Conclusion
There is a lot to love about the Old Web. It’s surprisingly entertaining and incredibly creative. It wasn’t engineered to exploit human psychology for revenue, like the websites of today. There’s also an aspect of discovery in browsing the web, it feels like finding hidden treasure when the odd site dedicated to Chinese Shar Pei dogs pops up. Ultimately, there’s a lot put into the internet, and the possibilities this technology opens up are limitless. It doesn’t have to be the way it is now, we can look back and take this idealism, this blue-skies optimism of the early web forward with us. We can write our own websites, talk about what we want to talk about, find what we want to see, rather than be told what to say or like or do. The online experience doesn’t have to consist of ‘curated feeds’, and nobody has to yield their privacy to participate in a social realm.
Ultimately, we don’t have to invest ourselves so much with the future or the past. You could just enjoy what you have today, knowing you have options. If you don’t want to participate in modern social media, you have the option to become part of the community at Neocities. You could build a website with the help of HTML Dog, Mozilla, and W3Schools. You can pull gifs from the Internet Archive’s GifCities. You could do all this and find a belonging in a world which doesn’t work to propagate a social hierarchy. Whether you choose to step away from the current status quo or not, don’t ever forget that you have that option, because that’s the ultimate value the internet brings; knowledge of your options in life. May those options never be hidden.