The Internet Is Not Forever
A eulogy of La Cartoonerie, and the all-consuming worlds of Adobe Flash Player
Meerabelle Jesuthasan
I didn’t grow up watching anime, but I did grow up watching people trying to replicate its aesthetics. There is a strong French current of fascination with Japanese pop culture, and many of the magazines that I read discussed, or were inspired in part by, it. I grew up without being allowed to watch TV, either, so it’s surprising how many hours of my life I wound up spending on lacartoonerie.com, a corner of the Francophone internet dedicated to allowing users to create their own animations.
The principle of La Cartoonerie—or LaK—is simple. You get a basic studio with four workshops: casting, scenery, shooting, and editing. You start out by making your own 2D characters, customizable through standard toggling to adjust thickness, length, color. Then, you can use objects to populate backdrops (think bright, simple, 2000s sticker-like “trees” welded into locales like “field”). The next step, animation, is the most laborious because it relies on a frame-by-frame process, akin to that offered by fancy applications like Photoshop. By accumulating points—which you gain either by winning competitions, or paying real money—you can upgrade your studio to allow you to create even more characters, buy even more “objects” with which to populate your scene, and have musical scores by way of uploading mp3 files. (I would make these by uploading CD files scrubbed down to an absurdly low quality.) Of course, there is no actual way to make the cartoon characters talk (voice acting, unfortunately, was not yet a feature inscribable in code), so users make do with speech bubbles. All of this runs on Adobe Flash Player, that software that runs animations and used to ask you to update every few months. At the end of 2020, Flash will reach its “end-of-life date” and will no longer be supported by major web browsers like Google Chrome.
The moderators of LaK have found themselves in an uncomfortable position, since none of them hold the original rights to the website. Some early 2000s websites that run on Flash—notably neopets.com—will be transitioning to keep their features “playable in a post-Flash world.” But LaK’s original creator and current rights-holder has been waffling over, and then outright ignoring, the current moderator’s emails since 2018, in which they have reportedly been asking for a simple signature to sign over the rights. Users even tried mass-emailing her. Ultimately, her silence seems steadfast. In a matter of months, LaK as I knew it will be over.
It is strange to feel nostalgia over something that lives via a medium I have been cautioned to see as permanent. LaK was a way into French culture as the daughter of a French woman living in Singapore. I must have been around 10 when I discovered the site. It was no Neopets, the original captor of my childhood afternoons, but it was equally absorbing, such that my daily internet allowance of one hour would perpetually turn into two or three or more. I would emerge dazed to the reprimands of my parents at ignoring the normal occupations for children—reading, playing with my sisters, maybe participating in some kind of team sports—and obsess over when I would be able to return the next day.
The internet today is credited with grating away at our attention spans like they’re blocks of cheese. But my most formative online experiences as a younger person were actually all-consuming activities. Like the paper dolls I would take the time to draw, color, cut out, and name, my favorite “computer games” were those I could pursue as creative outlets, fueled by the motivation to have and enjoy things which I had made myself. After the paper dolls, and before LaK, there was Neopets, the quintessential 2000s childhood web experience. I enjoyed chomping, gallivanting, berry-collecting games like Turmac Roll and 200m Peanut Dash as much as the next kid. But what soon obsessed me was creating guilds, those online clubs that enabled you to create a basic homepage, have a messenger board, and positions for members. The goal was to get a guild with many members, who could in turn make friends, or—more excitingly to me—role play on those message boards.
Going online was like going outside. I had to ask for permission and, when I returned, it felt like most of my fun for the day had already happened.
Going online was like going outside. I had to ask for permission and, when I returned, it felt like most of my fun for the day had already happened. I was not proud of that. I felt ashamed that I wasn’t doing things I saw people “my age” do in movies, like talk on the phone or form deep friendships. But the creative experience was so immersive, and the physical thrill of seeing strangers comment on my own laboriously animated movies was so total and immediate. I came back again and again.
