This is what you’re nostalgic for
…And now, almost 20 years later, it is hard to recapture that feeling again. That feeling of the first website. And whenever I try to satiate that feeling I end up not reaching back for the web of 2004, but five, ten, fifteen years before that. I yearn to join a web that I had never known. A web that most people had never known. But in our crowded, privacy-invading, closed modern web, it’s a feeling shared by a lot of people.
I know I’m not alone because every few months somebody comes up with a new project that attempts to replicate some site or platform or service of an earlier web. A Geocities copy here, or a Myspace replica there. A new garish or ornate aesthetic or a service that simplifies the languages of the web. And the people that sign up to join these new projects aren’t just those that were around when it was first created. They’re all kinds of people. They’re experiencing anemoia, and trying to chase it with technology that harkens back to a time when the web felt more experimental and fun. We are, after all, technologists, and our minds reach for technological solutions that try to replicate the experience of building on the early web.
But I would argue that it isn’t technology that is at the root of our anemoia. I believe we aren’t nostalgic for the technology, or the aesthetic, or even the open web ethos. What we’re nostalgic for is a time when outsiders were given a chance to do something fun, off to the side and left alone, because mainstream culture had no idea what the hell to do with this thing that was right in front of it.
I’ve been researching the web for the better half of a decade, and its most exciting stories aren’t when some new technology or technique or programming language was released. The web, before it was the web, was hidden right there in plain sight. Anyone could reach out and do something with it, and go instantly global. So you had people who were chewed up and spit out by mainstream expectations that found refuge on the web. And what they built was something reckless and edgy and interesting…