The early internet was a feeling
Whilst it is true that the internet is still out there, if you know how to find it, one thing I neglected to talk about was how it felt to be a teenager on the early internet.
Nostalgia continues to be a hell of a drug, but I don’t think it is right to ignore how much of an impression it left on me and my peers back then.
Different times
It is remarkable to think there was a time when most of us didn’t have an email address, or even a computer. Yes, some of my friends were lucky enough to have a Commodore Amiga or an Atari ST, which was mostly used for games but could be used for serious things too. PC’s were still hilariously expensive for 12-year-old me.
It was only the good fortune of a grandparent leaving money to me that enabled me to buy my first PC, a 486 DX2/66 with a whopping 4 Megabytes of RAM and a 170 Megabyte hard drive. The internet still wasn’t a feature at this stage, but we would share around floppy disks or CD-ROMs, or pick up a magazine with a disc selotaped to the cover.
It wasn’t until the mid-90s when we would be able to access the internet in the computer room in school. This ignited a spark.
Up until this point, information was something you would find in books…in the library, or from your teacher, or an Encarta CD-ROM(remember that?!).
Wait, you can just type something in to this search box and find something someone put on the internet? I can’t even…
As I mentioned in my earlier blog post, the internet was mostly HTML pages we coded into one of a handful of editors doing the rounds at the time, along with low-resolution images and animated text. Even on a 56K modem pages would load pretty quickly and the plague of cookies and adtech was still a few years off.
We also had chat rooms, which at least to my eyes were civilised and fun. I understand they became quite sordid affairs a few years later when when the barriers to entry were much lower, but for us early-adopting nerds it was paradise.
Being able to reach someone on the other side of the world for the first time was incredible. I have family out in Canada which I hadn’t seen for about a decade by that point. I sent them a Christmas card and received an email back. An email, from halfway around the world!
Geocities
A big part of the online world back then was from sites like Geocities. This was a network of personal pages arranged in districts, affording people the freedom to code the websites of their dreams and have their own little corner of the web.
It would eventually be shuttered when its owner, Yahoo! began to circle the drain, with around 38 million pages disappearing with it. However, there is a project to turn those sites into a gallery, which you can find here.
Now
Skip forward a few decades and most of us spend our entire lives on the internet. We often have a number of email addresses, even fake ones we generate through a password manager to try to reduce the risk of our important ones falling into the wrong hands.
The internet today is awash with adtech, spyware and cookies from sites we haven’t even visited. We need multiple-megabit connections just to download things in a timely manner and a good proportion of what we see on the internet was put there by people with malicious intentions.
Some of the biggest companies on the planet are internet companies which make a living by making users dependent on it –the infinite scroll, the pull down to refresh, the engagement-farming, whilst producing nothing of value besides dopamine and the inevitable feeling of being used. It doesn’t matter, just so long as you look at the ads.
This didn’t happen overnight. It was a gradual shift from brave new world to the all-encompassing void we see today. Slowly but surely the internet shifted from a passion project to an economic one, slowly enough that we didn’t stop to mourn its passing.
Perhaps the reason I have nostalgia for the early internet is because it exists in a different world to the one we are in now. To borrow a modern phrase for a moment, the vibes are very much off.
A new mission
The technology we had back then is still here. We still have the means to build simple websites –we apparently call them Static Websites now. Just HMTL, no database, no unnecessary bloat.
There are tools like Hugo for creating static sites, if you have a domain and a host to use it with, but you can also use services like Neocities or Nekoweb if you really want to go nuts, 90s style.
For now I’m happy just having somewhere to write, without messing around with layouts and colours, but I love looking at things people have made by themselves.
In the past twenty years we have gradually and unwittingly surrendered our creativity to an unthinking and unfeeling corporate machine.
A corporate machine which then stole what we had created, only to regurgitate it back to us, somehow worse than the original and with none of the soul.
Some call it AI, but we mostly call it slop.