“The early internet is breaking - here’s how the World Wide Web from the 90s on will be saved” — Quartz, 2019, 9:02 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LzyRcLJdlg

Have you ever thought about the look and feel of the Internet? People who grew up before the 2000s probably have because early websites were much different than the professionalized digital landscape we have today. This videos explains how the early Internet was characterized by diversity and personalization. As time went on, it became more rationally organized, cleaner, and homogenized. Maybe we are seeing the “McDonaldsization” of the web where a single, optimized system replaces different ways of doing things. For example, website building services like Squarespace allow you to customize a site, but there’s no real aesthetic distinction between templates. Sure, you can pick different colors, font styles, and have HD images and videos, but even these artifacts contain formulaic principles.

How can we break free from these patterns and build a better interface? What do you think societies of the future will think of our current Internet? Do common aesthetic choices and site organization tell us something about our society?

From the video’s description: The early web looked different than it does today. In the 1990s, the internet was intimate and a bit amateur. Websites were made by everyday people on their personal computers, desktops, with very minimal knowledge of coding or HTML needed. Software becomes obsolete — Flash which made much of the early web run, will be shut down in 2020. People stop paying for domain names. Companies like Netscape or GeoCities or MySpace that host websites and online communities go out of business, or get sold (to Yahoo! for example). The internet is not forever, it can break and disappear. Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied are part of a growing group of people who preserve and archive our online digital history. They see the web from the 90s and 2000s as an artifact, at times, even, Net Art.