I Wish I Didn't Miss the '90s-00s Internet

about me

I am 18, born in 2006. This is generally a good thing as I am in the prime of life currently. I am not one of those people who think they were “born in the wrong decade”, I think I was born at the perfect time to take advantage of superlinearly growing technological advancements.

the internet today

I generally greatly dislike social media, although I am an avid user of it. When social media caught on, the people running these companies were tasked to make it profitable. In doing this, social media got completely ruined.

Our data got commodified[1], our attention got commodified, and a substantive part of who we say we are got commodified. This, in general, has led to a degradation in the quality of the internet.

They basically made social media like a drug, as addictive as possible. They do this by promoting FOMO and comparison in Instagram’s case. Instagram is a game, it is extremely performative. People carefully curate each part of their insta to give certain impressions.

What’s the ratio of followers to following you have? Are your story highlights organized and “aesthetic”? What reels are you liking?

There are a lot of “rules” in this game, which are enforced by social “ins” and mutual respect.

When it comes to shortform content, hundreds of people compete for slivers of our attention. We are not agents in this, they are just presented to us. Completely depersonalized. They are forgotten within seconds. Ask someone watching tiktok to describe the previous tiktoks they just watched, they would be hard pressed to tell you more than a few minutes in the past. Something about tiktok is unusually addictive. all the while providing absolutely no value.

It has become so shallow, you can tell almost nothing about who someone actually is through Instagram or tiktok. You can only tell how they want to portray themselves to the general population and, by how they organize their profile, if they are eligible to be a part of your social circle.

the appeal of simplicity

I wish I was around when people had blogs or even myspace. This era was deeply personal and creative. Most writing on the internet was individual, not written in search of “SEO” or profit but driven by the need and want of people to share knowledge–pure curiosity.

I want the thrill of finding new websites searching through web rings; when the web was truly the wild west and not another arm of control by mega corporations.

This is also reflective in the quality of content. There was little incentive to lie, to manipulate truth, and each blog entry or piece of information was tied to identity. (except in the cases of anonymity).

Even the content written by normal people for normal people has been commodified by sites like reddit and quora. What happened to an old fashioned forums or even usenet groups? (granted, especially for cars and hacking, there still exists plenty of forums)

Also, websites just simply looked cooler. Occasionally I scroll on the geocities archive and wonder, how did we get here? What happened to the patterned backgrounds, the bright maximalist jpegs and gifs? This is sort of contradictory to my website, as it’s almost annoyingly minimalist, but this more has to do with social norms and simplicity. Having a personal blog is already out of the ordinary, but the simple design and clear technical direction/theme gives me an excuse. I also am not that personal on here, because only a few of my friends frequent my blogs, and I want the site to be as simple and to the point as possible if a random person wants to know who I am.

a niche resurgence

There is neocites, and a small community of people who share this philosophy about the web (and that are relatively young), but I have not met anyone my age, in the real world, that would choose to do something like this.

The majority of people (my age) today would think sites like those (and, by extension, their creators) are weird.

[1] you can substitute “commodified” with “bought and sold”