Surf no more
nostalgia for the time when web were web
1.
Last week I emailed my wife an article from the Onion: “Moscow Expels 6 British Diplomats Who Would Not Shut Up About ‘Doctor Who.” My wife and I have an agreement, you see: she doesn’t bring up the celebrated BBC series around me, and I reciprocate by not directing any noise about X-Men comics toward her. Since I’d implictly declared the rules suspended by mentioning Doctor Who myself, she seized the opportunity to weigh in on the “Daleks or Cybermen?” question.
I didn’t know what either of those things were, so into the search bar went “daleks vs cybermen.”
I was sitting at an office desktop I don’t use often enough to customize. The browser was Edge; the search engine was Bing. I haven’t been able to replicate the results on my home computer,1 but I recall them falling under three categories:
(1) Ten-minute videos by professional YouTube operations with massive followings.
(2) Links to threads on r/DoctorWho (850,000 subscribers).
(3) Sludgy articles from the web’s long-calcified layer of “geek blog” content factories.
Perhaps you know the sites (3) comprises; I believe Comic Book Resources and ScreenRant are the two big ones. After I’d scrolled past the YouTube and Reddit links, just about everything else in the Bing results pointed towards articles from these and other entrenched content mills.
Some of the Doctor Who/Daleks/Cybermen links I scrolled past been published recently; others were from the 2010s. Unless my perception and memory fail me (and I regret not taking a screencap in the moment), I found a fairly blatant instance of an article recycled four or five years after the fact. And why not? These sites have to pump out geek media commentary and infotainment at a truly nauseating pace if they want to stay alive, and there is evidently a finite number of concepts for pre-chewed 600-word nuggets about Doctor Who available to a platoon of alienated freelancers fueled by ADHD meds and desperation to Make It As A Writer. If that means publishing something like “Who would win: Daleks or Cybermen?” in 2019, followed by “Who would win: Cybermen or Daleks?” in 2021, so be it. As long as it shows up in the Google & Bing & DuckDuckGo search results. As long as it gets clicked.
Where most of these sites are concerned, you could replace the white-knuckled freelancers turning out clickbait and listicles with ChatGPT, and there would be very, very little value lost. At this point, the mindless, emotionless robot is probably as genuinely happy and intellectually interested in writing about Doctor Who’s Ten Most Dangerous Foes or The Fifteen Most Powerful Mutants in the Marvel Universe as the human author who’s done the math and reckons they’re turning in articles at a rate that amounts to a wage of $18.50 an hour.
Actually, I’d be shocked if the largest mills haven’t already replaced most of the writers in their stables with AI. Nobody clicks and lingers on ScreenRant if what they’re seeking is an original thought, clever insight, a bold perspective, or the stamp of an author’s personality.
I’d ask why anyone still visits ScreenRant, but there’s really no mystery, is there? It’s developed and maintained not to be loved by human readers, but to be appreciated by search engines—and it’s the search engine that decides what the human user engages with when he or she goes looking for information about Daleks, Cyberman, or anything else in the world.
Twenty-five years ago, I could have punched “doctor who” or maybe even “daleks vs cybermen” into a search engine and expected many or most of the results to lead to sites like one capped above: janky fan pages slapped together by amateur enthusiasts who wanted nothing but to share their love of Doctor Who with anyone who happened to come passing though their little plots in cyberspace.
In this relatively early iteration, the architecture of the internet resembled a zine library. Most of the content worth anyone’s time to engage with was rough, colloquial, and ingenuous, published on amateurs and hobbyists’ personal websites, and typically updated at a rate of “whenever I feel like it.” Because the search engine was still something of a work in progress with hit-or-miss results, and because cyberspace was a smaller, slower, and more personable place, the sidebar or separate page dedicated to outgoing links was de riguer: thanks for visiting, here are some other sites focused on the interests I’ve documented here, and these are some of my friends’ sites, and here’s some other stuff I think is neat…
For a time into the aughts, there remained a fairly comfortable balance between the original and the emergent models of the internet—between slow and fast, between discovery through surf and discovery through search, and between the consolidated center and the constellated periphery. By the end of the decade, the Web 2.0 schema prevailed and the old internet was no more.
While the monolithic information stores—namely Wikipedia, the Wikia network (which would become Fandom), Wikihow, etc.—had their role in shrinking and centralizing cyberspace, blame for the spoilage of the World Wide Web’s ecosystem must be laid at the feet of both the big social platforms and the professional blog sites and content mills. As we’ve seen, the creep of professionalism into online culture began altering the web’s disposition some years years before Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, etc. cleared the neighborhood. But ultimately it was the hegemonic platforms that were responsible for supercharging the attention economy and setting the terms on which professional and amateur content creators alike were compelled to operate, both on and off the socmed fiefs.
It’s really no wonder why we’ve come to spend most of our time on and taking most of our content from platforms and apps. The World Wide Web has gone to seed.
