I’ve been researching the 1990’s web aesthetic for inspiration for my site theme, and I can’t stop thinking about why I want a 1990s theme. The web of that time certainly was formative for me, which I am certain is a piece of it. My greatest fear is that as I age I’m starting to indulge nostalgia in myself: the trappings of a “simpler time.” I don’t think that’s the case, as I continue to create this site I wish to position it as some kind of alternative to “how the web is done”1

In my research I’ve seen many, for lack of a better term, counter-cultural efforts at recreating the feel of the early web. For example Neocities.org stated mission is “to make the web fun again,” providing among other things an in browser HTML editor and “web surfing” on a website gallery.

I also found out about tilde.club from this 2014 fastcompany.com article about it.

The Tilde Club

Bright colors!

At one point the article quotes that sites like tilde.club and the 90s aesthetic stem from a “desire for those more earnest days of the Internet.” That’s a good way to describe how I have been feeling about the internet of my youth. Although I’m still committed to the style, I admit if it’s only about the style, it’s a poor stand-in for what people are really looking for: a sense of wonder, exploration and discovery.2

sadgrl.online banner

Dithering!

I’m shooting from the hip here, but my hunch is that the modern internet is transactional in a way the early internet wasn’t. And our imagination of what the internet can be is limited by that transactionally. There are consumers and creators. Consumers want content. Creators create content. Keyword analysis is a feedback loop that incentives inexpensive3 content in order to funnel attention from search engine to ads. Walled gardens like Facebook, Reddit, YouTube and Instagram are more like hedge mazes designed to trap4 attention (to ads, of course.)

How do I find things on the internet I didn’t know I wanted to find?5

I don’t have a solution. Retro-vibe culture of Neocities.org scratches some kind of itch, but it does so as it’s own kind of walled garden. An article I found via a tilde.club blog by hifukuno suggests the solution is boutique search engines. In an page Surf the web, sadgrl.online outlines some ways to practice the ancient art of surfing the web as a kind of antidote to the modern web. I find the elements of surfing are contained in ethos I’m cultivating at guyinterlinked.com, but mainly jamming links to other sites everywhere.6 Whatever the solution is, I want to be a part of it.

Further Reading

Footnotes

  1. I don’t actually have an idea how to do this. The “modern web” runs on ad revenue, which I have zero interest in pursuing. ↩

  2. I wonder if wonder, exploration and discovery are also a part of youth, and that as you age, you find less wonder in the world. I hope not. ↩

  3. And frustrating. ↩

  4. Social media sites have a clear profit motive to shape the way we spend our time, and have a significant impact on how we we consume “content.” ↩

  5. Searching for this phrase ironically got me results that I know I didn’t want. The one thing I didn't want ↩

  6. The linking at www.guyinterlinked.com is almost exclusively in-post. At some point I will make some non-post pages for more obvious linking. The embarrassing reason I haven’t already is that my current theme displays links to all pages on the home page, behavior I do not want and haven’t spent the time figuring out how to fix. ↩