When I was 9 years old, I frequented the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic-based online forum, Equestria Daily. Known amongst bronies as EQD, the forum was a home for illegal episode uploads, fan art, and merchandise updates, and helped form the brony community into the mammoth it was in the early 2010s. 

I must’ve been EQD’s youngest and simultaneously most dedicated browser. I was a self-proclaimed brony, despite fitting into the target audience of My Little Pony (MLP)–literal children–and was completely, unabashedly obsessed with all things Pony-related. I spent my IT classes scrolling through Strawberry Reef, the unofficial wiki of every MLP doll, ticking off which figures I had and forming a wish list in my head of my most desired figures (prototype Minty Brushable I dream of you…), and walking around the school oval discussing the Equestria Girls leaks with my best friend.

EQD was just another part of my routine. I hopped on the website after school every day, skimmed through the art tab and submitted my own art on multiple occasions, all of which I will never let any of you see. It was in this art tab that I discovered DJ-PON3, MLP’s resident DJ and possibly the coolest designed pony ever. Upon further research into DJ PON-3, I discovered the world of pony music parodies, the majority of which were dubstep and EDM. This was my introduction to electronic music and unintentionally aided in forming my current music taste at 22 years old.

Flash forward 12 years. It’s 2025. I’m seeing The Living Tombstone’s Discord live in a room of fellow EQD frequenters. It’s 2026. Now I’m seeing Ninajirachi perform her highly anticipated collab with Porter Robinson, WannaCry, live, thinking of MLP and calculating how many people in The Forum also saw Discord live a year ago. I landed on about 75% of Nina attendees also screaming along to the anthem of chaos.

Ninajirachi’s debut album, I Love My Computer (ILMC), has won her 3 ARIA Awards, four spots in the 2025 Triple J Hottest 100, and endorsement from the likes of Madeon and Porter Robinson just a year from release. Her signature EDM, hyperpop-esque sounds have evolved into a cohesive body of work through ILMC, as the album follows Nina’s journey of growing with her computer. The themes of her album have resonated with a specific brand of Gen-Z that relates to her understanding of the internet, social media, and the intrinsic tie many of us 20-somethings have to technology.

Nina approaches the chronically online community with a nuance and sympathy not often granted to this sub-group of Gen-Z. For us growing up in the era of Newgrounds and Adobe Flash Player, the early insurgence of YouTube, and the peak of online communities like Club Penguin and MovieStarPlanet, ILMC strikes a chord. 

Nina herself is aware of this. In an interview with collaborator and fellow-Melbournian Daine, both artists discuss the “chronically online” label and how it affects their music. In particular, Nina’s comment on omitting discussions on Artificial Intelligence (AI) on ILMC has stuck with me. She notes that she only writes songs from the perspective of her younger self dealing with a less insidious online landscape, prior to the AI apocalypse of the 2020’s, and tells Daine that ignoring the discussion of AI wasn’t a conscious decision, ‘but maybe the omission of it did make the album feel more hopeful’. I think this is why ILMC has become such a sensation amongst our generation, it acts as a time capsule of the internet prior to the insurgence of AI, dead-internet theories and the alt-right pipeline.

On Infohazard, Nina approaches the danger that comes with being a young person online, described as having “unrestricted internet access”. She broaches this topic in a simple yet effective loop in the chorus;

In my dream, I saw him

The man without a head

On my screen, I saw him

When I was four and ten

I didn't mean to see him

It all happened so fast

What does it mean to see him

Now all this time has passed?

“The man without a head” is a term vague enough for listeners to impose their own experience of seeing something they shouldn’t have seen online, something that we can’t understand. Something that older generations can point to as a direct example of what the internet is; dangerous, inappropriate, uncensored and unrelenting. It’s an amazing thing to have access to the world at our fingertips, and yet it is all so far from us. We have access to an entire world but are unable to do anything to help its people through our screen. Nina might’ve seen the man without a head, but what did you see? What changed you at the age of 10 and showed you a world you didn’t know, or couldn't fathom, was real? What did it mean to see it?

In a similar vein, Delete follows the all too familiar feeling of posting online in a shallow search for validation; in Nina’s words, a “modern, mega, digital, meta, matin’, ritual”. From posting pony fanart on EQD to speed-paints on YouTube and eventually compilations of my life on Instagram, the search for validation online is something I don’t think I will ever truly give up, even with all the self-awareness and reflection in the world. Delete embraces the self-awareness that comes with posting just for one person to see, the feeling of tossing around in bed, trying to keep your hands off your phone, all in an anxious, desperate bid to be acknowledged. Seeing this live, with “I'm on show on that phone in your pocket” playing alongside photos of Nina at her most exposed and a crowd of young people singing along, was cathartic. A crowd that all understands the experience of being a person online in their own way.

iPod Touch closed the final third of Nina’s live set; a fitting, nostalgic outro. Imagery of Year 8 lockers and hallways, falling asleep to the slow hum of an overworked laptop, and music scoring the most mundane moments of life flood into my head as Nina dances along on stage. It’s a bittersweet thing, I think. I’ll never be 9, 13, 17, 19 or, sooner than I realise, 21 again. I can try to catch up to the online experience I should’ve had in my teens—Roblox late into the night, watching the most unimaginably random streams on Discord, inside jokes as every group chat name—and yet I keep coming back to the loneliness I felt online for many years. Posting my art to the void, being slowly removed on Instagram by my old friends, spending hours alone on YouTube learning everything I could about the video games that shaped my childhood. This was my online experience, scored by my ever-evolving music taste and rotating circle of friendships.

And yet what a lovely thing it is to be online now. To build stronger friendships, to laugh late into the night and share the things we found amusing at 8 years old. To show my horrid MLP art on call with a newfound sense of understanding of my 9-year-old self, a version of me well-embedded into my 21-year-old self. To share songs we heard in posts at 12 years old that formed our teen years and grant ourselves the sympathy and grace that we didn’t at the time. To give our past selves, the selves that hung out with our computers late into the night, a little more grace.

Nina understands the online experience; how quickly the internet can alienate us from real life and from connections essential to our growth, and how beautiful it is to be a part of something meaningful. ILMC has amassed such a large community purely because of this understanding of the power of the internet, how beautiful and dangerous it is. There is a reason ILMC is a cult-classic for Gen-Z—because Nina was online with us.

I think of the art I posted on EQD at 9, an amalgamation of my two interests at the time, MLP and Five Nights at Freddy’s. Drawn on Microsoft Paint with shaky lines from my mouse and white gaps from the paint bucket tool. I laugh at it now. It’s objectively a funny drawing and so unabashedly juvenile. And yet I’ll never forget the reassuring comments I got. The encouragement and support for an artist, clearly young and aspiring to be somebody important someday, to keep going.