The old idea of having a personal site—i.e., hi I’m Katie and this is my webpage with sections about Baby-Sitters Club nostalgia, the movie Hocus Pocus, and the band Eve 6; if you’re arriving from one of the webrings I’m on, or from one of my friends’ link pages, welcome, and please sign my guestbook before you go!—no longer even occurs to anyone in the age of the platform and the profile. There’s just no point.
Owing to the way we typically use the World Wide Web now—with a goal firmly in mind and little interest in browsing or dallying, like heterosexual men visiting a clothing store—nobody would ever see Katie’s site. Nobody who didn’t already know about Katie and her Baby-Sitters Club fan page and could specify it in their search would ever find it via Google or Bing; not unless they scrolled and clicked past scores or hundreds of links to Wikipedia, Netflix, Reddit, Scholastic, Instagram, IMDb, Amazon, Facebook, Barnes & Noble, Fandom, Target (I’m just rolling the mouse wheel and listing off “babysitters club” search results here), Audible, eBay, Salon, the New Yorker, etc., etc.
Knowing this, why would Katie bother? Even during the halcyon days of dial-up and GeoCities, nobody would have fussed over HTML tags and garish wallpapers if they didn’t believe their little homepage would definitely be seen be somebody. Probably not a mass audience—but by somebody.
Today, if we want to submit our ideas, opinions, creative work, etc. to cyberspace with the expectation (or reasonable hope) that they will be counted, and that they will count, we’d be more sensible to do so through our though our big-platform profiles than to attempt the same with a personal website. Sure, there are exceptions—but in usually being tied to a personality with tens or hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, the exceptions prove the rule.
So much for the just-for-fun personal websites and fan pages, then. But with all of these gone, there just isn’t much of a World Wide Web worth surfing anymore.
For that matter, it’s no longer really possible to surf it in the old sense of the term: to visit a website and follow its links section to another site at another domain, and then to follow that site’s links section to another site at another domain, and then to follow that site’s link section to another site at another domain, and so on and on until you finally see a reason to click the Back button or log off. That went out with personal sites, too. No blog factory, listicle mill, or other variety of content site (or network) dependent on ad revenue has any motive to point viewers toward an off-ramp. A search engine is therefore necessary to get anywhere and find anything on the web—and given the stuff that usually populates the results, it’s probably a better idea to cut out the middleman and use a reliable and specialized app instead.
And so more and more of us have packed up our digital surfboards and opted into the forever scroll instead. The current model of the internet is something like a small number of large, heavily populated islands surrounded by an immense bog.
2.
Not long ago, I received a thoughtful message from somebody who read my pile of essays about Japanese RPGs circa 2013 and had recently revisited them. Even if I’ve pretty much moved on from jabbering longform video game criticism (for better or worse), it’s immensely gratifying to know that my work has brought joy, comfort, or a sense of affinity to someone out there.
However—I was struck by how he described the site hosting my stuff:
It was surreal, going back to what's clearly a graveyard of an unsuccessful content site, run by what was apparently your girlfriend at the time (girlfriend still?), only to see links to a forum that no longer exists, even in archive form, and references to "upcoming titles" over ten years old, many of these apparently written when the PS2 was still a relevant gaming console...
I have to dispute this because I thought it was successful. The goal was to have fun, and we did have fun. (For a while, anyway.)
At first it was a personal site—one of those things people used to make before the social media profile replaced the webpage. My friend the webmistress (not my girlfriend; I’ve never met her IRL) used it to post game reviews and essays and such. Just for fun.
If I’m remembering correctly—it was almost twenty years ago, and I smoked a lot of weed in those days—my involvement began after a group activity she thought of called NES Week. Her thinking probably went: hey, I’ve got a website, and I’ve got a bunch of internet friends who like old video games. Why don’t we all write stuff about the Nintendo Entertainment System—memories, reviews, joke articles, whatever—and I’ll post them on my site, and we’ll all see what everyone else wrote? Just for fun.
Unless my memory fails me, that was when I wrote and handed over an essay about the first iteration of a certain Japanese video game series—for fun. Some time after that I figured, heck, why not play the second one and write about that one, too? And she figured, heck, what’s the harm in hosting another one?
And so on and on another thirteen (or more) times. Just for fun.2
Later on, my friend followed NES Week with SNES Week with Genesis Week. Over the next few years, she ran several console-specific crowdsourced Top X lists, where anyone who was paying attention to the site could submit an index of personal favorites with accompanying reviews or commentary blurbs, after which a points system determined the order of the aggregate when it was all published. Fairly early on, I had the idea of doing a few friend-sourced Favorite/Least Favorite Games of All Time listicles—again, for fun—and I’m pretty sure I was inspired by the kind of stuff Progressive Boink was doing a couple years earlier.
