Transcription
The family computer sits on a towering wooden desk, surrounded by CDs and loose papers. After getting home from school, you had dropped your backpack by the door and scrambled up the stairs. It had taken a little negotiating, but you've been granted 30 minutes of internet use. The dial-up is agonizingly slow to connect. Its loud and discordant tone feels like an announcement to the household that you are now tying up the phone line.
When the browser finally loads, you race through your tasks. You feed your Neopets from the giant omelette. You check the news on your hooligans—news being dinosaur facts. But best of all, you have a reply from your pen pal. You learn she has a hamster and her favorite color is purple. You barely have time to peck out a response when the call comes from downstairs. Time's up. The screen goes dark. You shut the door behind you. And just like that, it was over.
You never gave much thought to the act of logging off. It felt like turning off a light, a non-event. We didn't question the boundaries between spaces because we assumed they would always be there. We moved through rooms. We crossed thresholds. We arrived and we left. The internet lived in a room, and that room had a door. It took a long time to notice when the door went missing. [Music]
The thing I remember most about the old internet is the sense of discovery. It felt like stepping through the wardrobe, and everything on the other side was unknown. Parts of it were dangerous. You had to stay alert. Following one too many links down an unfamiliar path could get dark fast. But for all the danger, it was also magical. It opened a door that you didn't know existed.
When the internet became more freely available, when it didn't require a screeching dial tone to connect to, I remember racing home every day to get online. I'd had trouble connecting in real life. But online, I had made a network of really close friends. We had bonded over art. We drew characters and told stories together. Some of them are still my friends to this day. We've managed to make the leap into the real world. But most have vanished into the ether. We didn't use our real names. We didn't post real photos. There was nothing tying any of us to an identity in the real world. I've tried looking for some of the friends I've lost. I've tried hard. There's nowhere to begin. It's like tracking down a ghost.
The future is you, your passion, your imagination, your hard work. Hypnospace Outlaw is a puzzle game set in an alternate version of the '90s where the internet lives in our dreams. Literally, a headband worn to bed lets users surf the web at night. The story is environmental and largely nonlinear, pieced together as you navigate pages on a retro web browser. There are hundreds of personal sites to explore across Hypnospace within themed zones. There are friendships and communities, rivalries and dramas. The world that unfolds feels genuinely alive, which makes it all the more unsettling when cracks start to show.
Hypnospace takes heavy inspiration from the real-world, now-defunct web hosting service Geocities. We have Geocities to thank for a huge chunk of the culture of the early internet. It was free. Anyone could design and host a personal website. It helped pass the internet from the hands of super nerds into the hands of ordinary people. There were teachers and kids and retirees all making websites for whatever they wanted. It lended itself to super niche websites that existed just for the hell of it. Here's what I found about raisins.
When I first stumbled across a site called Cameron's World, I thought I had found the Geocities page to end all Geocities pages, until I realized I wasn't on archive.org. I was on a live, modern website. Cameron Ascin, the artist behind the site, pulled thousands of images and text snippets from actual archived Geocities websites and collaged them into a beautiful cacophony. It's a living museum. Cameron describes it as a love letter to the internet. It's like scrolling through layers of an archaeological dig site. My favorite motif the site nods to is how often pages marked areas of themselves as being under construction. They were constantly being tinkered with, ever evolving.
Search engines back in the day were still getting off the ground. SEO wasn't a word. There were no curated algorithms. Nothing was served to you. You had to go foraging for your content. Scroll to the bottom of an ancient website, and you'd often find a little icon announcing that it belonged to a web ring. Web rings were like clubs. They existed for every niche under the sun: UFO enthusiasts, Sailor Moon, Sonic the Hedgehog. See, the internet hasn't changed that much. Sites within a web ring linked to one another in a circular loop, managed by a ring master who curated the links. People would browse through them the way that they scroll through Twitter. In a 1999 New York Times article, writer Tina Kelly described it as such: "If using a search engine can be like drinking from a fire hose, internet surfing using a web ring is like sharing a cup of tea with a group of strangers who are baddy about a favorite hobby."
Initially, creating a web ring was laborious. But in 1995, a high schooler named Sage Why made webring.org. He wrote a script that automated the process of updating links when someone joined or left. The site was completely free, and web rings exploded in popularity. All sites in a web ring were equal. There was no ranking system. The first site in the ring was the one you landed on. It was a way for tiny websites to get seen. The internet became shaped by its users, lighting up pathways towards each other in the dark.
