“Fiona has a cool head…even that nasty Ellen apologized for her e-mail. Ben Werdmuller has stopped his bad treatment of me, the other little Ben has come to terms, and Sven is actually a damn nice kid. I’ve also received over 50 e-mails from very nice UK guys and girls wanting to be friends and asking me to stop for the sake of their finances.” ~ Terri Tickle
Long before it became a hotbed of illegal filesharing and god-knows-what, I was big into Usenet.
Imagine an internet before social media; before blogs; before apps and Reddit. Newsgroups were a kind of forum before forums were invented: discussion lists that anyone could read. You could find discussions about anything, with no ads, business model, or ownership. In the same way email is just a part of the internet, so were the groups.
Anyone could create an “alternative”, or “alt.*” group (the origin of alt- as a prefix in common language). But alt.teens was too America-centric, so a group of British kids got together and founded uk.people.teens as a place for locals to chat with each other.
That’s where I found them. Every night after school, I’d come home, dial in with my 28k modem, and sync new messages to read and reply to. We chatted on IRC, tying up hundreds of phone lines. Because nobody had yet realized that letting teenagers who talked to each other online meet each other in real life was potentially unsafe, we organized meetups all over the country.
I’m not sure this would have worked in the US, with larger distances and worse public transport. I don’t think anyone would have let us do it even a couple of years later. But to this day, some of my closest friends are from the group. It was a wonderful way for an awkward, shy kid to find an enduring community where he felt welcomed.
There was just one problem.
“My name is Terri. I am a female college student in the Boston, Massachusetts area that is a total TICKLING FREAK. As a hobby…one that costs me ALOT of money…I maintain a personal collection of amateur videos featuring guys being tickled (usually for 30 or 60 minutes) by a girlfriend, good girl friend, girl friends, or even guy friends. I am not a business, video trader, or porn solicitor. My interest is in TICKLING.”
It started with a simple message to the group. Her name was Terri DiSisto, or Terri Tickle, and her post invited us to send video of us being tickled in exchange for money or new computers. We made fun of it, of course, and nothing really happened.
And then, three weeks later, there was another one.
And another one.
We complained some more, a little more angrily, and instead of falling on deaf ears, our messages were met with something else.
It’s hard to remember now, but a couple of megabytes could take half an hour or more to download over a modem. Even on my fastest-ever dialup connection, a single MP3 file took ten minutes to download. So when we were bombarded by megabytes and megabytes of binary files, it threatened to blow our community apart.
The onslaught stopped as suddenly as it had started. She had demonstrated that she had the power, but her aim was to attract teenagers who were willing to tickle on-camera for money. She wanted us to accept her ads.
So, uneasily, we did. She became a part of our community, sort of. We had conversations with her; we even, sometimes, made the effort to understand why she did what she did.
When Princess Diana died, she posted on Elton John’s Candle in the Wind: “will any GUYS on this newsgroup admit that they cried when they heard Elton John perform this? most of my girl friends here at college did…and so did a few guys…i was stunned.” One reply: “I admit that I cried.”
Looking back at the Usenet archive as an adult, it’s easy to infer that her subsequent posts are far from innocent. For example, on British slang:
“manky=gross; sod it=forget it; cheeky=sassy; bum=butt (that one’s obvious); Wanker = Masturbater. i was told that a knowledge of these terms is essential here….”
To an innocent teenager, it seemed like an American’s naïve exploration of how we talked. It was almost funny. Now, the inappropriate overtones are obvious. It’s clear that she wasn’t one of us.
And when I found the following post while researching this piece, I didn’t find it funny at all.
TERRI will be coming to Great Britain and Ireland… ….during the latter part of July…. i expect to visit London, Winchester, Canterbury, Norfolk, and Nottingham….then on to Dublin and other parts of Southern Ireland…. …and i’ll have my new 200mmx laptop the entire time…. <hehe>….i’m serious!!!!
In 2001, Terri Tickle was revealed to be David D’Amato, a 39-year-old assistant principal in Long Island, New York. He was fined $5,000 and spent six months in a halfway house for overloading Drexel University’s computer network as retaliation to a 17 year old boy who had ended their tickle video relationship.
I haven’t seen David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s movie Tickled yet, but it alleges that D’Amato has re-emerged as the founder of Jane O’Brien Media, the organizer of Competitive Endurance Tickling, and has been blackmailing former participants in a similar way.
I think fondly of the community I joined, and the friends I made. I’ve always thought of it as perfectly safe; something that was a product of an era of the internet that we’ll never get back.
Now, I wonder if we were just lucky.
