Bring back the Interwebs
Creating our own beautifully messy corners of the internet
Yeah, I know it’s been a while. Hi, how are you? Hope the month was good to you and you had profound revelations about your life that would rival those of ancient mathematicians swinging their temple bells in public after jumping out of a bathtub.
I have been so distracted the past few weeks, and it is not without reason. I delivered the website projects I had to, wrote a nice little blog post and hosted a few online discussion sessions.
In the midst of all this, I thought it would be a good idea to work on my personal website, which had been languishing in the prehistoric horrors of the phrase ‘the cobbler’s kids have no shoes’.
The way my brain works, I would’ve never gotten to it if I had not constrained myself to do it. I am the carrot and I am the stick.
Which, of course, meant that I got distracted and kept thinking about my first contacts with the alien world called the Internet.
At the age of 13, puberty was knocking at the bedroom doors of boys who were huddled together around a flickering CRT monitor, trying to study what goes inside where and why in the hell everyone was shouting– but it took the scenic route to reach me. While I waited for my hormones to get their shit together, I focused all the energy I had on making this website called Graffiti on a free hosting platform called sitesled.com. I had imbued it with all the things that caught my fancy, namely: Dragons, Linkin Park, Dragon Ball Z and Emma Watson.
Every Sunday, I would cycle to the Rs. 10 per hour cyber cafes and update the site with diatribes on my love for these things. The topics were not the same as what I’ve listed below, but they embodied the spirit:
How to tell a dragon and a wyvern apart?
What is the point of yamcha in dbz?
EMMA! Marry me plz <3
That sitebuilder is long gone. The domain now leads to a shady Thai football news site, and even that stopped updating a decade ago. Even Wayback Machine was no help at all in recovering the site, but snooping through my very first gmail account (this and Orkut I got via invites. Remember Orkut?), I found lurking in my drafts were html files dated October 2007.
To think someone born on this date will be eligible to vote and drive in a couple of months is nuts! But, don’t worry fellow millennials, soon they will learn that we live in an autocracy and roads don’t exist anymore, and so as the enthusiasm of youth wanes and they stop shuddering at the apathy of the world, we will welcome them with open arms in an unfeeling embrace. That’s how time works. It’s amazeballs!
Most of the pages I found were illegible and/or too embarrassing to be archived, but in service of documentation, here is the eye sore of a home page:
Of all the images of graffitied walls I could’ve added as the background, I had to find one of an ugly ass black-on-black Japanese graffiti that looks like a Venom Symbiote discharge, but kudos to the creator of that site that it survived the social internet and is still active, which is why this is the only image that still loaded.
I’m glad archivers of the internet exist. Hand-cranked websites that still function thirty years later are the foundations on which the web is built. I don’t want to sound too nostalgic, but I really miss the early version of Internet 2.0, where having fun was paramount and you tinkered with every detail.
Now we are way past even the social media phase, where you saw people-you-may-know sharing food and vacation photos, and have somehow landed in this vast hellhole where ephemeral videos from strangers fill the void of our post-work malaise. Fingers swiping up ad infinitum.
Yeah, I know, Bo Burnham said it best, so I might as well link it here
We need a certain bifurcation in the definition of a “millennial”, especially the Indian millennial, that is defined by whether you got access to the internet in your preteens. In my case, by the time I was 11 (circa ‘03), I was already fascinated with even the concept of the world and the wide and the web. Just those three words would blow this idiot’s brains out. You mean I could access information from anywhere, anytime?
When I was in school, Times of India ran a programme called NIE, Newspaper in Education — easily one of the best in-school things we had. They brought in guest speakers, ran competitions, and one year held a “web page” design contest. I took part in the 5th class. Not coding, mind you. We were supposed to cut out pictures from newspapers and make a “web page” on the page. I don’t remember what I did exactly, but it had something to do with lions. Anyway, I won that (humbly brushes off the shoulders).
