Not much to really say this week, real life has been oddly busy. Nonetheless, I set up a small little Neocities page for anyone to look up if they want. I saw a chance to create a webpage like it was back in the day and jumped on it. Who wouldn't?
For those unaware, back in the day places like Geocities existed to allow anyone to make their own sites however they wanted. At least, until Yahoo! closed in down 8 years ago in 2015 (Yes, it's really been 8 years). Millions of pages were erased overnight.
And so is the inevitable future of the old internet. Much like the malls and local community centers in our neighborhoods, it is all destined to be paved over for Progress. Eventually all that will remain will be memories.
Since nostalgia for the old internet is the only thing really keeping the modern internet afloat (social media imploding as a whole, news sites and comment sections now ghost towns filled with bots, and video hosting services weighing down on the users and chasing away viewers) is memories of the wild west it used to be. When anything could happen.
You can still reclaim a little of that in what few days the internet might have left. It definitely won't be around in this state for much longer. Thankfully there are still those working to help preserve things that were lost. Otherwise we would be left with no examples of the way it once was or how to build off of it to make new things.
Want to make a Neocities page yourself? There are plenty of tutorials out there. It's not that complex or out there, but it will bring you back to the way things once were pretty fast. It's almost eerily accurate to the way it used to be back in the day.
Here is a tutorial:
There was a palpable feeling back in the late '90s and early '00s that the internet was this unknown frontier of endless possibilities. It was the Great Unknown! Our entertainment reflected it in perhaps the only real unique usage of 3D CG animation there has ever been, with series like Reboot or Code Lyoko where anything could happen and the world was a mystery waiting to be explored. We are so far away from that world today that it almost, ironically, feels quaint now. The magic is gone and nothing will ever replicate that feeling again.
Where it was once wide open fields sprawling outwards forever and twisting catacombs into deep, hidden chambers, is now a hallway of locked doors and a few limited rooms with tight space and little else inside. It's just not the same as it used to be.
I'm sure back in the day we thought that world would always expand, grow, and show us things we never thought could happen before. But, as always, that isn't how it went. Every year, the internet is swarmed with more bots, hammered with more restrictions, and becomes a little more artificially bloated. Eventually it will be nothing but a small list of preapproved sites you will be able to click on and access with your personal account that can be shut off at any time if those in charge deem it necessary. Far from being the infinite growth paradise that the old cyberpunk stories depicted, it is eventually going to turn into the virtual equivalent of the dead malls so popular on YouTube. You can even see it now with plenty of old, abandoned popular sites that are somehow still online. It's all a giant ghost town.
While that might be an extreme example, it's hard to not see it as it is. Mostly because the old internet feels like the last bit of shared pop culture experience remaining among the general populace. TV is dead, the music industry is over, movies are irrelevant, comics killed themselves, and everything else is little more than a shrunken niche now. Once the internet goes, what shared experience will remain? Where will all of that history go?
And how much longer will the current order hold on before it finally slips and lets it all fall away? I can't even imagine how one will explain what the internet even was in the future. There is really nothing like it and there won't be again.
Nonetheless, it's the weekend! Rest up and have a good one. Something will come next, no matter how long that takes. There's always something to look forward to.
We have a lot to look forward to, so lets make sure there's plenty to build now for the future. It's all going to be worth it in the end.
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