I’m so excited! I was digging around in some folders and files tonight, looking for a photo, when I came across a file named “Manifesto.html” in a folder buried deep on my hard drive, called “Archaic Shit Circa 2001-2003”.
Intrigued, because a lot of my cam pics have that HTML file’s URL on them, I opened it, and memories came flooding back from over 20 years ago, to a time that some folks may remember, where I was sort of tasked to write a book on camgirls, cam culture, and the community by an editor friend, who was an author and writer for Wired magazine at the time, who assured me that he could help me get such a book published. All I had to do was write it first.
No other books had been written about the subject, there was no research or any real or notable media coverage of what actually happened within our subculture. We were all so still underground, except for Jennifer Ringley and Ana Voog, who were both written about extensively and interviewed on late night American TV.
Also, what Jenni was on her way out of doing in 2003, and Ana still did at the time, “lifecasting” for lack of a better term, was completely different than what teen and young adult camgirls like me were doing only 4-5 years after they started. Where Jenni was documenting her life at home 24/7, as honestly as she could, like an exhibitionist documentarian, and Ana’s cams were also going 24/7, showing a stylized, often purposely distorted view with her “art + life cam”, camgirls of my era were selective about when we turned our cams on and engaged with our audiences. Our websites, aesthetics and webcam images were well-crafted and expertly-curated for the best impact, the way you see Instagram influencers do today. And almost none of us ran our cams 24/7.
Many inspired by Jenni and Ana, but also each other, we – girls in our teens and 20’s – were pioneering web design, cybersecurity, and online payment systems all on our own, in a time when that type of infrastructure online was still being built, as well as exploring image, self expression, sexuality, and feminism (whether we all liked or knew it or not) on our own terms, on our own little islands on the internet. Islands we taught ourselves – and each other – how to build, while navigating a quickly changing, post-9/11 political and cultural landscape that was increasingly threatening our cyber freedoms! Oh, and we all looked pretty cool doing it! 👩🏼💻👌
But, no one was writing this shit down.
I knew that the internet wasn’t forever, because nothing ever really is, and I knew that all of this material, this media built by girls and women, was only as permanent as the servers they were hosted on.
Most of us were hosted by geeky, pervy guys with servers in their basements or bedrooms, who were really only in it for a guaranteed, steady stream of cute, if not provocative, if not nude, live, daily photos, as well as our immense gratitude to them – our “heroes” – for giving us a platform. There were a few altruistic hosts, but most of us had to kiss a lot of frogs to find them. I knew that any of them backing up, keeping, and preserving or maintaining any kind of legacy for the work we were doing and the art we were making was slim to none, or at least not reliable, maybe as it should be. It’s our history after all, not theirs, so it was up to us to preserve it.
I was aware of the Wayback Machine and just sort of hoped it would do the work I couldn’t, and always continue to be the permanent internet archive it wanted to be, while I tried to print as many paper copies of blog posts, blog comments, news articles, and webpages as I could afford to buy paper and toner for my refurbished workhorse, black & white laser printer at the time. I was just grabbing things willy nilly for the most part, like a girl on a game show trying to snatch flying $100 bills in the air, and it’s still to be determined if what I grabbed has value, or is, or is not, still available online or on the Wayback Machine. The few things I checked in 2024, while I was making the archive more archival, had not been.
At the same time as I was trying to print the whole damn internet, I enlisted the help of the cam community that thought me writing a book and preserving our legacy was such a good idea. I created a page on my website entitled “The Camgirl Manifesto”, because that was the working title of the book I had in my head, and laid out my hopes for the project.
“The Camgirl Manifesto is the working title of a book I’m writing chronicling cam culture from its beginnings to present and predictions by people within the culture on its future. It’s about US,” I wrote, then I went on to explain who “us” was (the cam community – camgirls and viewers, lovers or haters), and what the book was not (“feminist bullshit” apparently, which was a loaded word on a predominantly white, male internet at the time, even among women). Then at the side it had a small area for a Twitter-length news update, obviously long before Twitter existed, and a handy little graphic I made for people to use to link to the page from their own websites.
I also had my host, Kevin, also the webmaster of CamwhoresDotCom, put up a forum for me, where I engaged with about 250 folks from within cam culture, from camgirls to cam viewers, from 2003-2005. At least, until it fell prey to spam bots in 2006 and became unusable.
The forum was obviously not PC, if you look at it on the Wayback Machine, as very few of us from the E/N scene were, (“E/N” was internet shorthand for “Everything/News” or “Everything/Nothing”, which was the umbrella category all our personal sites fell under), especially by today’s standards, but we discussed everything about cam culture from favourite camgirls, why the people hosted or watched them, what the girls’ motivations were, how much money they made, what kinds of gifts they got and if they were requested to do anything in exchange, their weirdest or most endearing fans and gifts, scariest incidents, and so much more. I also ran completely unscientific polls asking about demographics and psychographics, which I had just learned about in ad school.
Unfortunately, I no longer have access to the Camgirl Manifesto forum, or a backup, because I wasn’t technologically advanced enough to have known how to save or back that up. I was not hosting my own website at the time and would have been too afraid to fuck with anything outside of ftping HTML files to update my site. I do have some printed threads and posts from the forum, however.
