Zoomers don't know what Usenet is - by Allegra Rosenberg
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Zoomers don't know what Usenet is<br>As proven by their tweets about Gerard Way's late-90s online fetish posting. But does that even matter?<br>Allegra Rosenberg<br>Aug 11, 2026
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Hi! I’m Allegra, a fandom expert with a book out next year about the history of fan culture, from Lord Byron to Beatlemania and beyond. Follow me on X, TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more commentary on fan trends, cult media, and pop-culture phenomena.<br>Last week I guested on New York Magazine’s Dinner Party newsletter with a follow-up piece about the AI scandal in Heated Rivalry fandom — you can check that out here.
Apparently, fans of My Chemical Romance have known for some time that frontman Gerard Way has a vomit fetish, thanks to the fact that he has made tweets to that extent before. But last week, the talk of the algorithmic town was a Usenet thread from 1998 that fans dug up which featured a 21-year-old Gerard discussing in detail, on alt.fondle.vomit, his love of watching girls puke—preferably clothed.<br>I have no parasocial attachment to this man or his music so have no feelings one way or another about his kink… But what I did find incredibly interesting was the variety of ways in which young fans comprehended the environment that Way was posting in.<br>I saw some fans calling the posts “leaked emails” and others referring to the forums as “AOL.” Some were seemingly under the impression it was some kind of instant messaging service. Still other fans referred to it as “Google Groups” — which, yes, that is the interface through which the posts are preserved today, but certainly not their original home.<br>Are you one of these young people slightly confused about where exactly Gerard and his bandmates were posting? Let me clear it up for you.<br>Usenet was a distributed message board service that first became popular in the 1980s. It was divided into a hierarchy of newsgroups, which were essentially text-based forums, grouped by interest. The “big 8” categories included “humanities” “comp” “sci” and “soc” for top-level interests; new subforums had to go through a lengthy formal voting process to be approved and added to the hierarchy. Then there were the “alt” groups, collectively known as the alternet. Pretty much anyone could spin up an “alt” group like the one that Way’s puke posting fell under.<br>Early on, it was more common to access Usenet directly via the command line/terminal interface of a personal computer; by the late 1990s, subscriptions to ISPs like AOL and EarthLink provided direct access to Usenet through their bundled software. You could also read & write to Usenet with independent reader software like Agent, or email programs like Microsoft Outlook.
The MCR guys might have been using any of these options: the point of Usenet was its easy accessibility and wide reach.<br>The software architecture that made it accessible, however, also made it difficult to archive. Because of the distributed way it operated, with messages being propagated throughout the system from server to server, clients/users might receive different versions of newsfeeds, depending on how they were accessing it.<br>There is no one canonical version of Usenet’s history. For many years, users had the comfort of knowing that their posts were not being archived—depending on the server you used and data costs, your posts would be gone days or weeks after you made them. When a company called Deja News announced in 1995 that it had developed a searchable archive of the last few years of Usenet postings, and would be archiving posts going forward, there was widespread outcry: under pressure from users, Deja introduced ways to retroactively delete or “nuke” one’s own posts from the archive, as well as methods to prevent new posts from being archived at all.<br>The reason we can read Gerard Way’s vomit fetish posts today, and other historically important Usenet posts (like Steven Moffat’s fanboy posts in rec.arts.drwho) is thanks to services like Deja News, various academic archivists, and later, Google, which acquired Deja, plus a scattering of other incomplete archives, to form a searchable Usenet interface as part of Google Groups in 2001. In 2024 Google sunsetted the ability to post to Usenet via its Groups interface, but the existing archive going back to 1981 remains searchable.<br>How do young people think about the early internet?
Reading fanfiction that is supposed to be set in the 2000s, I often see references to characters using Uber, Google Maps, GrubHub, YouTube, and other mundane features of contemporary technological life that were not available, let alone ubiquitous, until years later. I’m fascinated by these slip-ups from Gen Z fans and what they reveal about the generation currently coming of age as creatives.<br>Apart from groundbreaking advances in AI, our digital landscape has changed so little since the mid-2010s that people who have grown up entirely within...