I was born too late for the internet I dream about.
The internet of the early 1990s — the one I’ve only experienced through archives, old forum posts, and the fading memories of people who were actually there — was something fundamentally different from what we have today. Not just technologically different. Spiritually different.
What the Old Internet Was
Picture this: a network of forums, mailing lists, Usenet groups, and hand-coded personal pages. Most of them were run by volunteers — a MIT professor here, a Bell Labs engineer there, a bored college student somewhere else. Nobody was doing it for money, because there was no money in it. Nobody was optimizing for engagement, because the concept hadn’t been invented yet. People just showed up, wrote things, argued about things, and built things, because the act of being online was itself an adventure.
These spaces became refuges for everything the mainstream world didn’t have room for. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Japanese anime spread across the Western internet through fansub groups and niche forums — what today’s aesthetics-obsessed internet calls “Animecore” is really just the afterglow of that era. Communities formed around things that couldn’t exist anywhere else: obscure music scenes, occult philosophy, experimental art, femboy culture and catgirl aesthetics, deep technical discussions about Unix internals or programming language theory. The internet was the place where the culturally homeless found a home.
The forums were imperfect. They could be elitist, insular, sometimes hostile. But they had something that today’s platforms fundamentally lack: they were built and maintained by people who cared about the thing itself, not about monetizing the attention of the people who cared about the thing.
What Killed It
The standard narrative is that capitalism killed the internet, and there’s truth to that. The arrival of Web 2.0 — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and their successors — transformed the internet from a constellation of independent communities into a handful of walled gardens optimized for advertising revenue. The algorithm replaced the forum moderator. The feed replaced the thread. The influencer replaced the anonymous expert.
But I think the story is more nuanced than “capitalism ruined everything.” There’s a structural reason the old internet couldn’t last, and it has to do with access.
The early internet was pure partly because it was small. The barrier to entry was high — you needed a computer, a modem, some technical knowledge, and usually a university or corporate account. The people who made it through that filter were, almost by definition, a self-selected group of curious, technically literate individuals. The quality of discourse was a byproduct of exclusion.
When the internet became truly universal — when everyone got a smartphone and a social media account — it stopped being a counterculture and started being a mirror of the real world. And the real world is messy, commercial, noisy, and full of people who don’t share your niche interests. The “degradation” of the internet wasn’t entirely a corporate conspiracy. It was the inevitable consequence of a private club becoming a public square.
That doesn’t make it less painful. It just means the cause is deeper than any single villain.
The Platforms Are Not the Internet
Here’s the thing that I think a lot of people miss: what we call “the internet” today is not really the internet. It’s a handful of apps running on the internet. When someone says “the internet is toxic” or “the internet is dead,” what they mean is that Twitter is toxic or that Instagram is soul-deadening. And they’re right. But the internet — the actual network, the actual infrastructure, the actual possibility space — is still there. It hasn’t gone anywhere.
The platforms captured our attention so completely that we forgot there’s an entire world outside of them. You can still host your own website. You can still run a forum. You can still create a community that isn’t mediated by an algorithm designed to maximize engagement through outrage. You can still build the internet you want to live in.
The spirit didn’t die. It got displaced. And displacement is not the same as death.
Where the Spirit Lives Now
If you know where to look, the old internet spirit is alive and remarkably well. It just went back underground — which, if you think about it, is exactly where it belongs.
It’s on Neocities, where people are building personal websites with hand-written HTML, ugly backgrounds, and animated GIFs, not because it’s trendy but because they genuinely enjoy the craft of making a web page.
It’s on Mastodon and the Fediverse, where small instances run by individuals serve communities of dozens or hundreds of people who actually know each other — the digital equivalent of a neighborhood bar.
It’s in IRC channels that have been running continuously for decades, where the conversation is slow, low-bandwidth, and deeply human in a way that no Discord server with custom emojis can replicate.
It’s on Lainchan and its descendants, where the intersection of technology, anime, and countercultural philosophy is discussed with a seriousness and depth that would be impossible on any mainstream platform.
It’s in the open source community, where people still contribute thousands of hours of labor to projects they believe in, for no compensation other than the satisfaction of building something useful.
And it’s in projects like the AI VTuber I’m building — not because AI VTubers are inherently countercultural, but because the act of building one from scratch, alone, for no commercial reason, driven purely by the desire to see if it can be done, is the exact same energy that powered every great thing the old internet produced.
The Rebellion Test
I have a theory that might be controversial: the way to know if someone is a real computer scientist — not just someone with a CS degree, but someone who has internalized what computing is actually about — is to check whether they have the spirit of rebellion.
I don’t mean rebellion in the shallow, edgy, “I’m going to break the rules for fun” sense. I mean something deeper. The entire history of computer science is a history of people who looked at the way things were and said: “This is not good enough. I can build something better.” And then they did, usually in defiance of the institutions and conventions around them.
Stallman rebelled against proprietary software. Torvalds rebelled against the idea that operating systems had to be expensive and closed. Berners-Lee rebelled against the information silos of academia. Aaron Swartz rebelled against the paywalling of human knowledge. Satoshi rebelled against centralized monetary systems.
The rebellion is not the point. The point is the vision of something better that the rebellion serves. But without the willingness to reject the default — to say “no, this isn’t right, and I’m going to build the alternative myself” — none of those things would have happened.
When I look at my peers in computer science — talented, smart, technically accomplished — I sometimes notice a strange passivity. They optimize for the next job at a big company. They follow the trending framework. They build what the market tells them to build. There’s nothing wrong with that, exactly, but it’s missing the essential quality that makes computer science what it is: the insistence that the world doesn’t have to be this way.
Building, Not Mourning
I’ll be honest: I sometimes catch myself mourning the internet I never had. Romanticizing the 1990s, wishing I could have been in one of those Usenet discussions or Berkeley mailing lists.
But nostalgia is a trap. The point is not to recreate the past. The point is to understand what made the past valuable and to carry that forward into whatever we build next.
What made the old internet valuable wasn’t the technology — it was Usenet and FTP and Gopher, all tools that are objectively worse than what we have now. What made it valuable was the culture: the belief that you could build your own space, that communities should serve their members rather than their advertisers, that the weird and the niche and the difficult deserved a place to exist.
That culture doesn’t require 1990s technology. It requires 1990s values applied with 2020s tools.
So here’s what I’m doing about it: I’m building things I actually care about, in public, with the door open for anyone who shares the same sensibility. Not for followers. Not for a personal brand. Because the thing itself matters.
If the internet spirit is going to be reborn, it won’t happen through manifestos or nostalgia posts. It’ll happen through the accumulated weight of thousands of individual choices — each person who decides to build their own website instead of posting on someone else’s platform, who contributes to open source instead of hoarding proprietary advantage, who creates something strange and beautiful and pointless and real.
The old internet was made by people like that. The next one will be too.
“No matter where you go, everyone’s connected.” — Serial Experiments Lain
This post is part of an ongoing series about technology, culture, and the places where they collide. I write here on my own site, because that’s the point.