Kevin, my former host, could have a backup of it somewhere, but we’re both really busy and I haven’t had a chance to talk to him about it yet.
In the meantime, there are enough keywords gleaned from the forum on all of the Wayback Machine’s saves to jog my memory a bit, to know what to further search for on the Wayback Machine and within my pink Camgirl Museum archive of printouts, for when I decide to write the book everyone wanted me to write in 2003. The one that my editor friend from back then still says he can help me get published, and not just self-published on Amazon like my previous two books. All I have to do is write it. And not even the whole thing, the first 50 pages is enough to get a book deal, he said.
The reason I ended up not doing it back then, and why I haven’t done it in all this time despite having all the material and a brain full of memories and knowledge, is that in 2004 streaming video cam sites started popping up, which quickly changed the landscape of cam culture and what a camgirl was or could be – and I simply couldn’t keep up, both the energy and time required to do interviews and research a book, as well as “finding the story” while the story was still ongoing and changing. Not to mention sitting down and physically concentrating long enough to write 50,000-80,000 words, which is about the length of a novel, in a tiny house with two kids, two crazy dogs, the worst cat ever, and…a husband who killed my self-esteem and sucked the motivation to succeed – or even exist – right out of me.
I officially apologize to the cam community for not writing the book I said I’d try to write in 2003.
I’m sorry that I couldn’t write this book 20 years ago, but simultaneously, I believe things happen when they’re supposed to, and that it wasn’t time to write that book in 2003, or even 2005, or even 5 years ago. The time could be now, if I shuffled around most of my priorities and focus – like I said, I have an editor on board who can still help me get it published, we had a phone call about a year & a half ago about it – but at the same time, I’ve always been torn on how to write it.
Do I write it from an “expert” perspective? By someone who’s watched what’s now a whole ass billion dollar industry, closely and from the inside, from 2001-present? Or do I write about my own journey through the cam world and how I fit in? How do I do both and do justice to myself, and everyone else?
I think about the book almost every second of every day, my brain trying to work out all the problems and finding holes, which is why I created this site in the meantime, figuring shorter blog posts would be a happy medium, and then we could move onto the metaverse and have actual “exhibits”, then maybe a book could be made from that material. Like, when I’m 65 and retired and life slows down! Unfortunately, I haven’t even had the resources to dedicate to creating original content here “in the meantime” because my priorities have laid elsewhere. 😕
Working on a book would mean putting my art business on hold, after trying to build it this past year with 0 success, for a completely different set of reasons, that I’m still trying to work out.
Maybe that in itself is a sign from the Universe that now is time to shift priorities, that maybe now is the time for the book, and later is the time for SunnyGrrrl. I know for a fact I can’t make SunnyGrrrl successful while also putting everything I have – which is what it would take, with my current mental limitations and lifestyle working against me every second – into finishing a book.
And if that’s not a sign, perhaps the fact that there’s a new French-German documentary in the works and they want to interview me for it, both about my experiences as a camgirl and about the Camgirl Museum idea/concept of preserving our legacies, is one.
Plus, like I said, my editor friend, who now works for Carnegie Mellon University publishing all kinds of techie things, is still on board to help me get a book published if all I would do is finally write the damn thing.
So here’s what I’m thinking:
- I can reach out to my partner, friends, family, and patrons on Discord, for support and helping me stay focused and accountable. 🫵😊
- I can start going through my box of printed material and the Wayback Machine immediately because I need to for the documentary interview next week anyway.
- I can ask Kevin if he has a backup of the Camgirl Manifesto forum and if he miraculously does (🤞), bring it back online or locally, so I can lock it down, delete the spam threads, and go through the interviews, polls, and discussions. This is such a long shot, I don’t even know how to do that, but maybe ChatGPT can explain it to me like I’m 5. 🤷🏼♀️
- Once I’m through most/all of at least the paper archive and have re-verified what I can via the Wayback Machine, I can start writing and I just won’t stop or stray from that subject until the book is finished and the story’s been told. No making art, no running my online shop or sticker club, no wasting time making “content” for billionaires’ social media platforms, only writing. Or writing about the writing.
- Burnout will be dealt with by playing video games and going out in nature, hopefully between writing milestones, as opposed to more “output” like making art and “content”.
I feel like participating in this new documentary, and being asked to think about the cam culture of the past again, has ignited a newfound interest in me in completing a book, and could possibly bring clarity as to how this story starts and flows. I also feel like over 20 years of hindsight and knowing, more or less, how the story “ends” makes it a much different situation than in 2003. What a camgirl is and does in 2025 is pretty well established and fine-tuned, I work for them every day.
Before I do anything, I have to get this documentary interview under my belt, which means getting into “cramming for a test” mode with my archive, aaaaaand cleaning my house…it’s February 5th and my Christmas tree is still up! Oh and getting enough rest that I don’t get any new zits. 😌
So, I’m gonna go start doing all of that. Feel free to wish me luck, give me anecdotes, or cheer me on in the Camgirl Museum subreddit, on Bluesky, or on my Discord/Patreon, once I start everything! I could really use the support and will be updating in any, or all, of those places! I may also write posts here about things that come up as I’m inspired going through the archive!
Thank you for reading such a long post with no photos! 👏😊