It Was Bound to Happen: Brooklyn Hipsters Now Want to Return to the ’90s Internet
You’d open a webpage with a few photos scattered among the text and could go grab a coffee before it even finished loading. In that sense, it reminds me of Joe Biden’s processing speed. I remember once trying to load a large star chart — I was looking for Orion and hadn’t smoked weed — and I left it loading, went to sleep, and the next morning all I could see were a couple of Taurus horns, maybe 5 percent of the image. The ’90s internet was a stress test comparable only to the adventure of trying to install a pirated ’80s video game without errors.
Brooklyn hipsters have grown tired of unreliable gadgets and are now obsessed with the Web Revival, a movement born in opposition to algorithms…
Brooklyn hipsters have grown tired of unreliable gadgets and are now obsessed with the Web Revival, a movement born in opposition to algorithms, standardized functional design, and the “dead internet” teeming with bots and AI, where it seems increasingly difficult to encounter real humans.
This trend is spearheaded by a motley crew of activists, creatives, designers, and generally people who listen to vinyl, sport beards thicker than their hair, and smoke pipes before turning sixty. They’re launching homemade forums, video games that emulate the old Flash classics (RIP), websites with ’90s-style designs full of looping GIFs, mouse pointers shaped like giant hands that spark when clicked, and a bunch of archival sites rescuing the chaotic flood of lost pages from Geocities and other places we once peered into with the same suspicion I now feel staring at Gemini AI’s rear end as it passes by. (RELATED: Gen Z’s Nostalgia Isn’t Regression — It’s Resistance)
Being nostalgic by nature, I tried to join this cultural movement for PTG (People with Thick Glasses) by convincing my nephews to swap Fortnite for old Minesweeper. I failed: I was immediately canceled in their room, blocked on my phone, and they’ve developed a preventative device that makes Alexa sound a siren and shout, “Attention all units, the crazy uncle is at it again!” every time I approach their room.
In the Web Revival, it’s not so much the old ’90s forums themselves that are the stars, but the fact that their designers have deliberately preserved the same look and limited functionalities as back then. It’s more or less like trying to perform appendicitis surgery by sticking a cardboard straw in the patient’s stomach and sucking through it, after chanting to the god of appendices.
One of the funniest initiatives in this vein is creating websites that act as graveyards for other websites, complete with tombstones, names, functions, and the lifespan of each service. I was visiting these website graveyards when I realized I had forgotten MySpace, AltaVista, Lycos, and many other illustrious dead. Besides a prayer for their souls, I tossed a random icon into the recycle bin in their memory.
I admit I was starting to find all this amusing, and it seems to reflect the fact that twentysomethings who first ventured online in 1997 — rather than recalling Beatles albums like it was the ’60s — are now feeling sentimental about the chords of the famous modem song, whose expectant chorus, promising a world of illusions, went something like: “bee-doo-krrr-shhhh-reee-kshhh.” But, of course, there’s always more in cultural matters.
Diving into articles about this growing net-vintage wave, I realized that what bothers these activists isn’t so much that the internet is now faster, prettier, and full of AI tools. What disturbs many of the movement’s driving forces is that they no longer control public discourse: the left has lost its digital hegemony. That’s why they hate social media, criticize digital capitalism, find Elon Musk nauseating, and their main enemy is something they call crypto-fascists, presumably fascists addicted to that stuff Superman didn’t like.
What amazes me is why, whenever a quirky and fun cultural trend emerges, some left-wing group has to colonize it, taking it way too seriously and filling it with unbearably boring ideological content. And it’s a shame, because I was convinced and about to log on to ICQ for a while, send a text to download a Backstreet Boys polytone, and make a 411 call from my landline to ask my favorite Brooklyn hipster friend for his phone number. Sigh… Any time in the past was always… slower.
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