In 2005, I was a 7th grader in an online school called NorthStar Academy. It was a school set up mostly for Americans living in remote locations around the world. Missionary families, aid workers, people whose lives didn’t fit neatly into any one place.
The pitch was consistency: same curriculum, same textbooks, same routines. Whether you were living in a fishing village near the island of Sumatra, or were somewhere in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. I had classmates in both places.
My sister and I ended up there for a much more boring reason. We moved to Bombay too late for admissions in a local school, and since we’d anyway been homeschooling offline, my parents signed us up for NorthStar.
This was twenty years ago (😧) so the concept of remote learning wasn’t in circulation yet. Zoom didn’t exist. We had one family computer: A sturdy Toshiba laptop with a battery that overheated, stationed in a corner of my parents’ bedroom.
The entire school lived on a server.
They’d ship you physical textbooks, but everything else—from assignments to peer interaction—happened online. You picked your classes. Some were mandatory, like math and science. Others were electives.
Every week came with a bundle of tasks. An assignment to check if you understood the content, and another focused on critical thinking, where you were supposed to engage with the material in a more thoughtful way. Sometimes there was an occasional bonus task if you had time or were trying to pad your grade.
Each class had its own virtual classroom. It was like a forum where you could see your teacher’s bio and a bulletin board of announcements. You could also message all the other students in your class, and start conversations with them.
My favorite class at the time was advanced history. Our teacher was a kind and thoughtful woman living in Minnesota, and we’d been covering the World Wars for a couple of weeks—names of battles, dates, countries involved. Then one week, she gave us a critical thinking prompt that I’ve never forgotten:
If you could go back in time and take one action to reduce or prevent the human toll of the World Wars, what would you do? And you had to explain your reasoning.
We were usually expected to share the critical thinking responses on the public board to encourage conversations and idea-sharing, so I remember reading a bunch of passionate answers.
Intervene in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Come up with the idea of the UN before all this mess.
One kid wrote a long description about kidnapping Hitler as a child to “raise him in a loving household.” This was a Christian school so “Kill baby Hitler” wasn’t exactly the vibe.
I can’t remember my answer but it was something along the lines of inventing antibiotics in time to help save lives in WWI.
And then our teacher did something unusual: she posted her own response.
She said that while it’s tempting to focus on the individual (especially when the individual is convenient to blame), it isn’t usually one person that makes or breaks things.
Political, economic, or ideological cultural climates usually set the stage. And once the stage is set, someone WILL step into the spotlight. In any group, there will always be people who are exceptionally charismatic, cruel, kind, brilliant, deluded, persuasive. Those are the ones who end up inventing things, destroying things, leading people, misleading them. Driving history forward, for better or worse.
If it hadn’t been Hitler, she said, it might’ve been someone else. Not the same mustache or the same speeches, but maybe the same path.
That wasn’t meant to downplay what he did. It just shifted the frame. The real question wasn’t how do we stop him? It was what made him possible? It was the very first time I’d encountered the idea that history is less about outliers and more about systems.
The idea stuck with me because it also reframed how I thought about progress. The same way the world can produce a dictator, it can also produce a discovery. It depends on what conditions we create and who’s waiting in the wings.
My first high school experience
That was the academic side of NorthStar. But the part that actually taught me how to be a person on the internet wasn’t the schoolwork. It was what happened around it. Obviously, school is supposed to be social, so every NorthStar student was given login access to the part of school where all the action happened. The Student Cafe.
The icon to enter was a tiny Coke can, for reasons no one ever explained. You clicked it and landed on a screen with two doors: Junior High or Senior High. I was in 7th grade, so I stayed on the Junior High side with the rest of the 12-to-15-year-olds.
Inside was a giant, chaotic message board where anyone could start a thread. Some posts were abandoned mid-thought. Others turned into full-scale debates. And pretty quickly, you figured out who the regulars were. Certain names came up constantly. They started the threads, replied first, replied last, replied in between. These were the popular kids.