The home parallels across the early internet are impossible to ignore. Many of these sites even had virtual doorways. You had to enter. Sites were often hosted with a visitor counter and a guest book. You were encouraged to leave a note about your experience. It was inherently social. It was designed to invite you in. So much of the language we used reflected the sense of place: homepage, chat room, game lobby, web address. The zones in Hypnospace Outlaw were inspired by the real themed communities on Geocities, which were called neighborhoods. They were named after real-world locations: Area 51 for sci-fi fans, Yusede for outdoor enthusiasts, West Hollywood for the queer community. Instead of a user, you were called a homesteader. You applied for residency in a community, at which point you were given your very own address.
I haven't told you the coolest part about Cameron's World yet, the love letter to the internet. Hundreds of gifts on the site are actually links. They open up into a custom browser within the page called Catscape Navigator and pull up actual archived Geocities pages that inspired each section of the site. It feels eerie reading them, their counters and guest books frozen in time. They are forever under construction. The only reason we can still visit the ruins of the internet is because of a handful of archivists that cared enough to save them. Brewster Kale started the Internet Archive. It's a nonprofit that's been crawling the internet since 1996, taking snapshots that are publicly accessible via the Wayback Machine. It scares me to think how close we almost came to losing it all. Without intervention, the old internet would have quietly vanished. We need these things to point to in order to articulate what has changed. Because what came to fill the space that the old internet has left doesn't quite feel like a space at all. But we'll get to that.
Witness the dawning of a new world. Where sleep time is no longer down time. It's where the future is built. A future built by you. Hypnospace Outlaw quietly pokes at a sense of impending loss. It's a fictionalized version of a sentiment echoed across many real, frozen Geocities websites. Hypnospace is run by a fictional company called Merchantsoft. Their ever-increasing presence across the web is viscerally felt. You play the role of an enforcer hired by Merchantsoft to ruin the lives of everyone online. You carry out typical cop behaviors like issuing takedowns of an elementary school teacher's website for posting copyrighted art of a cartoon fish drawn by her students. There will be no gum shoe gooper on my internet.
The citizens of Hypnospace are upset due to Merchantsoft deleting and merging zones without notifying their residents. People are joining up and trying to make their own coalition, the Sovereign Alliance of Imagination. When I first saw this, I was charmed, but then it started to unravel. After exploring for a while, you start to notice a pattern of broken links and pages that don't load quite right. On the fictional page, Conniey's Connections, which serves as a virtual yellow pages of recommended sites across Hypnospace, Connie has left a message: "Important update. November 5th, 1999. Due to recent issues surrounding Net Settler and Hypnospace page builder formats, many of the connections listed here are no longer functional. Some pages appear with unreadable text and broken links, while others have been deleted by users who have moved away. I'm holding out hope that Merchantsoft will realize just how many people here used Net Settler and figure out how to support their legacy software. If this does not happen, I'll have no choice but to close Conniey's Connections or move it to another sleeptime service."
Yahoo acquired Geocities in 1999. Nearly immediately, they began breaking things. Initially, there was controversy over the new terms of service, which homesteaders felt was attempting to claim copyright over their pages. They organized a protest called The Haunting, where they drained their sites of color. Yahoo eventually relented, but the attempts at making nice were short-lived. Yahoo began deleting sites and web rings that they deemed adult without letting the homesteaders know. Caught in the crosshairs were web rings like the Global Transgender Ring, a trans community that hosted over 1,000 people. Web rings had been acquired by Geocities at this point, but up until now, it had largely been left alone. Geocities had recognized its importance to their community, but now it was on borrowed time.
First, Yahoo announced Yahoo Web Ring. Overnight and without warning, the web rings across Geocities appeared with a shiny new navigation bar. The homepage of each web ring no longer pointed towards its ring master. Instead, homesteaders were taken to the Yahoo Web Ring homepage, where, of course, there were ads. In 2001, unhappy with their own attempts to monetize Web Rings, Yahoo laid off the staff for the feature and pulled support entirely. Some web rings were able to band together to migrate to other sites, but most were permanently broken. The site limped along for a few more years, but the writing was on the wall. In 2009, Yahoo announced the end of Geocities. 38 million sites went dark.
These days, I spend hours on my phone, and I find that I usually don't remember any of it. Maybe one particular meme or fun fact will stick in my brain, but most of it just blends together into a haze of bad feelings. I feel trapped, like I'm walking through an endless barren field, like Yahoo's Haunting. It's been drained of color. Sometimes I swear there's something moving in the grass behind me. Sometimes I think I see a flash of eyes, but when I turn and look, there's nothing there. I don't want to be there anymore, but I don't know how to leave. I don't remember how I got here. There are no doors.
