Lamentations of a Web 1.0 Dinosaur
🕸️ 1️⃣ . 0️⃣ 🦕
I miss you Web 1.0.
Where did you go?
I have this naive and misguided belief that you will someday be reawakened to rescue those poor souls trapped in social media who have been reduced to like button pressing automatons.
Why didn't you make it easier for the non-technical to carve out their own spaces on the web rather than forcing them into the centralized digital fiefdom known as social media?
You felt so much more relaxing. Open a web browser. Type in a URL and read. There weren't any apps to install. Following was as simple as adding a bookmark to a homepage.
What about RSS? Your version of the feed and a gentler way to receive updates as opposed to having a digital firehose of inane babble shoved in your face, coupled with the endless bleeps and blurts of alerts from a card deck sized computer theoretically zapping your prefrontal cortex's ability to sustain focused attention to a task for any length of time.
We only had centering and images but we were happy with that. Calling attention to an important section on the page only required a <BLINK> HTML tag. Well, maybe, blink wasn't the best approach.
Then one day we received the gift of HTML Tables and we abused them using ingenious hacks to achieve quasi-sophisticated layouts and formatting of our luridly hued pages.
No following. No liking. No commenting. No spam. No malicious bots trying to sway our opinions. You were the digital functional equivalent of a newspaper article that didn't sass you back.
The only trolls lied in wait patiently under their bridges hoping for the Web 2.0 solution that would allow them to catapult their cruel textual assaults upon the innocent.
DSM-5 grade selfie-taking narcissism did not exist. No platform forced you to watch short form videos of humans acting stupidly into their smartphone cameras, clamoring for attention, and eating up your precious cellphone data as a result.
You didn't create the unwitting human products hemorrhaging vast amounts of personal data sold off to unknown third parties eventually coercing the humans to buy unneeded trinkets. Nobody tried to hack your profile or account to take control with the goal to peddle digital goods purchased with digital currencies.
Doom Scrolling meant panning side-to-side in the 3D view of a first-person shooter video game called "Doom," not filling your head with an infinite scrolling feed of bad news and wrath.
I am a proud Web 1.0 Dinosaur and I miss you Web 1.0. I know you're still there, lurking in the backwoods of the Internet, waiting to be rediscovered.
May the weary denizens of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 find you and enjoy a refreshing respite from our present digital madness in a slice of Internet heaven from the days of old.