I’ve been seeking out the perfect Internet since I could remember. The primordial ooze from whence I came is an era of burgeoning online fandom. From 2009 to 2016, I used a grand total of three websites: DeviantArt (DA), an American art community platform; Tumblr, a blogging platform for Anglophiles, and Twitter, which needs no introduction. At this time, I was a young, weird kid with exactly two friends. Once I was introduced to a roleplaying forum by another weird kids on my bus route, I was off to the races. 

The way that people interacted during this transitory period of the Internet started out quite positively, and I was quick to cling to the way people treated me on the Internet. To them, I wasn’t the stinky kid with greasy hair that picked their nose. I escaped the cage of physicality when I was tehpurpleninja098, especially when I got into fights with other 11 year olds on how inauthentic their roleplaying on Facebook was.

Now, with a more developed frontal lobe [citation needed], I’ve developed a more cynical relationship to the World Wide Web, seeing as it has effectively permeated into all aspects of the everyday. I started my post-secondary career optimistically with a purported artistic and research focus on “hypertext artefacts” (hint: they’re just a bunch of links and images) and almost eight years later, I am seriously considering living under a rock. The self-obsessed excess the Internet has enabled has left me dissatisfied, in my own self-obsessed way, so I’ve been finding comfort in the simpler things.

Earlier this year, I started using the web design software Neocities to build my own website. At that point, I hadn’t used hyper-text markup languages (HTML) in a little over a decade, and the last time I touched a developer toolbar had been  when a 14-year-old me wanted my Tumblr to auto-play Vocaloid songs, prompting me to steal some code from another teenager. 

Neocities is the spiritual successor to Geocities, the Yahoo-owned web hosting service that provided users a means to host and develop their own sites free of charge. Active from 1994 to 2009, much of its appeal was that it let individuals cater to their own special interests, and would divide Web pages by user-selected “neighbourhoods.” 

Geocities sites are remembered for their primitive appearances, and are generally free of the smooth, richer elements we are so used to today. The popularity of Geocities signalled a transition from a post-military invention Internet populated mostly by disconnected documents and text (Web 1.0) into a new web—a Web 2.0, if you will—that connected people through that text. 

Neocities tries to emulate the look of Web 1.0 with the technical ability of today. We now have the luxury of multiple markup languages, and the convenience  of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to thank for the way websites function today. 

Everything we interact with on the Internet of things is the product of myriad unseen lines of code, and the attitude that most people take towards developing their sites on Neocities is often a response to this perceived excess. 

In spite of this, exploring Neocities has been a great pleasure over the last four months, and I frequently eulogize to whoever will tolerate it about the Web Revival movement, wherein a fringe group of Internet users are trying to return to the creative values of Web 1.0. 

On this edge of the platform, creativity is king, and the Internet is a friendly, fun realm of endless possibility, free of the profit incentive. I’ve spent a concerning amount of hours on the minutiae of my site-in-development, in that spirit, frequently pouring over the Internet Archive’s GifCities engine for the perfect paragraph break.

My current splash page is one made from borrowed code from a netizen named sadgrl.online, who went into retirement last year, but left behind a treasure trove of helpful HTML in a Github repository and scattered across her various webpages. When I work on my website, her helpful insights will pop up in the code, telling me where I should put things and what will break if I mess with certain text elements. 

In searching for more site ideas, I stumbled upon an update sadgrl made to her site’s manifesto, expressing concerns that Neocities was becoming more of  a social network instead of  a website developer. My enjoyment began to sour slightly as I realized that social interaction on Neocities is heavily mediated towards preference and traffic. While users frequently rely on coded features like guestbooks to directly engage with a site’s creator, the predilections we as people bring to social networking are still present. 

In her last manifest, sadgrl talked about having one of the largest followings on the Neocities platform, and how distressing this was for her. She found this spotlight to be dehumanizing and antithetical to what she felt Neocities should do. 

sadgrl is largely gone from Neocities, but she lives on in her web development and her voice continues to guide me through creating my own site, her ghost always chattering to my machine. 

I’m careful not to assign any label to my relationship with this user, but I cannot help myself in acknowledging the parasociality behind her presence in my site. 

The current nature of social interaction on the Internet drives people to compartmentalize themselves, because a lot of us don’t know how to behave well online. Most people on Neocities don’t seem to understand that website building is an increasingly individualistic endeavour, and interacting with others is becoming optional. 

From what I can understand, the preceding platform, Geocities, had managed to construct a digital geography that necessitated interacting with one another, and made online community connection nearly impossible to avoid in its tendency towards random chaos. The evidence of interaction (guestbooks, comment sections, forums) was secondary, and I think that’s what made Geocities so popular as a conduit for personal expression. 

Neocities, on the other hand, almost incentivizes the interaction imprint, and wants its users to interact with others in a heavily mediated fashion. This ordered chaos is not dissimilar from the Internet of today, where the shiniest, most detailed digital objects are going to receive the most traffic. There is no magic behind a manufactured series of links, connecting all of the sites tainted by a neo-futuristic chrome that blare Wii Shop Channel music as soon as you reach them. 

It’s the social media trap all over again, but this time, it’s determining which third-order Y2K slop you are the most nostalgic for.

Neocities relies on its users creating little nests of their own nostalgia in order to remain financially solvent. There is a paid option to increase your server space, and while paltry, there is something so devoid of the Geocities-geist when I’m paying to have gifs on a bare-bones website, marked up with a font I had to painfully install myself.

I truly wish there was some allowance for forgetting, but I don’t think this Digital Age allows this whatsoever. 

sadgrl is forced to live on in some half-life, having expressed repulsion at her limelight, and somewhere out there, my own Tumblr from 2012 is floating around, poorly coded and chirping out “Jinsei Reset Button” by Megpoid Gumi. 

I grew up in what many see as the Internet’s Wild West era—a time where its users had some idea of what the etiquette was, but had a collectivist feel to its goal of sharing and distributing information. It was an Internet for everyone, before it was the Internet tailored for each one of us, alone. 

The idea that specific sites on the Web could be used as a medium of personal expression was honed in with the Geocities era, but this era—the Tumblr/DA/forum age of 2009-2016—would set the tone for how people would interact with each other and their expressions of self. I think we shat the bed a little on this front. 

I’m careful not to idealize this era, but I cannot help if the soft green of the DeviantArt homepage fills the room of my memory, its light illuminating the dust of a past I adulterate for my own purposes. I am not free of the release that this particular form of nostalgia promises me, and what exactly remembrance through this revisionist lens does for my parasympathetic nervous system. 

The reality is that I was a social recluse that felt neglected enough to act out. I used the Internet to escape the present, and very quickly found other people like me, but nontheless managed to bring my problems with me. There was a lot of good that came out of surfing the Web, and I still have a lot of friends I only know through the Internet, but in the usual versions of this narrative, I conveniently leave out how maladjusted I actually was. 

Bad behaviour was—and still is—rewarded online, because there was (and remains) significant leeway to do so. 

I attribute a serenity to forgetfulness and memory, but in reality, there is also a debilitating loss of control in the method that my mind retains information. The Internet mediates this, but also fosters my forgetfulness by rendering the ability to remember reflexively unnecessary. Gone are the days of memorization and total commitment to memory, but here are the computers, ready to serve.

Truth is that there was never a perfect Internet. Things like Neocities will not fix this mess. The Internet is just a series of underwater fibre-optic cables; big snakes in the ocean, alive and buzzing on its floor. Attributing a moral character to something so vast in its complexity is dismissive and inane, but with that being said, I think that the perfect website is just text on a page.