Homesick.

My family used to own a Gateway desktop PC. If you’re unaware, that’s the company with the logo that looks like you shrink-wrapped a cube with a cow. It ran Windows XP, an operating system with UI that reflected the hardware it ran on: clicky, glossy faux-metal. I used to come home on the school bus and make a beeline straight to my family’s “office room” to press the power button on that thing so I could go back to playing Freddi Fish, parents willing. When that got boring, there was solitaire, Space Cadet Pinball, JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain. Today, it doesn’t seem like much, but back when we didn’t have what we do now, it was a world of limitless possibilities.

That all changed when I was exposed to the internet and subsequently Youtube. The first video I watched? A point-of-view perspective of a man pissing into a toilet.

Funny wiener videos aside, the fact of the matter is that the experience reflects the vibe of the internet at the time: lawless, unadulterated chaos. On one hand, that meant that no matter the person, hopping on the internet meant you were subject to a grab bag of things ranging from My Little Pony fan sites on Geocities to what would otherwise be brazenly illegal activity. On the other hand, the internet was constantly folding on itself and evolving, speckled with different perspectives and modes of expression. This diversity captured me, and I accepted this technological era as a major part of my life and personality, for better or for worse.

Then I joined iFunny. At the time, it just felt like another app. Just like I’d play Angry Birds or Plants v. Zombies on my iPod, I’d get entertainment from this silly little stream of content. After a while, that didn’t feel like enough, so I joined Instagram. After all, it’s just some fun things to look at, sugar to help the medicine of the day go down. Eventually, though, that stopped satisfying me as well, so I turned to Twitter. As time progressed, things started to change. Windows XP turned into 7, then into 10. The style of the internet started to reflect that of the new OS, simple visually but complex conceptually, stepping towards what corporate entities would consider profitable. Soon enough, this would become the norm. The days of surprise and intrigue on the internet were gone, and my wonder for it had been lost.

Then, for the first time in a long time, I stumbled across the song “Fallen Down” by Toby Fox.

It’s a relatively common song. Having watched plenty of video game essays leading up to this point, it was hard not to hear someone force it into their storyboard at every opportunity they had. Still, this time felt special. The last time I played Undertale was back when it came out, and the last time I’d thought about its music was when I still had the ability to visit my childhood home. The place where I played Humongous Entertainment games on my family’s Gateway PC.

I don’t want to talk about Undertale and the nostalgia it brings with it. That’s what we in the industry would call a narrative analysis, and to me it seems as if we have far surpassed the need for another narrative analysis regarding that masterpiece of a game. Instead, I want to talk about something it represents today that it might not have when it first came out. Something that critiques today’s cultural technology head-on, and that I hope will change the way we think about the internet for the foreseeable future if it’s used correctly. Let's talk about contemporary nostalgia.

There is an entry on the Aesthetics Wiki describing Old Web, aka. Webcore. It says the aesthetic utilizes “traditional web design elements combined with aspects of poetry and self-expression,” to “express nostalgia for Internet culture of the mid-1990s to late 2000s.” The images shown as examples feature a harsh, faded vision of operating systems and the internet of the time. It feels like looking at Windows XP through a beaten-up monitor found in an old abandoned elementary school's computer lab. In short, webcore effectively embodies the echoes of the old web, whatever pieces remain of it today.

A large portion of the internet community of today has been drawn to this kind of aesthetic and things like it. That’s not particularly surprising - there’s an untapped creativity that can be found in Webcore, similar to that of Vaporwave except maybe just a bit more somber, like a gothic church for the desktop computer. At first glance you’d think it had popped up out of nowhere, but phenomena like Undertale and CoolMathGames are evidence of its steady rise to prominence.