I love the new internet. You might have heard of the doorway effect. It's when you walk from your bedroom to your kitchen, but you can't remember why. You find yourself standing in front of the fridge feeling like someone deleted the thought. It's a real thing. The University of Notre Dame conducted a series of experiments where they had participants move objects between rooms and then recalled details about those objects. They found that moving through doorways had a significant effect on memory. They repeated the experiment virtually. Virtual doorways did the same thing. The thinking is that the doorway effect evolved to help us be more alert when moving between environments. If you're leaving the forest and entering, say, a haunted field, it would serve you well to be on alert for danger. It's annoying when you forget why you were standing in the kitchen. But there's a flip side to the doorway effect, too. It's not just about forgetting. It's also about remembering. Our memories are episodic. They're not continuous streams. They're segmented by events and locations. Moving from one space to another is part of what signals to our brain that one memory has ended and a new one has begun. But what happens when there are fewer doorways?
In 2006, entrepreneur Asa Rascin had an idea. Remember how Web Rings helped you navigate from site to site by clicking next? Most of the internet used to be built that way. There was a bottom to it. You had to choose to continue. But the new internet was in the business of making things seamless. We wanted things to move faster, be slicker. So, Asa tried something different. He got rid of the next button. He created a bottomless pit. Today, we call it the infinite scroll. It's on almost every website that you use.
I often find myself pointing to the internet's lack of physical tethering as the reason for my own woe. The problem is that it's crossed too many boundaries. It's overstayed its welcome. The phone used to compete with the internet. Now they're synonymous. And the phone too has lost its physical tether. It too was once a shared device, which is now deeply private. We can't slam it down. We can't snap it shut. We can't close it at all. If we could just take the internet off of our phones and stuff it back into the family computer room. If we could turn it back into something that we visited rather than something that was always there, maybe then everything would feel the way it used to feel, wouldn't it?
We spend a lot of time blaming the modern world on the internet. Nobody is present. Everybody's glued to their phones. We never just hang out anymore. Barnes & Noble used to have chairs. The world echoes the field, stark and empty. But if the internet sucked the whimsy out of the world, who sucked the whimsy out of the internet? The internet used to look like a McDonald's playplace. Which one disappeared first? Asa estimates that the infinite scroll has increased the amount of time we spend on a website by 50%, which he believes is a conservative estimate. It was about the time that we were getting to be really successful at this that my stomach started to drop. Asa said he began to question if what he was contributing to this world wasn't efficiency, but rather technology that "tears us, rips us, and breaks us." Oops.
I still vividly remember some of the sites where I used to hang out 20 years ago. I remember the feeling of being there. I remember staying up late, talking to my friends, creating stories together, creating worlds. I remember learning that I was queer, putting a name to a feeling, and that there were others like me. The Global Transgender Ring, the one that Yahoo wiped off of Web Rings, I originally found it on Cameron's World, and I was haunted by this passage: "It's June 28th, 1999. 3 years ago today, I founded this web ring for a reason. I guess I'm idealistic enough to believe that education can overcome ignorance and discrimination. We are simply human beings. Human beings whose perspectives cross the so-called gender line. I look forward to the day when gender and gender expression become non-issues rather than dreadfully serious ones."
The old internet was a neighborhood of little houses brimming with individuality; houses that invited you in and welcomed your visit. We looked forward to arriving. We missed them when we left. And they didn't ask anything of us in return. That feeling I have when I'm in the fields, the one that I'm being followed, hunted even, it's because I am. Silicon Valley is built on a profit model called surveillance capitalism. It's the reason why your phone feels like it's listening to you. It's why you get ads that feel psychic. The internet doesn't exist anymore for the purpose of having fun. It exists to harvest and sell your data. It doesn't need to listen to you to do that. It's enough to track your every movement both on and offline.
In Hypnospace Outlaw, you carry out your job of spreading misery among the community while actual safety violations rage on that you're much less able to stop. And you're following through on your enforcer duties under pressure from Merchantsoft. Some of the people you're taking orders from also express qualms about the work: "Great job cleaning up those gum shoe gooper violations. This whole zone has been a problem for the last 2 weeks, but none of us want to ban anyone over a silly goldfish cartoon. Hopefully they retreat soon."
