Ideas for videos in the series:

  • is it supposed to look like that? UX, UI, and creativity on the early internet
  • should everyone be technical?
  • We used to be offline; now we’re just AFK
    • too obvs?
  • it didn’t have to be like this: “rewilding the web”
  • vapo(u)rweb: nostalgia for an early internet that didn’t existed
  • was the web better before search? early internet discovery methods and browsing habits
  • the internet is not forever
    • memories are long but not all encompassing
    • experience of searching for something and realising that google has no idea what you’re on about
    • internet archive
    • the long now foundation
    • “keeping receipts” and decentralised memory, cancellation
  • “the early web was simpler”. but who was it simpler for?

other notes

nostalgia vs “people in the past were stupid”

“inevitably better” past, always worse, present, better but not perfect, future == perfect.

history is consistent with rhetoric because it’s written by victors

tells us we have nothing to learn from the past. overrides complicated work

level of complexity we are able to deal with hasn’t changed. things were never simpler, the problems that needed to be solved were just ones we are done with. dreaming up the idea or stumbling across the concepts of fire and then applying that to food, coming up with arithmetic… we build our society on the foundations of billions of humans and non-humans before us.

pop ups, pop unders, banner ads, virus search bars, etc

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What we lost?


learning HTML and CSS learning JS learning server stuff doesn’t seem as pertinent for a hobbyist pre-00s?