When I was about 11 or 12, I had a sleep over with my friends. My friends house had a computer with a microphone and internet access. It was around the year 2000. This was ages before the rise of chat services like Discord. Youtube was not popular, and was very niche. Hearing the voice of an ordinary person say ordinary things was still rare on the internet.

It was 3am, and her parents had gone to bed. Foolishly we had been left alone with the computer. Someone figured out how to find a voice chat program that connected us to random strangers around the world.

We spoke with a man from South Africa for a half hour. We talked about the weather. We asked him if he was afraid of being eaten by lions or trampled by elephants on the regular. He asked what school was like. He asked if we had been to New York , and we told him it was actually quite far away (10? Hours by car) and he seemed amazed by this fact, because we didn’t even live on the west coast. The conversation was so pure, and we were preteen girls speaking to an anonymous man on the internet

We (us girls and the man) were all amazed by the technology. It was like magic: you can have a real time conversation with anyone around the world. A real human conversation with someone you could never normally meet. It is one of my favorite memories.

The comic seems basic, but a long time ago I found it very funny. When the comic was new, we were all still enraptured by the strange new world we had all found ourself in. Without context, without the newness and hope of what the internet could be, the comic isn’t very good. That’s how some art works, though.

The New Yorker is a famous magazine, so the comic was known by people who read newspapers. It predates reddit and the word “meme” used in the context of internet jokes. It was a silly comic in a serious magazine.