In praise of the old web

09 April 2025

I love the internet; and by “the internet”, I mean the web (aka the part of the internet you access with a browser); and by “the web”, I mean the web as it was circa 2005, before all the doomscrolling and data harvesting. This was an ecosystem largely made up of small creators and hand-made sites; what John Scalzi calls “the artisan web”.

I had the good luck to grow up while conversations about the internet still had a utopian rather than dystopian tinge; “the information superhighway.” From my recollections, which I admit may be rose-tinted, the web was home to an abundance of creativity and an ethos of open discourse and sharing. I was probably 11 when I discovered the online community of animators and game developers making weird and wonderful content with Macromedia Flash on sites like Albino Blacksheep and badgerbadgerbadger.com, and I wanted so badly to be a part of it.

For many artists, writers, film makers, animators and programmers, the early web operated as a gift economy. Work was made and shared freely, in exchange for the work of others. Ads were around on some pages but not yet ubiquitous or disguised as content. Creators revelled in the democratisation of media and found an audience for work that previously would never have been published or aired.

I am not naive enough to think that the web nowadays is host to less creativity or that the place for niche content and communities has disappeared, but the centres of online culture have moved from small hand-made and self-hosted pages to platforms owned by some of the largest corporations the world has ever seen. These platforms have made it cheaper and easier than ever to publish creative work, a glorious thing, but they are fundamentally ambivalent to content that they host. On social media, art is often outcompeted by rage bait, memes and AI slop which track better on “engagement” metrics and ad clicks.

The good news is the old web is still here, and all of its fundamental technologies still work. Blogs are still being written. Small websites are still being made. If you want to curate a feed of content that isn’t designed to addict you, RSS still works just like it did in 2005; it still allows you to subscribe to most blogs and podcasts on the internet, all without handing over your personal data.