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

Slate's podcast about internet culture. And with me today,

I have writer Emily Kirkpatrick. You might know her as the voice behind the substack IHeart

mess. And the substack of it all is crucial to today's episode. But as we all know, before

we can get to that, Emily is a first-time guest on I-C-y-M-I, and therefore she must answer the first-time guest question,

which is, what is your first internet memory?

Hello, oh my God.

My first internet memory was probably being like, I don't know,

it's a tie, I guess, between like playing Oregon Trail at school when I was probably like seven, six, seven.

Wow, six, seven.

Oh, God, I didn't even realize what I just did.

Wow.

Listen, it wouldn't have meant anything to me like two weeks ago.

Me neither.

But now we've done so much coverage of it that now I'm like, now I'm one of them. Yes. And I walked right into it. So that's my bad. It's either that or it's like, do you remember going in like Nickelodeon chat rooms as a child? I don't know if I did the chat rooms, because I was scared of everything, but I definitely...

Oh, I was just mixing it up in there. I had no fears, no concerns. Like, pedophiles were like a distant future problem.

You know, like, I thought I was just chatting to all the kids, my age. I feel like, you know, in Sex and the City, that, like, iconic screenshot that gets shared

where, like, Carrie is being like, oh, my God, can he see me, like, in front of her laptop? She's, like, ducking away. That's how I felt as a kid. Like, because I think I'd had it so drilled into me. Like, this is, like, early kid. Once I was old enough to start, like, making my own way and, like, becoming actually literate in the internet, I was like, oh, no one can see me.

But when I was like, when I would have been becoming actually literate in the internet, I was like,

oh, no one can see me. But when I was like, when I would have been going on those sites, I was still very scared. But I did always like play all the games on all the sites. That's how I would waste my time. I do remember also having that feeling with early internet, but specifically, do you remember there was that like genre of like early YouTube videos where there would be like weird jump scares hidden in them. Yes.

And Bulls specifically, I felt like they is that like genre of like early YouTube videos where there would be like weird jump scares hidden in them?

Yes.

...