Mahir "I Kiss You"

» see xoom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

mahir was one of ours. a man from izmir with a homepage. in 1999 i was a teenager on a dial-up line in turkey and mahir cagri was about the closest thing the whole country had to a person the rest of the internet knew by name. the page opened with welcome to my home page, i kiss you, in shouting capitals, and for a while that sentence was just everywhere.

the real page lived on xoom.com, one of the free hosts of that era next to geocities and tripod. mahir listed his hobbies on it, photography and ping pong, in english that was warm and a little bent. it was earnest to the point of sweetness, a guy from izmir hoping some woman abroad might write to him. more or less that is all it was.

the version that actually spread was not exactly his. someone copied the page, altered some of the lines to sound more suggestive than mahir had written, and that doctored copy went around the world by email. at its height it pulled something like 300,000 views a day, which in 1999 was a staggering number for one guy's personal site. mahir spent years afterward saying the famous words were not all his. being turkish, i grew up with the second life of this, the news segments that found him again every few years, the running national joke that he somehow turned into being a minor folk hero. it was the first time the global internet laughed at something turkish and mostly laughed with him.

~ the case file ~

~ how it spread ~

email. before timelines and share buttons, a link moved by getting forwarded to your whole address book. mahir's page was built for exactly that, funny in about four seconds and harmless enough to send to anyone. it rode the same wave as the dancing baby and the hamster dance, the pre-meme memes that traveled person to person because there was no platform to travel on yet.

~ the funny part ~

years later sacha baron cohen's borat looked an awful lot like a character built out of mahir's public image, the accent and the earnestness. cohen denied it, mahir was not so convinced, and at one point he talked about suing. nothing came of it. but the fact stands that one broken-english homepage from izmir left fingerprints on a hollywood movie almost a decade after it went up.

~ what got buried with it ~

the original xoom page did not survive. xoom got folded into nbc's internet arm, nbci, and when that whole operation was wound down in 2001 the free hosting went with it, the same way geocities pages would vanish years later. mahir the man kept going, kept a site of his own, kept doing interviews. but the actual artifact, the specific page on the specific host that a few million people opened in 1999, is gone now except for archived screenshots.

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