A major distinguishing factor between the early net and modern internet is the amout of personality that’s expressed by the individuality of their respective components. Individuality was rampant early on, but it was phased out over time - at a point, it simply wasn’t profitable to build websites and tools that worked best for any particular person. Instead, a generalized definition of “satisfying” was discovered to use on the world's population and applied to all major platforms made for human consumption. This isn’t a bad thing on its own. In fact, many things would simply not function properly without a broad outlook on how the average human mind tends to interact with the world around it. This does become a problem when it strongly discourages the use and discovery of netspace to the point of nearly blotting those spaces out of existence.

An essay by Parimal Satyal titled Rediscovering the Small Web is a romp into the days of the old web and how it compares to modern day. It describes the problem with the visual and conceptual elements of the modern internet much more competently than I ever could, especially since its author is a UX designer. I highly recommend giving it a read if you’re interested in a more detailed history behind the design elements that paved the road to the Webcore aesthetic. Somewhere in the middle of reading this article, you’ll run into a definition of netspace as being “akin to a virtual manifestation of physical space,” which is expressed in things like Netscape’s neighborhoods or, as a more modern example, Reddit’s subreddits. Essentially, webspace is something to navigate and explore, constantly expanding and changing like some infinitely generated open-world sandbox game.

As of recent years, webspace has begun to feel smaller despite this supposed endlessness. I would argue that this is certainly not the case. Instead, we as explorers of webspace have had glass walls built around us.

You may have heard about the "algorithm" being used by various modern websites. At best it keeps users addicted to platforms which promote toxic behavior. At worst it separates them into factions, eventually resulting in actual civil war. As long as the victims are addicted, its purpose is satisfied. Addiction to a platform means more traffic on that platform, and with advertisements running on that platform, more traffic means more money. It’s one of the most infamous, broadly damaging computer viruses out there, and yet nothing has been done about it.

There’s a crucial line from the Old Web wiki page that I left out before: “Old Web’s philosophical heart yearns for the days of uninhibited individualism of the old web, before the internet became streamlined and social media monopolized how people communicated.” It’s the antithesis to the ideas that algorithms thrive on. While Webcore depicts familiarity as personalized and comfortable environments, they insist that familiarity is actually one universal style that will “work for everyone.” In simple terms, if the era of the internet romanticized in Webcore were home, the current era feels like Times Square.

This distinction is important because it reflects our experiences of technology from the past 25 years. I’ve been asking my friends and family about what they remember from the early era of internet technology and expected things like Toontown, the Nintendo DS, and Kongregate to pop up in conversation - a short list of familiar names (to me) synonymous with late-90s internet culture. Instead, what I got were names which were so niche and that left me so bewildered that I spent hours trying to find what the hell the other person was talking about. And they were enthusiastic about it. They weren’t just rattling off some product they remembered, they were using their memory of that product as a vessel through which their past was told. Some even went and found the games they remembered playing from back then. However, some artifacts of the era had been lost to time, whether it be through some corporate drama or by lack of being used for an extended period of time. It's this subsection of internet media, the mom and pop of the internet, that I believe is worth resurrecting.

A world completely free of algorithms is highly unlikely. Too many big platforms have too much money and it’s not like the entirety of the social media population will just decide that social media platforms are overrated one day and turn their phones off. However, this says nothing about our ability to create our own netspace within the walls of the glass city built around us, expanding until that wall shatters.

Satyal’s essay ends off with a few resources to get started with creating your own webpages on remotely-hosted servers for free. It sounds difficult, but if you want to show your works and passions on your own personalized home page, I promise you it’s worth getting the hang of. For your own convenience, I’ll link those resources right here. The first is Neocities, which is just how it sounds: a modern version of Geocities, which allows you to create a personal website and have it hosted for free without any outside intervention. In fact, the place you're reading this essay on is hosted by Neocities! Give it a go and maybe even throw the developers some support. The links that follow are tutorials on HTML and CSS, the languages used to design those websites. If you’re interested in establishing your own place in this space, I highly recommend you check those sites out!

Thanks so much to Phalen, who read over the predecessors to this script almost 3/4 of a year ago and told me in no uncertain terms what was good about them and what absolutely wasn't. It means a lot, and I wouldn't have had the confidence to publish this thing without you.

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