Did I just destroy any street cred I ever had by producing a 20-year-old certificate that proves that I am a bigger nerd than anyone ever thought, AND I still carried the certificate for some reason? Yeah, probably.
I didn’t have a PC at home, so the cyber café expeditions every Sunday were my refuge. I kept a diary/scrapbook of what I’d do when I was in front of the system, throughout the week— what I’d write, what changes I’d make and what sites I would visit, which I found via the tech section in newspapers.
I didn’t care much for the chatting or connectivity side of the net. Older cousins taught me the wonders of IRC and Yahoo Messenger, and how you could A/S/L your way to anyone, never knowing if you were talking to a cat, a fish, or worse. If it isn’t abundantly clear by now, websites fascinated me back then and still do. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have chosen this profession. “Chosen” being the operative word here. More like fell into it ass backwards while taking a wild detour through a middling engineering degree in an unrelated field, and now trying to connect the dots to my childhood in order to justify a grander purpose, if any.
But the reason for the fascination was simple: you’re carving out your own space in the noise. It wasn’t always transactional. Barely anyone could buy anything online back then. The chief maxim being fun. Random, irreverent, sincere fun.
In the past few years, a small movement called the indieweb has been growing — the goal being to create slow, durable, personal corners of the internet that reflect their creators, not what a feed rewards.
This video explaining it popped up in my feed (yes, I see the irony. The algorithm works against its own interest sometimes) and it brought a smile to my face. It embodies what I feel is the true purpose of the net: to tell your story in your own style. Mostly using neocities.
I made my personal site before I knew a movement like this was going on, but even then, this particular retro aesthetic is not my jam. I like a site to look good and be functional.
To be honest, I don’t like technology where you have to apply serious elbow grease in order to move a box to the right. I have a friend who wrote his entire novel on Emacs, a program that will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year! Another guy I knew ran an online magazine but was so paranoid that he refused to add any analytics code, so he didn’t even know which country the site was most popular in. I guess you could work like that, but it is a headache.
I like a site to be usable across devices and to have cool animations. And I am okay with using a VPS to host my site, and I like to play around with databases.
Maybe some day I will get so tired of algorithms that I’ll come full circle, hole up in a cave somewhere with a dial-up connection and get excited about the <marquee> tag making things move from right to left. For now, I am happy that there is a small section of people who are using the net as it was intended. That’s right, POR-
[ARCHIVE NOTICE: This blog post was discovered in a dusty corner of the Wayback Machine in the year 2047. The author’s whereabouts are unknown. All embedded videos are dead links. The only remaining link out is a low-res black-on-black Japanese graffiti pattern described as “Venom Symbiote discharge.”
The ending phrase “That’s right, POR–” remains unexplained. If only we knew what it meant, we could’ve saved our species from Skynet. Yes, Terminator played out exactly as described and we didn’t heed the warning signs. We are sorry, James Cameron.]
Sidequest: sumitshetty.com
Of course, this was gonna be the sidequest for this topic. A lot of hemming and hawing went into what to include in this, and what vibe I was going for. In the end, I decided to keep it to what I am currently working on.
It is a one-pager and covers all the current and past projects, my web dev agency (also had a site revamp, check it out: https://aetherwise.com), and my publications.
Check it out: https://sumitshetty.com/
Reccs
StumbleUpon was my go-to site whenever I was bored and/or needed a new fix on the interwebs. It asked what you were interested in and then showed you sites and articles with every “stumble” that pushed your interests a bit further and left you wide-eyed. Discovered a lot of gems that way. It too is long gone now, but there are alternatives that I tested recently that were quite decent
https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/
Reddit ostensibly has replaced that discovery experience for most of us, but still, it is UGC, and sometimes things can get quite vile. Some corners like this are still worth it though.
That’s about it for this week. Substack too, I feel, is us trying to get the old blogosphere era back. If only they had not added fucking videos to it. Sigh, anyway, see you next week hopefully.
What a nostalgia dive. Where is the book excerpt in this one? 🤨