P-Boi (as it was sometimes called) was another early-aughts “content site” I spent a lot of time on back in the day. I’m pretty sure its landmark contribution to culture was the “The 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings” article of 2007, but I also fondly remember its “25 Great Calvin and Hobbes Strips” from 2004 and “25 Best Futurama Moments” from…2005? 2006? The page doesn’t seem to exist anymore.
I feel a little silly for most clearly remembering the listicles off the top of my head—but this was like twenty years ago, and over a decade before the listicle had been ridden to death by Cracked and Buzzfeed. When Progressive Boink did a listicle, sourcing entries from its entire masthead—who were, at this early date, apparently just people who wanted to write and have fun writing—you could always tell it was coming from the heart, and that it gave joy to everyone involved. Can you blame us for emulating them?
In 2013, one of Progressive Boink’s founders meditated on the site’s ten-year anniversary:
I want to stop for a moment and outline exactly where I was in life in September of 2003. I was 20 years old, and the idea of going to college was beginning to permanently slip away. I didn't care that I had zero plans for the future, and didn't really even mind much that my job at RadioShack produced $1000 a month if I was lucky. I lived on my own and had cheap stupid fun, and that was good enough for me.
That cheap stupid fun included killing lots of time on the Internet. I found Whatever-Dude.com, where Brandon3 wrote about wrestling and video games and whatever else he felt like, and then I kept reading and reading until I'd read every article of his that I could find. Nobody else on the Internet was writing like this dude. I kind of wanted to write online somewhere, and upon finding B, I really wanted to. We talked for a while, made millions of dumb jokes about old NBA players, and then decided we would launch Progressive Boink. (That name, which Nick came up with, is a nod to Calvin & Hobbes, the comic strip that remains pretty much my favorite thing in the world.)
I did want to write online for a living -- and God, in the worst possible way -- but in 2003, almost nobody working independently really knew how to do that. Man, I just wanted to write. The Internet was young, and new, and afforded us the opportunity to do whatever they wanted and make it look however we wanted. Even at the time, I remember feeling really lucky to have been there, then. There was no excuse not to fly off the handle and do all kinds of fun, silly, outrageous, ridiculous bullshit.4
That was the spirit of the turn-of-the-century internet, and general model of what a lot of what my online friends and I were getting up to: just putting stuff out there for the sake of doing it, just to have fun. For as long as I was writing video game essays for my friend’s website, there was never any talk about audience metrics, update schedules, leasing ad space, or everything else a professional content mill has to concern itself with.
Progressive Boink was definitely a successful site. It had a talented and driven masthead whose members were all interested in going pro from the start, and they strove to make that happen. At some point (2012?), the site became part of the Vox Media network—but by then the new attention economy was firing on all cylinders. It was getting to be an increasingly a bad time to be a blogger, and a content site without a definite brand and a laser-focused idea of what it wanted to do and the audience it wanted to appeal to (“cool people, people who get us, I guess” no longer cut it) would have already had one foot edging precariously near the side of its grave by 2013.
Progressive Boink’s last updates were in 2016. I don’t see any indication of an editorial farewell; it appears to have died with a whimper. At some point Join Bois (quoted at length above) became a sports journalist with 270K followers on Twitter; he apparently stopped submitting Progressive Boink posts in 2014.
No endeavor can remain successful—or fun—forever. At some point, the shutters have to be drawn down over the windows. And for what it’s worth, my friend might not be updating her site much anymore, but has a really active Discord channel.
And I think now, perhaps as before, the strangest and most wonderful stuff of the web is probably off the beaten path, probably hard to find through a serendipitous Google search, probably places that people wander into on the recommendation of a friend or fellow traveler. What’s changed is that now there’s exponentially more bullshit, hype, and sludge for it to hide under.
3.
Am I suffering from nostalgia? Obviously. I wouldn’t be harping on decades-old defunct sites committed to stale pop culture if I didn’t have a distorted view of the past. Nevertheless, I do feel something important went missing when the old, clunky, more human-scaled internet evolved out of itself. Early digital culture’s more rustic ways of making, engaging with, and judging content (or stuff, as I believe it used to be called) is our collective loss.
I’m kind of tempted to construct some turgid Foucauldian metaphor about Big Tech’s disciplinary mechanisms and their coextension with the architecture of cyberspace at every level of use—but it’s enough to say that there are vanishingly few active online spaces where the motivators that crept into web culture during the aughts, and which were intensified during the 2010s, do not operate. The fundamental difference between the cultures of the early and of the modern internet is the absence of profit motives, careerism, and social validation feedback loops in the former, and how they condition nearly everything that happens in the latter.