Except you’d never seen them. Popularity here wasn’t about looks or clothes or whatever else high school kids usually fixate on. It was about humor. The ability to hold court in a public forum. Having enough time and internet access to reply to stuff quickly—because!!—this was pre-smartphone era.
If you wanted to see what was happening, you had to sit at a computer, log in, and get involved. Being online was an actual activity. It took planning and/or arguing with siblings.
Now the Student Cafe was a huge lawless place, but the real fun was in the subgroups. Dozens and dozens of them. A sprawling maze of niche forums buried inside this already-very-niche forum. You could join the sports group, which had subgroups for every major sport. You could join media and culture groups for your favorite movies, TV shows, and books.
I was in the Chronicles of Narnia group for about three days before getting swarmed with messages telling me to read The Lord of the Rings so I could graduate to the real group. Which I did. Peer pressure works.
There were subgroups by timezone, so you could find people awake when you were. One for word games, where we ran these made-up acronym contests that were embarrassing even by 2005 standards.
None of this was cool. It was aggressively uncool. It was peak early-internet adolescence and it mattered because all of this happened in 2005, which is important.
The internet was growing up. So was I.
A couple of years ago, I found what is still my favorite website on the internet. I was exploring a subreddit on internet culture and ended up on neal.fun, a site built by a guy named Neal Agarwal who makes builds these little projects for no real reason other than—they’re fun.
You can launch a fake asteroid at your hometown. There’s a game called Spend Bill Gates’ Money where you discover that buying yachts and the actual Mona Lisa BARELY make a dent in your bank balance.
You can do a long, endless scroll down into the deep sea. One of my favorite games is called Where Does The Day Go, where you can visually see your day and how it’s spent.
Neal describes his work as “digital toys,” which feels exactly right. They’re playful, silly, and entirely unserious. Nothing tries to sell you anything. Nobody tracks you. No one cares whether you come back or not.
One of his projects, Internet Artifacts, is probably what made his site more mainstream. It’s an interactive museum of the pre-iPhone internet. You can see the first ever mp3 file, scroll through the first blog site (my favorite), look at the first use of a smiley face, and other cute stuff like that.
Made for joy, not for scale
Today, the internet feels far less handmade. Most of what we see is filtered through a few large platforms that prioritize polish and consistency. That doesn’t make it bad, especially because more people can participate in it now, but it does make it easy to forget how strange and varied things used to be.
Sites had personality. People built things that didn’t scale. There’s still creativity online, but it’s often shaped by metrics. What’s missing is the joy of uselessness.
I’m grateful for the people who still hold onto that. A few years ago, a friend of mine posted a picture of the view from her office window. It was a nice little green patch.
The next day, she posted a picture of the same view again. And the next day, again. There are almost 100 pictures of that view. Over time, the grass disappeared, and was replaced by a steadily growing pile of gravel. The only thing that changed was the caption (and the size of the gravel pile).
It was weirdly comforting to watch. Nothing about it was engineered for engagement, but a few of us followed along anyway. This was the work of someone noticing something and deciding to share it.
In an interview with Business Insider, Neal Agarwal said: When I was just a kid, the internet felt like a Wild West, at least more than it is now. Almost all the sites I visited were by solo creators or small teams of people. As I watched all that go away, I kept feeling that this probably isn’t how it should be. There should be more people creating fun stuff on the web.
So how did we get here and what happened? It turns out there’s a pretty clear two-part answer. One shift was cultural. The other was technical.
Cultural shift: The rise of platforms.
Before social media dominated everything, the internet was made up of websites. Personal ones. Niche forums. Fan pages. Blogs. You had to seek things out. You had to know what you were looking for or be willing to get lost on the way.
But starting in the mid-2000s, the web began consolidating. Platforms like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and eventually Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok gave users a shared space and a template.
You no longer needed to “build” anything to participate. You just signed up and posted. And that was kind of great. More people could do things online! But it also standardized everything.
Now, everything is “For You” and delivers itself optimized for engagement. It feels like you’re seeing more, but you’re not. You’re seeing what fits the profile of your interests.
