The Internet Wasn't Supposed to Feel Like This
The Early Web Was Human Being a mid-to-late millennial has put me in an interesting spot. I remember the world before the internet, but I also grew up alongside it as it became what it is today. I was a kid in the ’90s with endless time to explore online compared to the generations before me. If the internet broke, I had to figure out how to fix it, same with the family computer. That curiosity shaped who I am today. It makes me sad that the next generation will never know the internet I grew up with. The weird, wonderful, human one. The internet used to feel like a place; it was messy, diverse, and human. Now it is a product. It’s optimized, sanitized, and owned. The shift from small communities and personal sites to algorithm-driven feeds hasn’t just changed how we communicate; it’s reshaped how we think and feel. There was a time when the internet felt like wandering through someone’s home. Now it feels like a giant mall. I remember trawling message boards for the games I played or losing hours inside strange, wonderful GeoCities pages. There was always something weird and wonderful to discover. Back then, the internet was the wild west, no rules, no SEO hacks, just people building pages about what they loved. I thought about this again when I stumbled onto milk.com, a domain someone bought in the early ’90s and refused to sell, no matter the offers. He turned it into a simple personal site. It’s still there, quietly defying everything the modern web became. It’s amazing. I suggest you check it out. ...