One way to bring life back to the internet is to make it weird again. According to software developer Jonas Hultenius, quirkiness is one of the things that made the early web feel alive. Today’s obsession with metrics and vitality are starving off everyday treasures, small wonders, and genuine oddities.
If you were online in the early 1990s you may remember wwwwww.jodi.org. The “home page” looks like a green-screen splash from The Matrix. Click randomly on the screen and you’ll come up with something different…a Nintendo-esque page of flaming samurai or maybe just an empty page with the cryptic message “v1.1 mWAR script” off to one side.
But there’s also the everyday weirdness that makes up our daily existence. Look at Meg Hourihan’s archival site Megnut.com. She posts about her kids, about her woes finding insurance, and about her pets.
There’s nothing earth-shattering here on Megnut. But it’s deeply human and relateable.
Of course there’s the really big question, how do we bring back this weirdness? Hultenius suggests that we need less algorithmic control on the sites we frequent.
That is going to require big systemic change on sites like Facebook and Tik-Tok. What can we do in the meantime? Maybe…bring back the blogroll
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