ORIGINALLY WRITTEN: SEPTEMBER 2023
LAST REVISION: DECEMBER 2023
I’ve tried my damndest to reword that old notepad I wrote back in January, but words evade me.
Even now I still don’t know why I've become fixated on the “old web” the way I have, and still do in a way.
A few months ago, I focused on the contradictory feelings I felt when reminiscing about the past, and feeling that things were better when I was a kid but also thinking extreme bias hurts the ability to move on and see the good in the present and future, but I feel like I also ignored the fact that the internet I found again, both revisiting fan servers such as Sudomemo, Club Penguin Rewritten (RIP), and spending time on Neocities and Spacehey after all this time is a lot more colorful and personalized than what the internet is today. And it’s free. I still believe there’s still good in the surface web, but it’s so rare that it might as well not exist. People are so focused on becoming “famous” and creations becoming “content” for a big audience that the idea of a community coming together to share what they’ve learned, and sharing the things they’re proud of has completely fizzled out thanks to platforms such as youtube, instagram and musica.ly (tiktok)
I don’t want to sound like a downer or the 10 millionth person who complains about the current state of the surface net, but I wouldn’t repeat these points if there wasn’t any truth behind it. It gives me a depressing heavy feeling in my chest that the feeling of thousands upon thousands of people experiencing one world together has been replaced by thousands and thousands of people watching and waiting for the content cow to hurry up and make something, not treating them as just another person experiencing the world, but as a machine whose only purpose is to entertain.
“Nostalgia is weird. It can make you biased to things that might’ve been just a little bit worse back in the day.” while I do still see what I was trying to say here I don’t think I explained myself very well. I’ve only thought about just the internet when thinking of this argument, but this does apply to real life too. I hate when people look at anything from the far past, not just video games and the internet, with rose tinted glasses when in many cases life has improved due to the advancements we’ve made in the past 20 years, but I have recently experienced intense bias to the way kids lived in the late 2000s, and a sort of bitterness towards current trends, even comparing myself from when I was a small kid to other kids of that age, even though I am quite young still, I guess it’s inevitable, human nature of sorts.
I don’t want to just sit there and complain about these things without suggesting a solution, it’s a problem I see way too often when this topic is brought up on the surface net. Though I cannot think of anything practical or without spiraling into a mindset of “the companies will mess this up badly”, but I think elements of the deep web and the indie web should be normalized and come back to the surface, but modernized, refined, and refreshed for new audiences, new types of programming, and new types of computers and phones, but still has the crude charm of the sort of crustiness and how frontend us old timers like (sorry it’s true, we are getting pretty old.)
To end on a more lighthearted note, I enjoyed reading about my experience about old computers. I was surprised to hear about dial-up, especially since I grew up around the time it was being phased out, and Wifi was the norm, but I do remember an old friend who still used it. Even in the late 2000s and early 2010s computers were slow, I like reminiscing about rushing to the computers at the library at school and waiting for the loading screen for the windows xp, and when I moved up a few grades, windows 7 computers to finish, and waiting for the shitty school internet to connect to a random flash game website to play games like super mario 63, SSF2, and miscellaneous stuff on coolmath because as a kid, not being able to control the amount of time you have, plus the computer being slow, feels like the end of the world. I also like remembering the gameboy advanced, gamecube and DSi, the gamecube being my favourite console of all time. I started wondering if it was because I started viewing the console with a nostalgic, fuzzy, and uneducated point of view but after dusting it off and playing the games my brother and I shared, realizing I love the gamecube because the games are charming, fun, and childish. The Wii U and Switch feel this way too, and the fact I can say this so confidently makes me think I was right about not everything having to be attached to the past, and to see the good in the present. If you want to experience the things you had in your childhood again, the internet is like a time-capsule, the line between you and those memories and future memories are so thin and transparent. Sure things may have changed, sure, your feelings are not the same as when you were young, but that just means you changed perspective as you experienced more of the world. you learned new things. I can step back and appreciate the “Old Web”, whatever you want to call it, for shaping me into who I am, now that I have rediscovered it via the Indie web. It warms my heart to see thousands of people love this internet as much as I do, and hope even more people can find it like I have.
