When I decided to start digging through the ancient internet a few months ago, I truly was
not entirely sure of what I would find. I knew a lot of the old hosting sites had gone down, I
knew that some had reset their entire servers, and that some had decided to technologically brick
up access to their old webspaces..
My first foray I found a few links to websites that claimed to be the oldest sites in the world. Through more digging and the occasional roadblock, I came across what I genuinely do believe is probably the oldest PUBLICALLY ACCESSED site to enter the web; and it was entirely hysterical to me, as someone who grew up in the late 90's and early 00's with the internet almost always in some form or another at my fingertips. I genuinely believe I'm one of the lucky generation, before the internet got scrubbed and cleaned and washed; to where everything is graywash and surveilled incredibly heavily. Every move you make targeted, every thing you look at or peruse documented and saved. The internet I grew up in felt silly at times, with how I could look up magic spells on Yahoo! or Google and come across someones handmade page, where they mapped out exactly how they would've perfomed the ritual. Clicking through their links and pages could bring me to someone elses page entirely, where they documented local flora and fauna and the purposes they'd have in an apocalyptic situation.
Funny to think that there would be any internet at all in an apocalypse, but I digress.
As I continued to dig I realized something that I genuinely missed about the OldWeb. The ability to share whatever, wherever, whenver you wanted with something as simple as a few perfectly placed wrappers. (and back then I SWEAR they didn't have to have nearly as much perfection, but I've noticed as I've dug deeper into .css and .js that it may genuinely matter more now that there's so much more involved with webpage building. I don't want my site to replicate the feel or vibe of Web1.0, I feel like more than enough sites are doing that and as the push for more people to join in on the train of actually working your brain, I feel like that'll be the first step and incredibly common.
No, actually,
My main interest with the way it used to be is finding these relics that still exist. Not simply on the wayback machine, but there, untouched, just waiting for the next visitor to the site to make the (probably broken) site counter bop up one more number; inevitably counting until the servers finally crash, or wherever it's locally stored is finally wiped. Those PURE relics of a time long gone are what truly interest me, truly make me want to find out what else is out there.
Because who knows, maybe the old wicca sites I used to cross are still waiting for me somewhere. I do know that not all of them were hosted by other sites that have gone down; communities long forgotten about as we moved onto social media; the bane of my existence in both my regular life and also my career life. Without it I would struggle to maintain a clientele, but with it I find myself in a place of constant comparision, something that I hate about myself and have regularly worked in and out of therapy to fight against for years. 'My worth and my place doesn't have to match anyone elses,' is what I've told myself for years; some days I think it works better than others. But that's part of why I've decided to dig for the oldweb. It still exists, even if just in small pockets; even if you have to dig past proxies and occasionally only view through the wayback window. I've started a shrine dedicated to what all I find out there. Be it photos that people posted thirty years ago and have forgotten about with time, gifs, statics, buttons, anything and everything I can get my hands on. I'm trying to start my own archival process, saving these files locally and demanding my husband get me at least a 2tb external to store things on to start with. I know I'm not the only one who wants to do this, but I think it's important that as many people do as possible.
As I progress through this digging process, I find myself wondering what those people were doing in their day to day lives; how they
handled the ever-changing and incredibly scary world around them. As things like 9/11 happened, I know what I and my family were up to,
but I get to glimpse into the lives of others who experienced it as well, and sometimes the before/after of these tragedies is incredible
to be able to witness. There at one point were over two thousand 'In Memoriam' pages made for people who had passed during that tragedy, by
some folks sometimes who had 0 clue anything about the victims beyond what was public information; which understandably back then worked wildly
differently than it does now. Propoganda was less paid for, and less obvious. We also weren't living in a time where they thought the internet
or the connections it provides as "scary", like we are now.
*I'd like to note that I do realize that we still had heavy propoganda, it was my age group and the one right before me that were led
to believe that China was a horrifying place to be, when we found out through social media and a pandemic lockdown that it actually was not,
and that the people who live there believe the same about our country... (which unfortunately is more true now than it was when I was a kid)
Sometimes I get a glimpse into different subsections of the internet that I can't picture existing now like they did then. Entire groups of pages
dedicated to their love of some form of media or another. People who obsessed over Star Trek all had their own community, people for history and
politics and genuinely whatever your mind can come up with, communities existed for it. Much akin to facebook groups or whatsapp groups, but entirely
different at the same time. Everything was personal, personable, and connected in a way we don't get to witness anymore. The information superhighway
was just that, a superhighway. Some stops were dingy, and some were amazing. It all truly depended on where you stopped.
There was once a time where against best advice, you could type in almost anything into the url bar and get sent to
If you go to youtube and type in 'Hillbilly SquirrelSmasher 3000' (and no, I will not link it, if you want to see it that badly go dig a little bit), you will find a video from 2007, where my brother, his best friend, and a young me decide to fuck around with our old not-so-tire-swing, tireswing. It's crazy now as an adult to go back and watch that video, and the others that my brother had posted to YouTube before it turned into what we know it as today. Other fun glimpses you can find is 'Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate History', or any of the old 'MrEpicMann' videos. It's not nearly as old and is after the web started to modernize, but 'VenetianPrincess', if her videos still exist, kept me laughing after school for hours, as did 'Jenna Marbles'. Some of what kept me going back online exists, and some doesn't. And I plan to find as much as I can to document and archive it to the fullest extent of my capabilities. I deserve it, and so does all of the forgotten things I find; left on the web to "rot" for eternity, or until the entire internet collapses in on itself.
Atlas out