The internet is filled with ghosts: posthumous profiles, digital doppelgangers, lost media, anonymous comments, failed digital products, defunct websites, etc. They represent unrealized potentials — our digital lost futures. While the World Wide Web and its instant connections have seemingly collapsed the confines of time and space, it is increasingly difficult for us to imagine and look forward to what the future could look like; we are haunted by these digital ghosts. The irony of this failure is that we look back to the past to experience nostalgia for utopias that never happened, and things come back and haunt us. 


In the digital age, where information is available at the click of a button, the past, present, and future begin to bleed into each other. As Grafton Tanner puts it, “we find ourselves living in a state of atemporality, yearning for a time before the present”. In his book Babbling Corpse, Tanner suggests that in the West, we pine for a time before the twenty-first century. Before the arrival of “September 11, 2001, and before the rise of the Internet. Capitalism knows this and exploits our collective nostalgia for economic gain, commodifying the very ghosts we clutch earnestly” (pg.4). In this commodified nostalgia, the cyberspaces of the 90s are remembered as an open space for creativity, something that was decentralized and self-built, populated by communities and discussions, and hosted on these bright and funky pages. Juxtaposed with the fast, surveilled, and invasive, app-driven spaces of the modern day, it is easy to understand the appeal and demand for nostalgic content of the 1990s internet.


The visions of the past, however, are not accurate reflections of past times. Many of the darker aspects are bleached out, and the result is media made by corporations that want us to see the past in particular ways that benefit their interests. Some notable examples of corporations commodifying Web 1.0 I came across are: Netflix’s BoJack Horseman, Marvel’s Captain Marvel, Meta’s e.gg. These sites are the products of an algamation of the past. The midi files, THEE Dancing Baby GIF (appears in both e.gg and Captain Marvel), guestbooks, Comic Sans, bright primary colours, starry night backgrounds, etc. It is as if the developers followed a WikiHow on “How to Design a Retro 90s Style Website or Blog”. It is so templated, yet the whole point of Web 1.0 is anything but. Internet historian Olia Lalina describes the early internet as “a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer.” Yet none of that hopefulness and risk-taking is present in these revivals. What is present is a small checklist of visual elements commonly found on the amateur web. The spirit of Web 1.0 is not there in its corporate, franken-designed revival, instead, what comes alive is the mangled corpse of its former self.


At the heart of these disembodied ghosts is a sense of uncanniness. These nostalgic web 1.0 pages act as an intermediary being, ghost from the spectral glow of the old web, present yet absent. They rob the familiar of its comfort. There is a gap between what is seen and its origins. We know Marvel meant to reference the 1990s amateur web through specific visual references, but where is the spirit of the amateur web? More importantly, Why? Why is a military recruitment tool weaponizing elements commonly associated with amateur web in order to appear “#relatable”? Why does it exist? Something is off. This uncanniness is predicated on our existing memory to form a “creeping strangeness”. It is both familiar and eerie, old and new.


This aesthetic of the old amateur web is often associated with the once popular web hosting site GeoCities. At its beginnings, it helped mark the shift of the internet from academia to an instrument of the people. At its height, it was purchased by Yahoo; it is some of the first examples of commercialization of the internet as well as platform society. It was brought back into notoriety in 2009 when Yahoo announced it would shut down and subsequently delete all its contents. A team of internet archivists were able to extract 1TB (of the reported 8TB) of content, and make it publicly available via a torrent.Today, its name is almost used as an stand-in for HTML eclecticism or 90s internet as a whole. When the term “GeoCities” is given away to these remembered styles, it creates the possibility that GeoCities had its own unique style, and its pages are distinguishable from web pages made elsewhere on the internet. In reality, GeoCities was one of many web hosting sites! To remember/reduce the 90s internet as bright colours, Comic Sans, GIFs, flashy images, etc paints an inaccurate image of what the internet of the 90s was like.


The emphasis on aesthetics also means it could be easily imitated, repurposed under different context, and often lacking the understanding about what it means to make a web page under the particular conditions of 90s internet. This, in turn, makes it more vulnerable to exploitation, and it works! Nostalgia is profitable; it tends to hold people’s attention well, helps sell products and ideas, and is easy to execute.


Kate Wagner in The Baffler calls this idealized, utopic version of the early web a form of “technological cannibalism”. Where media platforms create pastiches from the visual remnants of an internet that has long faded. Any context, political ethos, and history are “erased, leaving only a commodified, nostalgic aesthetic, or a decontextualized set of images”. They eat away at the internet’s history and legacy and vomit back a mushy, mingled version of it for our consumption. Outside the three examples above, a quick search will bring up a plethora of aesthetics driven, 90s nostalgic website examples.This phenomenon goes beyond 90s amateur web because capitalism has essentially forced the drive for innovation in art into atrophy. It continues to mine for our cultural past in an increasingly invasive manner.


All of this brings back to the project. Exploring the disembodied ghosts of our digital past. It is a commentary on the corporate commodification of amateur Web 1.0. The nostalgia felt for a time before the web was monetizable is being commodified and sold back to us. The idea was inspired by the three examples, Marvel, Meta, Netflix discussed earlier. It is a satirical version of these sites, where it has all the “mangled limbs” but none of the spirit. A hypothetical world where a media corporation launches a drag-and-drop site builder as a promotional piece for an upcoming movie about ghosts and monsters. A drag-and-drop site is rather ironic because it is so antithetical to what Web 1.0 was about. The juxtaposition between the modern site builder and the Geocities-esque site the user is creating highlights the relationship we have the web. The modern user is busy working, having fun, expressing themselves and they have the perfect tools and services at their disposal. Connection never breaks and the internet never fails. The distinctions between local servers, “clouds”, personal hard disks, laptop of one’s own and someone else’s vanishes. Once technology has become an unquestioned extension of ourselves, it no longer provokes us. Ask no new questions about technology and us.  


In a way, it can continue to haunt us, yet we have nothing we can do about it.