This is a simple page to remember those anonymous masses who's tinkering on personal pages almost 30 years ago brought us where we are today. I remember exploring the early internet and seeing how diverse and wonderful it could be. Thousands and thousands of totally unique websites from the technical Harry's Homebrew Homepage, to the informative Toasty tech and even the absurd Cabbage Converter to name a tiny few. I was lucky enough to experience the internet in those days, when information was traded freely with unobtrusive ads, no tracking, virtually total anonymity. The anonymous nature allowed people to express themselves totally freely without fear, whilst this could be for negative reasons, on the whole it was an overwhelmingly positive thing. People used this freedom to share art, knowledge, creativitu and passions with strangers they never met.
In my opinion, this was the pinnacle of human expression, the only time in our entire existence where we were truly free. Those days have long since passed. We are now subject to getting a censored view of the world, one determined my algorithms determined by less than a dozen faceless, soul-less companies. Sure the technology has improved and we can do far more online now, but the magic has gone. I remember watching Real Media files and .mov clips downloaded from tiny websites, slow downloads, low resolution pictures, the infamous dial up internet. But it was a different world. You could stumple from site to site using link pages that all websites had, or web rings and before you knew it, it was 4AM and you'd navigated through the most esoteric sites on offer. These days you're lucky if the same 5 or 6 megacorps social media offerings keep you entertained for a few hours at most.
I mourn the loss of user generated and, more importantly, user curated content. We are all slaves to what those in charge want us to see. They saw the internet as a saviour and as a threat. When it became clear they couldn't kill this surge in freedom of expression by simply removing our access (Except a few morally bankrups regimes), they instead decided that we would have to be policed by ever tightening user guidelines on centralised sites. We are simply no longer free online, and I think that's a travesty. There are a countless old web 1.0 sites still online after all these years, some updated regularly, some morphed and mutated into what is expected of modern web pages, but a few survive unupdated, just as they were back in the 90s, fading away into digital oblivion.
Thank you, kind strangers. Thank you for sharing your lives with fellow strangers in the last truly optimistic time. You will be fondly remembered by me, if no-one else.
Your grateful friend, Mikaela.