The Last People Before the Internet

Revisiting the AOL Instant Messenger era

Last week, I went to a party at my friend’s parents’ house and her lime green iMac from high school had been taken out of storage and placed on a side table in one of the rooms. Long since functional, it sat on display like a sculpture and got a lot of attention. Not just an iconic piece of Y2K-era industrial design and a perfect visual emblem of an idealized pre-9/11 culture, the iMac G3 is also a powerful source of personal nostalgia for older millennials, evoking a phase of youth as reliably as the AOL Instant Messenger pings and chimes that would issue from its speakers nonstop. Before computers flattened into two-dimensional screens and effectively disappeared, when they still possessed some awkward heft, this was about as good as they ever looked.

That was my second encounter with a candy-colored early-‘00s iMac in the last two weeks. An identical one appeared in a play called “Initiative” I’d just seen, currently showing at the Public Theater for another week, which takes place over four years of high school between 2000 and 2004. The play is a coming-of-age story about a group of friends who live in suburban California and bond over an ongoing Dungeons & Dragons game that runs the course of their high school years. The play was excellent (and five hours long) but what initially interested me about it was the choice to set it in the early ‘00s, not just because I’ve been paying attention to how aging millennials like myself are reflecting upon our own past and narrativizing it, but because those years remain a surprisingly under-historicized era—now as far in the past as the ‘70s were in 2001, yet somehow not feeling all that distant or entirely separate from the present, the way prior decades did (in contrast, the ‘80s already felt quite dated in the ‘90s). The lime green iMac and similar props, along with constant AOL Instant Messenger usage and occasional references to background events like 9/11, thus perform an important function in the play: Without those details, the setting might pass for contemporary. The mall attire that the suburban teenage characters wear, for example, represents the early ‘00s but has also returned in various forms in the years since, and still does. You don’t have to look too hard to find “Y2K fashion” or cargo pants today.

“Initiative” is not specifically about the internet but it captures the technology’s rapidly growing role in early ‘00s social life. The specific time period it portrays, between the summers of 2000 and 2004, bookended by misplaced Y2K anxiety and arrival of Facebook, was solidly the AOL Instant Messenger era: AIM was released in 1997, peaked in 2001, and declined more rapidly after 2005, losing ground to SMS texting and social media. Early in the play, one character’s younger brother helps him download it, telling him that “AIM isn’t nerdy, it’s just a way to talk to people online.” The play is peppered with such amusing reminders of what it felt like to be figuring out the internet, before it was all so obvious (“message boards aren’t real life!”), and the janky early-’00s internet forms a backdrop for the characters’ similarly awkward adolescence: simultaneous spoken AIM conversations overlapping with in-person dialogue, case-sensitive usernames with underscores projected onto the walls of the set, Goatse links spelled out verbally by a character.

I rarely think about AIM today, despite the huge role it played in my life as a teenager. And when I saw the lime green iMacs I realized I never think about those anymore either. Napster endures in memory as an inflection point for media consumption and the music industry. But overall, that era will increasingly seem like a transitional phase, more difficult to place as time passes and history is divided into two parts, before and after the internet. September 11 was the ultimate historical event, meanwhile, occurring right in the middle of all this, during AIM’s peak year of usage. Perhaps 9/11 has drawn all the air out of the room, dominating our memory of that time so completely that it’s hard to see anything that didn’t align with the seriousness it dictated. Any work of fiction set around that time must carefully measure its proximity to that event, or risk being somehow “about” 9/11—a problem that ‘80s and ‘90s period pieces rarely face.

The migration of culture into digital space has surely made the recent past feel more ahistorical. In that sense, the early ‘00s were the end of something as well as the beginning of something else. It’s not that any less happened then but that more of what did happen resists straightforward depiction. The challenge of portraying online activity in film and TV has always fascinated me, because it raises uncomfortable questions about how we use that technology as well as how storytelling works. Showing a screen on another screen usually feels like the worst solution to the problem. Another option is to set the story in a time or place where screens don’t exist. There is an archaic but persistent idea that any drama worth portraying happens in real life, not on a screen, but that is probably just a holdover from when screens were one-way channels of static, pre-packaged entertainment, not portals to a dynamic environment where a lot does happen. People like to point out that screens never appear in our dreams, suggesting that deep down we all long to get off our phones, but as I’ve wondered before, maybe it’s just that the dream is the screen, our phones framing our reality so comprehensively that we already think we live inside of them.

In the movies and TV that came out during the early ‘00s, when AIM still reigned, I began noticing that digital activity was underrepresented, as if pretending that important feature of contemporary life simply didn’t exist. As the internet became more and more central to everyday life, cinematic portrayals of that life lagged behind and thus began to diverge from reality (there has been progress more recently, but they still lag). Putting AIM conversations or social media activity onstage may be an inherently awkward proposition, but “Initiative” at least embraces the challenge and does not seem embarrassed to acknowledge that for teenagers in 2003, many of their important conversations would have happened in that medium. That this move still seems notable in 2025 suggests that dramatic depictions of digital activity need to catch up to reality.

“It’s hard to be nostalgic for what you don’t even remember,” I wrote in a recent column for Vice about that Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros video from 2010 going viral. “With mass media in decline and digital platforms having taken their place, reliable narrators and shared reality are elusive, replaced by atomized units of content that vanish and reappear in an endless cycle.” Our failure to represent contemporary reality in media is a complicated problem because the media itself has also warped our ability to see it clearly, and it’s possible that every subsequent era will share this same ahistorical quality as a result.

At one point in “Initiative,” a new kid from New York City arrives at their California high school and enters dressed like a member of the Strokes, in contrast to everyone else’s humdrum Gap and Pacific Sunwear wardrobes. I took it as a nod to the image of the ‘00s that has actually endured—now rebranded as “indie sleaze”—but which felt quite distant from most people’s everyday experience back then. And that aesthetic itself was borrowed wholesale from the ‘70s.

The early ‘00s, again, are too easily dismissed as pre-9/11 frivolity and post-9/11 tension, but the experience of everyday life was then undergoing a transformation that merits reexamination now that we’re firmly on the other side of it. As “Initiative” shows, they were the last years before the internet, in a sense: No one had a smartphone, screens were usually shared or viewed communally, and going online was less a destination unto itself than something you did while you were bored at home. In short, life was different than now. Today, the internet encourages us to see the past as a soup of content that mixes an infinite variety of times and places; our immersion in that mixture is so complete that it now inhibits our historical sensibility and our ability to maintain a strong sense of temporal difference. A play like “Initiative,” by looking back twenty years and restoring that sense of difference, is both an example of how to revisit the past and a glimpse of what was already then slipping away.