Netstalgia

December 20, 2019 4:00 PM

The complicated pang of nostalgia that you feel while scrolling through the GeoCities-izer isn’t necessarily for the objects themselves — it’s for the context in which they were made, for the promises of an inclusive and utopic web that they were enmeshed in, yet have since failed to materialise. Hit counters, auto-playing midi files and scrolling marquees are rendered kitsch the same way that, say, Lana Del Rey kitschifies the failed aesthetics of the American Dream. from We found love in a fictional place by Emma Madden [The Outline]
posted by chavenet (5 comments total)

dear cortex can the classic mobile theme play jingle rock bell midis throughout the month of december okthxbye
posted by Huffy Puffy at 7:17 PM on December 20, 2019 [6 favorites]

Good addition to the general discussion of 90s nostalgia, vaporwave, hauntology and all that.

The author's description of early internet felt a little off to me. Like a highly fluent non native language speaker who is 98% perfect but sometimes constructs unusual collocations.

It looks as though Emma Madden, the writer of this piece, attended university between 2013 and 2016. That probably means that a lot of this is history she would have researched. I think that's why some of the texture of the descriptions feels strange to me. It's historiography not memoir.
posted by Telf at 11:50 PM on December 20, 2019 [5 favorites]

I was Extremely Online from the 90s until social media swallowed Web 2.0, or more precisely until the day Google killed Reader, and that experience made me an anti-capitalist. (I was also Extremely Online afterwards, a condition I'm only now starting to fix.) The California ideology, that toxic brew of 70s utopianism and Objectivism, inadvertently made a place where money largely didn't exist because payment processing was a pain, but the system largely worked. Sure, the big sites would have ads, and site takeovers, and paid content, but people could get together on blogs and web forums that largely operated either due to the distracted largesse of a larger corporation, the largesse of one guy who liked the idea of having a forum and paid for the server hosting, or was Wordpress. We kind of had a world without capitalism there, so we all got the vague sense that capitalism wasn't actually necessary, and we all got to enjoy the experience of capitalism moving in and choking everything you love to death.

I wonder how much that specific experience influenced millennials, who seem to be rather more open about their dislike for capitalism than Gen X tend to be.
posted by Merus at 5:59 AM on December 21, 2019 [10 favorites]

I'm either a very old millennial or a very young X. The web is certainly not the first time capitalism overran grassroots creations -- "you know those unused woods where we built a dirt bike track? yeah, they're putting in tract housing" -- but pre-Net you really only got to see local instances of it. Online, you could see it happening in a lot more places all at once, and maybe that helped create a more systemic perspective.
posted by eritain at 6:27 AM on December 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

It's funny that the 90s have become the last time everyone could agree that things were good and normal. I know that's not true for entire swathes of the population, but the 90s will be the 1950s of the 2030s and beyond. I guess the long 20th century ended in 2001 and that's when it became apparent that we're living in one of the weird earths from Sliders and not the main one.
posted by Telf at 1:13 PM on December 21, 2019 [4 favorites]