Now, in the odd nostalgic tweets or personal essays that long for the magic of the old internet, there is a legitimization of that weird daily ritual which had made me so self-conscious. It was definitely not nice to feel like I could not get enough of this internet. I would feel especially guilty when I snuck onto the family computer when my parents were out, or at night when everyone was asleep, or even during meal times to check if anyone had added a comment to my release. It was a lot harder to be furtive, unlike today when a glance down to a lockscreen is accepted social behavior. But retrospectively, I don’t think it was all bad. Unintuitively perhaps, I built many Neopets guilds with my real-life neighbors. Drawing on fictional worlds like Harry Potter (some of which I had read) and Cartoon Network’s Teen Titans (which I knew definitely nothing about), we decided we would go further than guilds dedicated to a single, pre-existing story. We would create our own. We expanded the usual kiddie exercises of devising characters and games into the creation of actual digital content. We wrote quizzes, that would sort members into their own house (no relation, of course); we invented potion recipes, for “students” to be tested on before advancing to the next “class”; we even drew our own illustrations, like maps, to be scanned and uploaded for potential members to better visualize the world that we were inviting them to navigate.
But I knew that even our best hand-drawn efforts coupled with basic HTML, replete with hard-edged tables and default fonts, was not impressive enough to compete with guilds that were offering exciting competitions for prized items like Neopet brushes and rare potions. Their layouts were dazzling, bright, and professional. I decided to throw myself into CSS as well and picked up some Javascript along the way. I could not have been older than 10 years old. The most exciting thing I learned how to use were maps.
I once tried explaining to a friend at school that I was learning HTML. “It means you can build things,” I said. “But on the internet.”
“Ooh,” she replied. “Like a house?”
I didn’t know how to explain it.
The little HTML I know is now written in far more sophisticated programming. Wandering through old customizable neopet “homepages” feels like wandering through neighborhoods with ugly nostalgic architecture. As someone on Twitter said, the Zoomers will probably come for us soon for saying “click on it” and not “tap on it.”
Looking for my old user profiles now feels like looking for old friends, people I haven’t seen in ages, who might not even speak the same language as me. It’s easier to find people I went to school in kindergarten with than to remember the login details of my old account. The supposed all-knowing internet is quietly swallowing the past along with my own memories, and in just a few months more of them will be gone. What treasures did I make that will disappear soon? It’s probably best not to try and keep them—today, intellectual property is a slimy, vanishing concept online, where brands can replicate an artists’ work for their designs and teenagers can spread a popular dance move without crediting the creator. (Black people are disproportionate targets of this cultural theft.) I am sure accusations of plagiarism between users may have come up on LaK—but, ultimately, most of the work was more akin to fan fiction or even outright adaptation of popular manga series or music videos.
The days of fan fiction climbing bestseller lists were far, far away. Frankly, its strange aesthetic made it so that nothing on LaK was pretty enough for external use. I remember getting adjusted to the fact that, for the longest time, characters had no necks and only smooth circles for hands. But once I learned to make the characters my own (eyes as large as possible, lips as thin as possible), I was in the grip of that world.
When I think of using the family computer as a child, I think of the sneaking around, the absorption I felt—and the guilt, afterwards, at letting such a brain-rotting activity get me once more, to the shame and disgust of my parents.
I also feel an irrational pride that, even at a young age, collecting Neopoints was never my true objective (to a fault—my neopets were almost always “DYING” and I could barely be bothered to get them any free omelet). My objective was to build these worlds, to get so good at creating them and sustaining them. I could read into this, or I could not.
The internet today is smart and dressed up in a way that my childhood self could not understand, much like it takes growing up to understand the appeal of monochrome clothes without any patterns, or a show without any magic, or a coffee without any sweetness. The internet feels today like the cage I pace in, whereas it used to be a portal. I pride myself, a connoisseur of advance-search tools, on being able to search the internet like a dirt-scraper. But I don’t miss the internet itself, exactly. I just miss my place on it, which felt small, while the rest was large, and full of options. I used to look over my shoulder for a parental figure coming to advise about dinner time—today, I lock my accounts and take down personal pictures. I’m hyper-aware of my all-too-searchable name and the insatiable curiosity of government agencies.The shame of bottomless scrolling coupled with the paranoia from surveillance feels worlds away from the shame of computer games. When my mother would catch me going past my hourly limit, she would reprimand me gently, but in a way that made me so ashamed. I wonder what my life would have been like—and what I would be like today—if I had been better at heeding her instructions to attend to real life outside. What real life? What outside?
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