Can you believe Windows 95 is almost 30 years old? It feels like just yesterday when the gang from Friends was pushing the then-burgeoning internet world on wider society in their Windows 95 promo, not to mention when Bill Gates appeared in a DOOM video to show just how far technology has come. Some say it took until the 2000s before “normies” stormed the online space, but no: It was 1995 when things really began to change.
And it really was a whole different world back then.
There was even a time when a site like Geocities existed for everyone else to make their own home page and show the world just who they were. It is always ubiquitous with the old internet and how things once worked. At least, it did until Yahoo! closed in down 8 years ago in 2015 (Yes, it's really been 8 years). Millions of pages were erased overnight.
Even though newer spaces like Neocities were created to fill that gap (yours truly even has his own Neocities page here), it was a sign that the old internet was on the way out. Sure enough, nearly a decade since then all traces of that world have been intentionally wiped away.
And so is the inevitable future of the old internet. Much like the malls and local community centers in our own neighborhoods, it is all destined to be paved over for Progress and be left in the wake of what is to come. Eventually all that will remain will be memories—unless those haven’t been properly archived, of course.
Since nostalgia for the old internet is the only thing really keeping the modern internet afloat (social media imploding as a whole, news sites and comment sections now ghost towns filled with bots, and video hosting services weighing down on the users and chasing away viewers) is memories of the wild west it used to be. When anything could happen.
You can still reclaim a little of that in what few days the internet might have left. It definitely won't be around in this state for much longer. Thankfully there are still those working to help preserve things that were lost. Otherwise we would be left with no examples of the way it once was or how to build off of it to make new things.
Want to make a Neocities page yourself? There are plenty of tutorials out there. It's not that complex or out there, but it will bring you back to the way things once were pretty fast. It's almost eerily accurate to the way it used to be back in the day. Here is a tutorial.
There was a palpable feeling back in the late '90s and early '00s that the internet was this unknown frontier of endless possibilities. It was the Great Unknown! Our entertainment reflected it in perhaps the only real unique usage of 3D CG animation there has ever been, with series like Reboot or Code Lyoko where anything could happen and the world was a mystery waiting to be explored. We are so far away from that world today that it almost, ironically, feels quaint now. The magic is gone and nothing will ever replicate that feeling again.
Where it was once wide open fields sprawling outwards forever and twisting catacombs into deep, hidden chambers, is now a hallway of locked doors and a few limited rooms with tight space and little else inside. It's just not the same as it used to be.
I'm sure back in the day we thought that world would always expand, grow, and show us things we never thought could happen before. But, as always, that isn't how it went. Every year, the internet is swarmed with more bots, hammered with more restrictions, and becomes a little more artificially bloated. Eventually it will be nothing but a small list of preapproved sites you will be able to click on and access with your personal account that can be shut off at any time if those in charge deem it necessary. Far from being the infinite growth paradise that the old cyberpunk stories depicted, it is eventually going to turn into the virtual equivalent of the dead malls so popular on YouTube. You can even see it now with plenty of old, abandoned popular sites that are somehow still online. It's all a giant ghost town.
While that might be an extreme example, it's hard to not see it as it is. Mostly because the old internet feels like the last bit of shared pop culture experience remaining among the general populace. TV is dead, the music industry is over, movies are irrelevant, comics killed themselves, and everything else is little more than a shrunken niche now. Once the internet goes, what shared experience will remain? Where will all of that history go?
And how much longer will the current order hold on before it finally slips and lets it all fall away? I can't even imagine how one will explain what the internet even was in the future.
There is really nothing like it and there won't be again.
Let us now focus instead on where the internet is today. It should not surprise anyone to see that it is a far different place than where it was when Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston were selling it to their millions of fans back then. Not only that, but once was an endless open frontier is slowly on the way out as a valuable ecosystem, being strangled to death faster than any other we've ever dealt with before in all of human history.
The Golden Age of the Internet, is over.
In a mere quarter century, the internet went from an outlandish and impossible wild west to being a ghost town of corporate bots and automatic processes repeating itself into a void. Yes, we've talked about Dead Internet Theory before, but that's only because it's self-evidently real to anyone who has been here since the internet became ubiquitous in the late 90s—kids and teenagers who grew up where people could be found everywhere, subcultures all had their own spaces where you could find and discover new things. Independent works were as discoverable as corporate ones, and everyone was willing to show it off to everyone else. It was one of the few things that didn't collapse when the 20th century hit, but actually grew larger.
