterates the need for anyone or anything else, for a time.
Keeping in contact with people became more of a chance thing. Sometimes I would wonder about so-and-so, look for a number (only landlines in those days) or address and maybe follow that up. The people around me became my tribe, my old tribe still there somewhere in my affections but out of sight, and more than likely out of my life.
As a group of friend we made arrangements to meet, and went to meet at that time and place. If you weren’t there, something had happened. Half an hour was the usual amount of time to wait, then give up. If we called each other it was to make these arrangements, or to cancel them, very occasionally to chat about a specific thing, or, in the case of love, to listen all dewey eyed to inanities and sweet nothings.
Letters were still sent. Then came fax machines. The boyfriend I was with back in those days had an Apple Mac desk computer on which he would play endless games of Crystal Quest. The screen saver was fish tank with the occasional flying toaster criss-crossing the screen. I would use the word processor to write proposals and requests for our never-to-actually-happen adventures to Africa, which would be printed out and sent through the post.
Until the advent of the fax. The joy of feeding a letter into a machine and have someone pick it up almost instantaneously at the other end was immeasurable. It was sci-fi at home. It was how he and I communicated when he was away and I wasn’t - long complicated feelings spilled on a page and then translated into, what? I don’t know how that works and even though I have the answer at the tips of my fingers I simply don’t care enough to tippy tap.
For a while that was it with technology, as far as I knew anyway. I had a baby and the only technology I was interested in was how to make it pain free despite having opted an for an all natural, woowoo style birth.
I was pretty broke in those days, and although I understood the system enough to get the help I needed from HM Gov there were no frills. I had a buggy, the folding umbrella kind, with which we would sally forth, a spare nappy in one pocket and age appropriate snacks/bottles in the other. That was pretty much it. Now? Cameras in their bedrooms; giant bouncy buggies that double as entertainment centres, and where that fails they get handed a phone to play with.
I know what that sounds like. Sniffy middle class judgment. Perhaps if I had been a perfect parent to a perfect child I could have some grounds for saying my way was the right way, but we are neither and actually other ways didn’t present themselves, it’s just how we were and I didn’t need any tech other than a decent folding buggy.
Before the internet came into our homes endless questions from the small boy, the hows, whys and whats, would most often be answered with “I don’t know, let’s look it up when we get home”, which we did - first in books, and then on CD roms. Then slowly, after the Dell arrived and with it The Internet, we would begin to ‘google’ things. It was a clunky thing in those days, even to those of us still in awe at such possibilities, but he, like all kids of his generation, was the fertile soil for the technology seeds that were being scattered without any of us even realising it. I was too.
A play station also arrived in our home, a gift from the small boy’s dad, upon which they would spend hours playing a down hill skiing game. Any niggling doubts about the benefits of this screen time, which wasn’t even known as a thing then, were shunted aside - it was part of their time together after all. Then also a game boy appeared - fantastic for car journeys I thought.
I fell in love again at almost the same time as I got my first mobile phone. It was a Nokia. All texts were in capitals because I didn’t know how to change it. Beeps in the night as we exchanged nonsense. Until very recently his name was still in my contacts, still in capital letters.
I am sure no one wants a list of all my phones and how, when or why my son got one too. It happened. You think it will make things feel safer, until one afternoon they don’t answer it and you feel like you’ve been punched in the stomach.
Life without the internet feels, from this distance, a safer place. There was scary stuff out there in my childhood of course, some of which I knew about, but I didn’t need to know it all.
As I grew up I watched the news, I read newspapers, so I had information to hand when I wanted to look and had the headspace to absorb it, or indeed ignore it, if I chose. I read books, novels mostly, and learned about history and other cultures that way. I followed lines of thought if I was interested enough and studied them. I chose what to see and how to see it and where it was difficult and sad or angry making, I could look away and come back to it when I had some idea of what I could do with it.
I looked about my locality, communicated with people around me, and others by telephone or letter. I was not bombarded or saturated in information, images and videos. I didn’t have to field it as you do when scrolling on instagram; one minute watching a cookery demo, the next witnessing up close someone being shot dead, followed by a cat video.