The space for randomness and surprise, for stumbling into something unexpected—that keeps shrinking. And the more tailored it gets, the more predictable it becomes.
The technical shift: No more Flash
I spent an entire day recently reading about Flash. Adobe Flash. I had started out with vague memories of loading animations and sites that had weird browser games, and ended up a little obsessed with the rise and fall of this glitchy little plugin that accidentally shaped online culture.
Okay so—Flash was a browser add-on that let people make animated, interactive websites and games. If you ever played those silly tween dress up games online, or had anything to do with Neopets or Super Mario, you’ve got Flash to thank.
Roughly 80% of the internet’s personality in the early 2000s was brought to you by Flash. It was everywhere.
It was also, apparently, a nightmare. (I don’t know first hand because I never built anything with it, but if you did, hit me up and tell me more!)
Flash had all kinds of issues. It had security issues, it drained your battery, it crashed constantly. But none of this stopped people from using it. It was easy to pick up, fun to experiment with.
Now prepare for the inevitable canon event that propels the plot forward: Tech bros beefing.
In 2010, Steve Jobs published a dramatic open letter titled Thoughts on Flash where he explained why Apple wouldn’t support Flash on the iPhone. He listed all the technical problems (most of which were valid), and basically said: it’s buggy, it’s slow, it’s a security risk, and it doesn’t belong on mobile.
Adobe fired back, journalists took sides, and a bunch of very serious adults spent months arguing about whether Flash was a vital creative tool or a battery-draining dinosaur. The answer in hindsight was: kind of both.
After Steve Jobs cancelled Flash and smartphones became the primary place where people access the internet, Flash limped on for a few more years, and was officially discontinued in 2020. That was that.
Ok it’s 2025 why do we care?
Honestly, maybe we shouldn’t. If you’re reading this and wondering what the point is, why spend this much time thinking about dead browser plug-ins, you’re not wrong.
I don’t know if the usual people who read my work will care about how the internet felt twenty years ago. But if you’re wondering why I care, specifically, here’s why.
I’m not a designer or a developer. I never learned to code. I’m not especially good with gadgets. But the internet has always felt personal to me, not because I understood how it worked, but because I grew up needing it.
Reason #1: Staying connected obvs
When I was nine years old, my family and I moved out of Dubai, which was the only place I’d known as home. I remember the feeling when my parents told us we were leaving. It wasn’t panic or sadness, just the understanding that everything familiar was about to go away. There was some excitement too. But mostly I felt like I was about to fall off the edge of something.
As part of our preparation to move, my parents sat us down in what now feels like a very Y2K-era rite of passage, and helped us make our first email addresses. We weren’t allowed to choose nonsense like coolgirl93@hotmail.com or dramaqueen_sonia. We had to be sensible about it. The result was soniarebecca_4@hotmail.com.
Email became the plan. It felt like my one shot at not completely vanishing from the lives of the people I’d just spent my entire childhood with. As a nine-year-old, it felt both wildly futuristic and oddly formal.
Once I was fully online (in the Hotmail sense), the next step was to collect everyone else’s email addresses before we left. At the time, our school had a tradition—on the last day, you passed around a slam book.
If you went to a convent school, you know the drill: girls wrote sweet messages, goodbye wishes, fake secrets, and other diabolical nonsense. I added a new category to mine: email address.
My classmates scribbled down their parents’ contact info or their own Hotmail and Yahoo IDs. Later that night, I carefully copied each one into a separate notebook under the heading “School pals.” Then we said goodbye, and I left.
The first place I emailed from was a small town in England called Reading. We were staying in a cold little row house, and I got maybe ten minutes of computer time a day. I used all that time to write emails—short updates about where we were moving next, what my room looked like, how rainy it was (a huge novelty for someone from Dubai).
Most people didn’t respond, which makes sense. We were nine. Waking up and checking your email wasn’t part of the routine. But a couple of them did write back. And when they did, it was electric. You’ve Got Mail is the only cultural reference that gets even close to the thrill.
A few of us ended up emailing each other for years. The emails got longer, funnier, occasionally deranged. They became a kind of friendship we hadn’t really known how to have before, built entirely through writing.