Asa Rascin of the Infinite Scroll made a mistake, but he did so under pressure to innovate. There are thousands of Asas across Silicon Valley today. People feeling qualms about the decisions that they're making. But if your product doesn't generate profit, you're at risk of being laid off. Like Yahoo laid off the Web Rings team and eventually everyone who worked at Geocities. And in a world where being fired means losing healthcare and potentially housing, that threat is real. There's a wolf in the field breathing down their necks, pressuring them to create technology that breathes down ours. The things that broke, broke by design. The old internet didn't slide away into obscurity. It was taken. Designs that are fun, designs that facilitate community or prioritize your health and well-being—nobody has any incentive to make them. The things that make us feel the most human are the least compatible with profit.
This is getting really depressing. I'm going to turn it around. The '90s nostalgia boom isn't about aesthetics. It's about craving that sense of place, a feeling of belonging, the ability to exist without the pressure to commodify yourself, boundaries between yourself and the internet, a door to close, perhaps. The patchwork quilt of the old internet lent itself to belonging: Geocities, neighborhoods, themed web rings. The entire setup was like a built-in icebreaker: "What's your favorite movie? What do you collect? Do you know any fun facts about raisins?" You didn't need to be exceptional to be seen. You didn't need to be anything at all. It wasn't perfect. But the things we fear the internet has changed about the world—that were meaner, dumber, less attentive—those are things that happen when you're stressed. It's hard to be creative or silly when there's a wolf in the field. We've had to put those things down at the doorway to prioritize the threat. But they're things that come back when our environment changes.
Echoes of the old internet still exist in pockets and corners. There are still people making cool things on tiny personal websites. They just don't get picked up by algorithms or search engines. Nuance and virality aren't friends. We're seeing push back in both the vehicles of the internet and the internet itself. In the physical world, dumb phones are making a comeback. It's an attempt to bring back those boundaries. Companies like the Light Phone have introduced phones that serve as tools. They have some modern features like a GPS or podcast feeds, but they intentionally lack features like email, social media, or a web browser.
Online, we're seeing the appearance of decentralized platforms like Blue Sky and Mastodon. They're open-source, and they give users control over their own algorithms and data. Remember when you actually used to see the things your friends posted? There are other sites that evoke the internet's past. Substack has become a home for journalists and writers. It allows creators to send newsletters directly to their community. Discord servers are many chat rooms for friends. Reddit suffers from men, but it too retains the old internet feel with niche subreddits and anonymous usernames. I find all of these platforms wildly less stressful than, say, Instagram.
I would love to see us go further in the designs of these websites. I would love to see us shed some of the addictive UI choices that we've come to expect, like the infinite scroll. And now that search engines have come full circle and are completely useless again, I would love to see web rings make a comeback. And I think we're still missing opportunities for customization and a sense of true ownership. I think that the distinctiveness of some of these old sites served as a doorway or a threshold in and of itself. I'm certainly not going to forget where I am when I'm on a garishly yellow Peeps website. And yes, many of these design choices were not accessible or user-friendly. But I think there's a middle ground that we can find here between the Peeps website and optimization to the point of sterility.
To be clear, when we're dealing with systemic problems, we need changes to the system. And until we have real legal protections against problems like surveillance capitalism, we're kind of swimming upstream. But that doesn't mean we can't swim. I spent so much time on inert archived websites for this video that I was genuinely surprised when the world in Hypnospace changed. A character in the game actually published a promised update to their comic, and I was like, "Oh yeah, these pages weren't always static, and the world in Hypnospace reacted to me."
In a nod to the Geocities homesteaders repeatedly protesting against Yahoo, the people of Hypnospace rallied for the teacher I reported for posting Gum Shoe Gooper. They shared icons of the fish on their pages in support, daring me to ban them. Despite being limited by the system I was working within, I still did my best to resist it. And like I said, there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley with qualms ready to be swayed. I think one of the most hope-punk things we can do on the new internet is to make things with no point: personal and unpolished projects, things that we're passionate about but that fit in no niche. Things that are decidedly unviral and unprofitable. Humans are silly. We're creative. We're curious, and we're kind. We crave connection and community and authenticity. You can deprioritize these things in your algorithms and your infrastructures, but you can't take away something that's innate. The things we left behind at the threshold of the field are still waiting for us. They'll be there when we're ready to pick them back up. The homesteaders aren't gone. The ring masters aren't gone. Those hobbies, those passions, they're not gone. The thing about homes is that they can be rebuilt. All we really need is a door. [Music]