Hey, I'm Kate Lindsay, and you're listening to I-CYMIMI or, in case you missed it,

Slate's podcast about internet culture. And today on the show, we are

joined by writer Jennifer Swan. Welcome, Jennifer. Thanks for having me. Jennifer reports on internet

culture for outlets like Thice and The Cut. And it's here today because she wrote a piece for

Wired about Craigslist. I am excited to talk about this. If you told me Craigslist shut down years ago,

I would have believed you,

so I'm really excited to hear

not only what it's been up to,

but how it's, like, kind of thriving.

But before we get to that, speaking of old internet memories, this is the question that we ask all first time guests on the show. What is your first internet memory?

I was like racking my brain to try to remember the oldest one, because I feel like they all kind of mesh together in this weird space. And I have this like vague memory of seeing, and this was before YouTube, because I think YouTube

was like 2005.

Do you remember these videos that were like, it was like this very basic sort of flash animation,

and they were these little characters that were lip-syncing songs.

I think one of them was like a sponge monkey.

Oh my gosh, okay.

And I was researching it.

They used it in like a Quiznos commercial recently, which I guess was meant to appeal to

like, yeah.

Oh, my God.

Like millennials who remember it from junior high.

But yeah, it was just like these little cutout collage, like so bad. The animation was so poor, but they were singing to these songs. And I don't even know how I would have seen it. It wouldn't have been on YouTube. I was like, was it on eBom's world? Like, I don't know. A friend showed it to me. And that was like a weird thing that I'd forgotten about, but that people are still talking about, like, on Reddit once I researched it, you know? You had to, and here's how I know this very specific piece of information. I'm sure I've mentioned it, which is that I used to make music videos using footage from the Sims. Whoa. And I also did this, like, either pre- YouTube or, like, YouTube was just getting started so it wasn't ubiquitous. And what you needed to do, if you ever wanted to put, like, a video, like, display it on a site is you needed to find a place to host it. And then you would essentially embed that. And so I think, like, Put Locker was a big one that I used to host.

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