Early Internet

Posted on May 21, 2025

Last year I decided to make this silly little webpage on Neocities. I found images that evoked the style of the 90s, and created a nod to the internet I grew up with. As I spend more and more time in whatever we want to call this modern corporate internet slophole, this site becomes more attractive. I have a modern website (iskotaa.com) that serves as my main point of contact with the world (more colourful than most!), but I find myself preferring the websites people create here.

It's so much more interesting to see a website with fun colours and images than one that looks like millions of other marketing pages. My very first website was a Marvin the Martian fan page built with Dreamweaver. I spent hours scouring the internet for images of Marvin the Martian, dutifully collecting them on floppy disks. I lovingly created pages and pages of Marvin images and facts. I hoped my page counter would crack 100 views *total*. Now, if people don't get 100 views in an hour they see themselves as failures.

The 2000s

The internet was a silly place and a place to be silly. We had songs about Badgers, Ebaum's World, unicorn organ donors, whatever this is, ARROW'd, and so much more. Most of it is on YouTube now, removed from its original website. Nearly everything is on the same 5 webapps.

Not even that long ago, though, Chatrooms and forums were every weird shape and colour imaginable. Why? Normal people were at the heart of making them, and we all used to have different tastes. A favourite hangout of mine was The Palace, where you could hop between people's fan palaces, chat, and play games. You didn't have direct access to any of your friends. Instead you messaged them if and only if they were online and decided to go to the same chatroom as you.

WHY ARE WE BRANDING AND BLANDING OURSELVES?

The bland regression to the same style and layout is a lot of what I rebel against. The internet used to be fun, and not endlessly attention-seeking. You would visit a few websites and then, in modern parlance, touch grass.

The goal of the internet wasn't just profit, and we used to mock people who 'sold out'. Individuals are walking marketing billboards now (oh look, influencers descend), and...why? Just why?! Why are we branding people now. Creating a pristine online presence is exhausting, and one I've thankfully given up.

My favourite term to describe this is Corporate Blanding, and people seem hell-bent to apply it to their lives. We need to start embrace being messy, especially as AI drives us even further into the corner of boring, bland slop. Fuck "content", or whatever that is. Can't we just call it art?

So, resist. Write shitty blog posts with Grammarly turned off. Never open ChatGPT again. Leave Midjourney to rot. Let the data centres these fascist billionaires construct return to nature and become bird sanctuaries. We can do it if we care even a little bit about what we want the future to look like.

Yes, I'm mad that this is where we ended up. We allowed our lives to be taken over by corporations. We can try to make a better world and one we want to live in though, it just takes that first step.

Why not get started and make a Neocities site?