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Today: Arwa Mahdawi, columnist at The Guardian, and author of Strong Female Lead.

Issue No. 149

When the Internet Was a Friendly Neighborhood
Arwa Mahdawi

When the Internet Was a Friendly Neighborhood

by Arwa Mahdawi

This story is part of 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.

There was, I’ll grant you, plenty of greed on the old internet but the tools didn’t yet exist to mine and scrape and capture and sell data in all the sophisticated ways that there are now. “Users” weren’t yet “eyeballs,” we weren’t yet being squeezed for every monetizable nugget of information that could be sold to data brokers and advertisers. Data felt fun, not exploitative. The data capture tools on my GeoCities site were rudimentary. It had a “hit counter,” tallying up all the visitors. It also had a guest book, where people could leave comments.

Graphic design was our passion

I wasn’t some sort of early online influencer; my little page only racked up a dozen or so comments in total. Most of them, if I remember, were along the lines of, “not sure how I ended up on this random page, but it’s cool.” But I got an immense amount of joy from those comments. The idea that some stranger across the country or even across the world had taken a few moments to connect felt magical.

Occasionally I still feel those same jolts of joy and wonder. I’ll get a kind, thoughtful message from a stranger thousands of miles away who has read an article of mine and I’ll feel that same sense of connection.

Most of the time, however, I feel quite the opposite. The delight of the early internet seems to have soured into hate. My old GeoCities guestbook has effectively been replaced by my Twitter DMs, and the comments section on my Guardian articles (which are rarely open to comments due to all the abuse they routinely receive). These are far greater in number and far less pleasant than the little notes I used to get from fellow fans of Scully and Mulder; the joyous anticipation I used to feel from seeing a new missive on my GeoCities page has now been replaced by dread whenever I see a new email or Twitter message from someone I don’t know. 

The hate mail I get nowadays is badly spelled and the troll repeats the same tired insults: dyke, Muslim, whore, go back to where you came from. “Learn some better insults!” I want to scream. Try out something a little more literary! Tell me that my “wit’s as thick as a Tewkesbury mustard,” for a change instead of repeating the same old racist stuff. “Fun Shakespearean insults that will cut a middle-aged writer to the quick”: now there’s a GeoCities page I’m sure would have existed in the ’90s.

HYDRAS WHO HELP

Over at Indignity, Hydra Tom Scocca collected an archive of more than four years’ worth of ASK THE SOPHIST, the advice column that tells you what you want to hear! Got a problem? Wrong! Someone ELSE has the problem, not you. Write to Ask The Sophist at indignity@indignity.net and you too can learn how right you are.

Ask The Sophist! Go on

Flaming Hydra will be lolling around in a volcano in observation of Labor Day in the U.S., and will return to our regularly scheduled fire breathing on Tuesday, September 3rd. We wish you a lovely and refreshing holiday weekend.