This was what made the internet a bright spot at a time in Cultural Ground Zero when everything else was dying. Perhaps this explains why so few folk over the years have seemed to take notice of the West as it has faded. They could instead distract themselves with the internet as it grew. But now that it is also dying, all of that nonsense once overlooked is harder to ignore than ever before.
For those unware of Dead Internet Theory, here is a short description from Wikipedia:
"The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists almost entirely of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. These intelligent bots are assumed to have been made, in part, to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers."
I couldn't tell you why so many are still trying to frame this as conspiracy theory, but like many such conspiracy theories recently, it has turned out very true. Perhaps not in the way it was originally described, but the Dead Internet is a very obvious reality to anyone who has used the internet for any extended period of time. It is dead and it is very much over.
Take a look at how it once was contrasted with how it began: this is the Golden Age of the Internet.
Those days are gone.
There is no conspiracy here. The above video shows exactly what has happened to the internet. You can also tell its real because journos (who are fast being replaced by AI and will be in the coming years) have attacked it as false, even as they screech about AI threatening their employment opportunities out of the other side of their mouths. So much of the internet is artificial, and it is only becoming more so as the years pass and eggheads attempt to patch over what they already irreparably broke in their bid for control. But once you deliberately and deeply fracture the base it will not take too much time for the whole house to cave-in on itself.
It is the same everywhere online. Surely you have noticed this, too. This is an unavoidable reality.
Being a writer, I have had to try and understand some of these algorithms myself and can tell you that it is impossible to do so--because they are completely broken. They are broken because those in charge have spent so much time tweaking them for their own gain that they busted them and have no idea how to repair it again. It's completely borked.
Not only that, but the recent explosion of AI in arts and in chat bots has shown how fast this technology has come along. So much of it is fake, and almost all of it is 100% artificial.
You can see how much of it is fake in this video.
What is incorrect about the original Dead Internet Theory is the idea that anyone actually controls any of this. No, it's very much the opposite. The original push was an attempt to do such a thing, but their attempt was absolutely fumbled until those in control lost the plot not unlike so many post-apocalyptic plots from cyberpunk authors currently salivating over government control. No, it is another human failure that led to problems to everyone else.
As is usually the case. Self-proclaimed experts pining for control always end up eaten by their own monsters.
So what you end up having here is a former wild west as open and free as the real one being taken over by its own iron fisted government to pave the land over. Except in this case, they had no idea what they were doing in the slightest and instead broke it completely. The Dead Internet is a result of a failed takeover of wannabe kings which led to a flood of broken bots and artificial pages and sites that will soon overwhelm everything else.
Essentially, this happened from turning the internet into what it was never meant to be in the first place. It was never meant to be controlled by anyone—it was meant to be a communication gateway. And this result is what happened when Silicon Valley egghead types tried to do just that and crown themselves Lord Emperor of the digital world.
They essentially destroyed their own wonderland in an attempt to make themselves kings. Certainly not a story humanity has not played out before, nor will it be the last, but it definitely is the best example of one we've had in a long time. Sin really does make you stupid.
The internet is dead, and it has no future ahead of it.
But you can still remember the good times and remember what it was all meant for. Once again, humanity's own hubris will be its undoing in something else that could have been far greater than it ended up being in the end.
And who knows exactly what will come up next? Perhaps it will be better than what came before. We might not even screw this one up this time! There is always a chance, as hard as that might seem at times.
Who can tell what we might have to look forward to? No one could have predicted just what the internet was, after all.
Nonetheless, keep looking ahead. Perhaps the internet will hold together enough for the means of communication like this to survive for longer than the destroyed and converged parts of it will. You never really know what the future might hold. Only time will tell on that one.
I know I have a lot I'm still looking forward to sharing with you, so I hope you have the same hope for what is to come. We are what made the internet what is was, not corpos, eggheads, or politicians, and we will continue on despite their continued interference to destroy what has been made.
Let us show them what it means what they forgot. Let us remind them just what it means to be human, to be alive!