I found my YouTube channel from 2013.

Reminiscing on a happier internet.

Good morning! I wrote something this week about growing up online. I might break up the usual Ad Hoc template with occasional longer form pieces. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

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I downloaded Instagram on my iPod Touch when I was eight, in 2010. I thought it was a photo-filter app, which it was, but it also made my sepia-tinged selfies visible to my friends. I didn’t understand then how wild it was to be able to take a picture and instantaneously share it with the world. I set my account to private and named it ardenmusic. I was too young to be online. I loved it instantly.

In addition to my personal Instagram, I started a public photography Instagram, a quality Tumblr, a Taylor Swift fangirl Tumblr (that Taylor followed, when she was hyper-online). In 2013, I created a YouTube channel. I called it ArdenApparel22, inspired by MakeupbyMandy24, a girl I watched religiously. I made haul videos, outfit videos, tag videos (#gettoknowme, #siblingtag, #wouldyourather) in my pink bedroom, and uploaded them to my few hundred subscribers. I filmed on my dad’s Canon and strung the clips together on iMovie and it felt like I was running my own production.

The internet felt cozy. Each YouTuber greeted their fans with the same intro (“Hey guys, it’s ___”, “It’s X, back at it again with another video”). They had short videos on their channel pages with rapid-fire clips of their content, like a movie trailer for their personalities. I felt bonded to my favorite channels. They were so consistent. I knew that they would show up every week, excited to show me something new.

Twelve-year-old me and all her heroes.

I went to school, and when I came home, I opened my laptop and began my secondary form of education. I learned how to draw winged eyeliner, to dye my hair with lemon and Kool-Aid, to deal with friend drama. I absorbed all of the conspiracy theories that Shane Dawson whispered to me across the screen, and I half-believed some of them. There were the DIY girls, the makeup gurus, the heartthrob boys, the parody makers. They stayed in their niche. They played characters of themselves.

Privacy was still a thing, or at least the pretense of it. I didn’t post my last name anywhere. I never spoke about my neighborhood, or my school, or my family. It felt like I could share exactly the parts of myself that I wanted—my excitement over new eyeshadow palettes, the movie fandoms I was obsessed with, my reflections on my twelve years of life (“As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?”) and predictions about my distant future (“Do you want children? How many?”). Everything else was still mine. I knew the difference between Arden and ArdenApparel22. How could I not?

Then I went to a friend’s birthday party at Laudurée, where we sat outside in a cherry-blossomed garden and ate macaroons and sipped tea with our pinkies in the air. The popular girls at the other end of the table called my YouTube videos cute in the derogatory, cutting way that mean twelve-year-olds have already mastered. I deleted everything (this was before archiving existed, and I didn’t know you could private videos). I was red with shock. I had no idea what I was doing was embarrassing.

All that remains is a welcome trailer to my channel in the drafts of my backup account. Every couple years, I dig it up and cringe a little bit at my heightened performance of myself. I could see where I was mimicking the YouTubers I looked up to, which mannerisms and turns of speech were not my own. But this week, when I watched it, I felt so much joy, and appreciation. I was unashamedly weird and awkwardly charming. At school, I was shy, but I could be outgoing on the internet. It didn’t feel hard to publish videos onto an infinite web. I was essentially speaking into the void.

Now, the videos that populate my YouTube home page are titled “Day in my Life as a Data Analyst at Spotify” or “Moving to Paris at Nineteen!” or “How to be More Productive in 5 Steps.” But I don’t think YouTube was ever supposed to be about real life. There is something dystopian about me watching you take Zoom meetings and type sentences onto a screen that is blurred because you signed an NDA. Our online identities are inseparable from our lives, which are often inseparable from our jobs.

The internet now can feel like a lonely, plastic place. The twelve year olds have managers. I can’t watch anything without being pushed a new product or habit or trend that will improve my life. Collectively, we made Charli D’Amelio, a regular girl from Connecticut, into the most famous person in the world. We watched her pull her family members into her spotlight, and now we passively track (if you are still paying attention at all) her slow descent. I feel bad for her, having uprooted her high school life to live in a stark-white LA condo and launch a dozen random businesses, because her moment was so fleeting (How could she have known?). But maybe it’s also a blessing. She’s only nineteen and can still go to college if she wants to.

I almost miss the time when people with “real” jobs didn’t respect people who did social media. When the word creator didn’t exist, and you couldn’t make more money from one TikTok than working a year at a corporate job. When the only people I followed on Instagram besides my friends were Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber. Before bed, I still watch my comfort YouTuber, MissRemiAshten, who’s been on the platform for ten years. She lives in Los Angeles with her fiancé and three cute white dogs. She cooks, gets ready for events, and drives to and from her podcast studio. It is simple, predictable, delightful content. Her channel is a relic of the 2013 golden era.

I smile when I think of little Arden traversing the early internet. She was in the right place at the right time. And it was a place, ten years ago. You could log off.

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I hope you see the eclipse today. I really appreciate you for letting me into your inbox <3