Remember When The Internet Used To Be Fun?

Longing for a return to a carefree and unmonetized web

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

I am old enough to remember the days when you would unwind a long spool of telephone wire, disconnect your home phone, plug in the wire, and then run it to your computer. Then you would wait until the dial-up modem took over your phone line and connected you to the internet. Once you were online, the possibilities seemed endless.

I remember a website where someone had made little animated shorts spoofing Star Wars and Star Trek. The animation quality was good, the music was catchy, and the whole thing was a blast. There were little hidden pixels to click on to unlock new videos. I could not tell you the name of the site, but it was quirky, fun, and free. I spent numerous hours watching these videos and yucking it up. There were no advertisements. In fact, such a venture today would likely be shut down by a dozen different DMCA takedowns.

I remember the days when you could use simple HTML code to customize your MySpace page. Everyone was coding and learning to code and tricking out their pages with the latest trends. That was fun. It was fun to see what others were doing, it was fun to learn the code to dress up your website, and it was fun to search for premade code blocks from websites that shared HTML for free. MySpace was a…