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Welcome welcome! Not expecting anybody to actually read this, but it's so nice to return to the MySpace/Livejournal days of low-stakes personal blogging on the social internet. So much social media is so mean spirited nowadays, y'know? A small independent service like this feels perfect to just kind of vibe like we used to. A lovely return to Web 1.0. Remember Web 1.0? We didn't call it that then, kinda like how they didn't call World War I by that name when it was happening. In both cases, it's because nobody really saw the massive Nazi problem coming.
When I was little, young enough to still be in the second place, my parents gave me a great, big, clunky, charcoal-black office computer. It was old even for the time. It was awesome.
That computer is where I read, played, talked to my friends, made new ones. I would try to make my own point-and-click adventure games by using hyperlinks in Microsoft Powerpoint. I would try to write my own books in Word, and Clippy would help. I played on Club Penguin, Nitrome, Miniclip, NotDoppler… I downloaded music on Limewire, and sometimes it was even the music I wanted! One time I tried to download The Hairbrush Song from VeggieTales and I got an .mp3 that was just… some guy, singing the lyrics to the song, without any instruments, on a clearly very low quality microphone. I’m sure everyone from that time has a few dozen stories about randomly stumbling upon oddities like that. I went to web forums and talked about books I liked, cartoons I was watching, toys I would play with. My childhood lived on that computer. Every website was a different building on a neighborhood that could stretch on forever. Anything could happen, and everything did.
I’m looking back on this with rose-tinted glasses, I think. And I’m pretty sure my own memory is playing tricks on me to make this whole thing seem like a more compelling story. But still, even so... neighborhood's kind of gone downhill lately, hasn't it? Granted, it’s not like it was an entirely safe place when I was a kid. Everyone knew you could stumble into a virus or a scam or a video of someone getting beheaded if you weren’t careful. But still, it was better than this, right? It had to have been better than this! I know how it sounds. It sounds like I’m “That Guy,” just complaining about how everything used to be better back in the golden days and kids these days just don’t get it. “Old man yells at cloud” and all that. But, you know… look at this place. The whole web is being run by like three companies, and that endless list of websites to visit and explore is now a short list of social media platforms that don’t care about anything except profiting off our time and attention. Your entertainment, your news, your community, your activism, your career, your gossip, your hoaxes, they’re all in the same place and you can’t separate them from each other. Sometimes you can’t even tell them apart. There were always fake stories and elaborate lies on here, but they didn’t use to cause mass death in a global pandemic or an attempted fascist coup on the United States Capitol. Flash is dead. HTML is dead. The personal website is dead. Blogs are dead. There is only Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, SnapChat, Instagram. You are here to receive advertisements. You are here to consume products. You are here to engage in the discourse. Like, comment, subscribe, debate, scream, share, dox, buy, scroll, repeat. Stay for as long as you are profitable.
I remember when there were two hard-and-fast rules to being online. Rule number one: don’t share personal information. Don’t use your real name, don’t show your face, definitely don’t tell people where you live. This stuff is public, you know. You don’t want anyone coming to your house. Rule number two: if you go to a website that’s covered in a million ads and shows a popup every five seconds, run, because your computer probably already has a virus. Nobody who makes a website like that has your best interests in mind. Nowadays? Now everyone’s using their real name. Everyone shows their faces. This isn’t your little hangout spot in one tiny corner of the web anymore, this is a public space. You’re on display. Your fifteen minutes of fame aren’t just guaranteed, they’re coming for you. And websites with the shady ads, the popups, the scam links? Those are just… websites. They gotta make a profit somehow. It’s all about the ads, all about the algorithm, all about feeding the machine. We haven’t lived in that weird developing neighborhood for years. This is a corporate city now. Maybe it was always going to be.
Craving attention online is weird, right? Notifications feel good. It’s a dopamine hit. Ding, ding, ding, somebody saw something you said and they said something back. Someone’s paying you attention, maybe even somebody you don’t know. You’re worth something. You did something that made an impact. And at the same time, I see people online who get too much attention, and frankly, it sounds horrifying. It’s a new era of media where hundreds, thousands, maybe millions get to be treated like celebrities without any of the money, resources, or teams of people handling their public image. Living in public, all on your own. It’s not even a fear I can really feel justified having, because I don’t honestly believe I’m capable of producing anything that reaches a wide enough audience for me to start worrying about it. But it’s still a fear that gets in my head regardless.
I miss the internet from my childhood. I’m biased, I’m definitely obsessed with nostalgia to begin with, but I really do think that we used to have something here that’s been lost. I grew up right on the line between early internet and modern internet, where social medias were first going up, where YouTube was revolutionary and kind of obscure. I desperately hope that maybe, underneath all the ads and the algorithms and the shady mega-corporations, the violence and the hoaxes and everything else I’m terrified of, just maybe, the place I remember is still there. Maybe I can still live in it.
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