When the Internet Was a Friendly Neighborhood

by Arwa Mahdawi

Welcome to The Lost Internet, a month-long series in which the members of Flaming Hydra revisit internet marvels of the past. 

Somewhere in the ether, buried in the trash bin of the internet, lie the remains of my old GeoCities homepage. I built it in the mid-’90s when I was 14 or 15 and it was dedicated to The X-Files and Bush. The band Bush, obviously, not George H. W. I wasn’t a psychopath.

Like every GeoCities page mine was kitschy and bright with lots of flashing buttons and Comic Sans script. Behind the janky look, though, was an amazing innovation: when GeoCities launched in 1994 it suddenly became free and easy to create a personal website on the internet. GeoCities helped democratize the World Wide Web, and it did so in a charmingly whimsical way. Nerds of a certain age will remember, for example, that GeoCities pages were organized by “neighborhoods.” Mine must have been in the entertainment quarter: a fashionable address in Hollywood, maybe on the Sunset Strip.

You can see a huge collection of these lurid pages in the archives at restorativland; it appears they're working on expanding.

As others here have noted, there was a wholesomeness to the old internet that has largely been corporatized out of it. The salad days of online culture felt like they were characterized by creativity for creativity’s sake. Nobody even talked about personal brands back then. Or then again, maybe they did. I was born in the same year as the internet was created—1983—and it can be hard to separate my old self from the old internet. Maybe I thought it was innocent because I was innocent; a teenager ignorant of the fortunes made and lost in the first dot-com bubble.