It’s doubtful that the person who made that slapdash, Angelfire-hosted Doctor Who fan site capped up above was ever bedeviled by such questions as: What am I even doing if only 50 people visited my homepage in the last month? What am I getting wrong? Why are my metrics so poor? Other people get money and clout for making cool websites; what have they got that I don’t? Why is my website so bad and why am I such a fuck-up? Very few people thought like this during the early years of the internet; the digital environment simply didn’t prompt them to. Before its architecture was remade into a circular labyrinth of conditioned reinforcers, emotional manipulators, and dangled incentives, cyberspace was in general more playful, more relaxed, and more egalitarian; it was also less cynical, less mercenary, and less alienating than it is now.
I am suddenly reminded of the last lines of Invisible Cities:
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
This is just to say, as an old and disillusioned fan of (and participant in) digital culture, that I still cherish those times I come across creative and eccentric people in cyberspace who are unmoved by upvotes, aren’t looking for money or clout, and who just want to share their ideas & interests & energy with the world—purely for fun. It makes me feel young again, somehow.5
Another reminder that the very geography of cyberspace now depends on one’s vantage point.
Those times I started thinking I should take it more seriously (or tried to take it more seriously) were when it got less fun.
Brandon, or “B,” was Whatever Dude’s breakout star (to the extent that a little just-for-fun bloggy site could birth stars circa 2001). When he skipped over to Progressive Boink, I followed him. It kills me that his gut-busting writeup of the 1994 Street Fighter movie seems to have altogether vanished from cyberspace, though I’m glad to see that an Illusion of Gaia fan on Reddit preserved his “Illusion of Gaia and My Cousin David” piece, which was a tremendous inspiration to me around 2002–03.
It has been sobering searching the Internet Archive for captures of websites I remember visiting many years ago. More than I imagined have disappeared without a trace.
My vote for Progressive Boink’s all-time best bit of fun, silly, outrageous, ridiculous bullshit goes to its double parody of MySpace and Legend of Zelda: HySpace.
(1) Inveterate Lovecraft fan that I am, I’d be remiss not to mention of the possibility that his (somewhat snotty) views about amateurdom influenced me more than I realized when I first encountered them in Arkham House’s Miscellaneous Writings as a somewhat puzzled teenager who thought he was getting more stories about monsters. I’d link to the essays/articles I have in mind, but they don’t seem to live on cyberspace.
(2) I have been unbelievably busy this last month, and I’m not sure what the outlook is for this upcoming month. I’ll try my darnedest to carve out some time, and hopefully I’ll come up with something less distracted than this outing was.
"I do feel something important went missing when the old, clunky, more human-scaled internet evolved out of itself."
Specifying exactly what this is would be extremely difficult. The early Internet was uniquely special because of a confluence of factors that came together in a perfect storm that burned brightly and burned out quickly. I'm not sure there's even a single word or term for what you're thinking of.
But if I had to take a stab at it: The Unexpected. The joy of spontaneous discovery. The sense of adventure that comes from exploring a new world, not really knowing where you would go, and what you would find. That is exactly how it felt surfing the old Internet. I hearken back to the very last Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, as the two main characters step out into a world covered by fresh snow, in awe that everything is all brand new. "It's like having a big white sheet of paper to draw on!"
The modern Internet is certainly more efficient in every measurable way. But there is very little spontaneous or unexpected taking place.
I can still remember some of the old gems I found. the Unofficial Squaresoft Homepage comes to mind. I still have a text file of the Completely Bogus FF3 FAQ, which was a fake guide to the game made by a bunch of different authors, describing all these bizarre extra worlds you could explore, and all these secret characters and bosses and dungeons you could find.
Somehow, stumbling on these things through exploration only made them more precious.
I miss the old internet, but I don't pine for it. Better to just remember it fondly. Its death was inevitable, so there's no point wishing it would come back. It died for the same reason we lost the Garden of Eden and the Golden Age of Greek mythology: It was too perfect, too pure, too delicate an equilibrium to survive extended contact with mankind. As you put it: "The fundamental difference between the cultures of the early and of the modern internet is the absence of profit motives, careerism, and social validation feedback loops in the former, and how they condition nearly everything that happens in the latter."
Platforms like Neocities exist and are very active. I've been hosting my writing on there for a year and a half and in that time have talked to lots of people (via email) and made lots of friends. Discoverability is bad and it takes quite a bit of effort to find interesting websites, but that's of course exactly what you're praising.
I don't want to sound like a jerk, but I suspect the main issue is that you simply don't have the time to find interesting internet stuff anymore -- which is of course is understandable, as there are probably more worthwhile things you could be doing. SEO and concentration towards large platforms certainly are part of the problem, but there are search engines like marginalia.nu specifically designed for finding smaller websites. The actual effort it takes to start a website is no different from before, and there are plenty of communities (often found in discord servers rather than forums or irc channels) for finding like minded people. The small internet continues to exist, it just takes time to explore -- and since you're no longer a teenager or 20-something, you probably don't have as much time to explore it as when you were younger.