While writing this, I went back and read a few of those old emails. It was sweet and endearing, but also a terrifyingly accurate portrait of schoolgirls, who are objectively the most unpredictable and socially dangerous demographic in human history.
Anyway, this back and forth continued sporadically until Facebook arrived and made the whole email system feel outdated. You didn’t need to write a full message anymore. You just clicked “Add Friend” and that counted as staying in touch. I definitely miss the emailing days. It felt deliberate.
The internet never felt like an abstract product to me, it felt like a place. And sometimes it was the only one I had access to when everything else was changing so fast.
Reason #2: Learning to be a person online
The second reason the internet feels personal to me is that my first high school experience wasn’t a school. It was a login screen.
It was where I first learned what it meant to participate in a community that you couldn’t see. Your personality had to be typed out, sentence by sentence. It was where I figured out how to be funny in writing.
How to read a room made entirely out of posts. How to disagree without getting roasted, when to be sarcastic, how to actually get to know people. I made friends. I tried to be cool. Failed. Tried again.
Every group had its own codes, its own language. You had to lurk, and learn, and earn your place. And I did!
By the time I left, I had a bunch of friends and was excited and chatty and all over the place. I felt like myself again. I had earned my spot in the Student Cafe.
When school moved online during the pandemic years, I thought about this a lot—how strange it was to see online school suddenly become the default. I felt weirdly protective of the kids going through it, because I knew what it was like to build a version of yourself entirely through a screen. The difference is that they didn’t have to get used to it. Most of them already were.
I still feel more comfortable being myself online sometimes. I still express myself better in typed-out thoughts than casual in-person banter. I’m the most “me” on text and long WhatsApp voice notes.
I used to think that was a flaw, like I was behind on real-life social skills. Now I just think it’s a particular way of existing. One I happen to be good at.
A long walk from the Student Cafe
Even though I only went to NorthStar for a short time, I stayed loosely connected with a few friends for years. One of them was a classmate who lived on a ship with his family when we studied together. Years later, I figured out through Instagram that he was in New York.
We hadn’t talked in over a decade, but I was going to be in New York around Christmas and figured I’d reach out. I sent a quick message just to say hey, not expecting much. But he replied almost immediately.
We were both free that day, so we picked a time and met in Washington Square Park. We each brought our brothers along like human ice-breakers, and just wandered around the park, talking and people-watching.
Some NYU kids were filming stuff near the arch. There was a Christmas market nearby. There were the usual crowds of tourists, dog walkers, and families with kids. It was chaotic and cozy, and exactly the kind of day that makes a place feel alive.
Eventually, we walked towards these narrow East Village buildings and reached his apartment block. He warned me that it was a five floor climb with creaky stairs. The apartment felt like Bombay. It was small, warm (thankfully!), and full of stuff. Books, musical instruments, a little kitchen in the corner.
Some of his friends were lounging around, all of us were talking. It felt easy.
At some point, we climbed ANOTHER even wonkier staircase to the rooftop to enjoy the view. The skyline was so vibrant. I remember the whole thing really well, even though it wasn’t some big dramatic moment.
We talked about what we’d been up to for the past decade. Told stories about our lives and the detours we took to end up where we were.
Only very briefly did it cross my mind that the two of us shared the same weird overlap of online school 11 years ago. For the most part, it didn’t matter.
And I know that today, none of this is unusual. Meeting people online, staying in touch, crossing paths again years later—it’s just how life works now. Everyone has internet friends. No one thinks twice about it.
But back when I was 12, it didn’t feel inevitable. I didn’t know if any of it would count. Or if it even could.
When I was logging into school with people from every timezone imaginable, trying to feel normal in a very abnormal setup, spending hours talking to faceless user IDs about World Wars, or when I felt like I was missing out on the life other kids were having, I didn’t know there’d be new versions of it waiting for me somewhere else.
That’s why the internet still feels personal to me. Not because it was better, or deeper, or meant something more back then. But because there were real people on the other side, and there still are.
Unfinished Conversations 
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