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In the early days of AIM, middle schoolers were afforded occasion to self-aestheticize. The choices were not endless but they were grueling. Font size, color, style. AIM was none other than the crucible through which my early textual eros was expressed and impressed: the crushes, boyfriends, and askings-out that materialized there were the exact thing my parents should have been worried about, are clear referents in my present perversion. Today I keep my dreams on white backgrounds in black text, locked up on 750words and in Google Docs. Streamlined and sanitized, we don’t speak to each other in stylized text anymore. By the time I smartened up, maybe ninth grade, my AIM text was a ten-point Arial, bold, in soft pink-orange on a dark gray background. In addition to literally not knowing where the untold gigabytes of data we pour onto digital platforms ever goes or ends up, who holds it or who sees it, to live digitally we consign to never knowing what about us leaks out with these aesthetic choices, at once minor and major, as they populate our pages and constitute our selves. Only endless experimentation, living-through-it, could divine the truth of that off-coral. And even then, you could just change the color.

Lyle St is a media scholar living in Brooklyn, NY. She makes a podcast about Aaron Carter and writes extemporaneously on the internet.