Sarah Davis Baker: The Internet Used to Be a Place

Via a page someone linked in my guestbook on the small web, I stumbled upon Sarah Davis Baker's video essay on YouTube about the early internet, filtered through the lens of the indie game Hypnospace Outlaw. It's a nice introduction to the web she - and I - used to know. My own experience I think started earlier than hers - I don't have an exact date as to when I first went online, but it would've been either in late 1994 or early 95. I remember using Webcrawler on Mosaic on my mother's 386 in her office. I remember my searches returning very little.

For the next few years I mostly dialed local BBSs, using the internet more and more as my time allowed. I did what we all did. Browsed idly, waited for things to load, made my own webpage, because that was the thing to do. I did other things, too, emailed back and forth with other users at my ISP, downloaded NES ROMs using FTP-to-email gateways, posted on roguelike and occult Usenet groups. But the web was the thing. It was always the thing, until it slowly started getting worse.

Davis Baker points to Yahoo's acquisition of GeoCities as a starting point, and I think that's a reasonable thing to consider. For me, though, having first made a webpage at my local ISP, then GeoCities, then another ISP, then... (this went on for a bit), GeoCities' heyday felt like 96 through 98. Things were still (very) new. We were still figuring things out, stealing each other's HTML and images and nascent JavaScript. Davis Baker talks about the Internet Archive and Wayback machine and how they were important in the way they preserved the early web. But I'm a little sad, because I came and went without a trace. A year or two ago I finally found my old GeoCities URL, buried in a friend's GeoCities page that managed to be archived. But the URL, which I think was right (the neighbourhood was what I remember, the number rang a bell) didn't lead to my page. Did GeoCities reassign it after some long period of inactivity? Maybe. But my page wasn't there. Instead, a grainy photo of a woman somewhere in her 30s. A page about her life, not mine. I remember my page being bright green on black, like the look of an old Apple ][. Grandiose. Overwrought. The sort of thing a teenager going through it in the middle of nowhere would (and did) write.

GeoCities was, for me and for others, their first "homestead" online. I made other pages first, but I remember putting a lot of effort into my GeoCities site. We really did used to talk that way, talk about websurfing the way we talk about doomscrolling today. I eventually moved on. For me, the process of creating things is constant and non-negotiable. I made other webpages. For several years, I kept a public online journal. I met up with and fell for people I shouldn't have, never got together with the one I should. Davis Baker talks about the potential of those early days, and I feel like she's right. Identity was always ever whatever you wanted to call it, and it certainly didn't have to be your full legal name. Make an alias (like winter), and tie something to it. Meet other people willing to do the same. It was open and more dangerous than I'd ever admit at the time, but there was a vulnerability there and you could sense it in others as well. We wanted something new, and good. Isn't it always such?

Yahoo bought GeoCities in 1999 and slowly made it worse. A bad TOS, deletion of LGBT and "sexual" content (wow, doesn't the past repeat), all sorts of things that I missed at the time by dint of moving my presence elsewhere. A decade later, they'd kill it off altogether. Somehow, miraculously, Angelfire still survives. Tripod, too. (How?)

"These days," Davis Baker narrates, "I spend hours on my phone, and I find that I usually don't remember any of it." Isn't that a universal truth. Whereas before, the web was a place that you went to, and left, intentionally, now the internet is ever-present. Ever taken out your phone and started scrolling without even thinking? Yeah, me too. I spend too much time anonymously browsing Reddit. Why? It's not good for me, and it's largely forgettable. I know that this is the case. But I think part of it is, this is where people are now. We want community but we also want it easy. Unlock, tap, scroll and scroll. We're like cattle, feeding idly in our pen.

"I feel trapped," Davis Baker continues, "like I'm walking through an endless, barren field." Probably a common feeling for a lot of us. How many of us make things online anymore? Distressingly few.

I'm in Geminispace because it feels similar. It isn't the same, and the exact thing we had will never come back. But we can identify and name the things that were good - individuality, community, discoverability - and work towards solutions that can start to bring them back. The era where the default thing to do is making a webpage, well, that's done. But why can't we still do that? We can (via neocities and others), but a distressing number of social media sites punish outside links. So, use social media that doesn't. That's Bluesky, and Mastodon. Use search engines like Kagi's small web search, that let you find new and interesting things. I admit, that might be easier said than done. I often forget Kagi exists. Google has been the default for a literal quarter century now, and has embedded into my consciousness in ways I don't fully understand. But, just to say, like Davis Baker does, that things can still be good. We can work towards a better experience online, a little bit at a time.