Zachary W. Huang
September 20, 2026
I was born post-2000, into a world that was more connected than ever before. There’s a family photo of me as a toddler (like I was probably around 2 years old) sitting in front of a PC, with my hand on the mouse. The first video game I ever played was Purble Place, this really shitty game included with Windows Vista, and I remember there was a minigame where you made cakes which I found really stressful for some reason.
By the time I was in first grade, multiple iPhones had been released. In middle school, there was Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube, and they were already massive platforms that were still growing. The point being, for my entire life, this whole “internet” thing was already normalized and a part of everyday life.
But somewhere along the line, the “internet” turned into a monster. When I was a kid, the internet was where I went to download Minecraft mods and watch Gordon Ramsay cooking videos. Now, the internet is the world’s largest data collection platform, whose sole purpose is to monetize your attention for advertising purposes. The “internet” (e.g. like 3-4 large social media apps) is now mainly driven by recommendation algorithms that figure out exactly what type of content is most addictive to you personally and show you endless amounts of it.
It didn’t even occur to me how bad it got until, in college, I realized that I literally couldn’t work on my problem sets for more than like 30 minutes consecutively without opening up Instagram and scrolling for 5-10 minutes. It was like the digital equivalent of a cigarette break.
Ever wondered why your TikTok or Instagram recommendations are so damn accurate? Well, it’s because these companies are hiring PhDs for high 6-figure salaries (maybe even 7-figure TC) to develop AI systems that maximize the amount of time you stay on their apps. Then, once they have your attention, social media apps auction off your data and the screen space on your device to the highest-bidding advertiser.
As it turns out, this business model is so good that it’s worth nearly 1 trillion dollars globally (source). Isn’t that, like, absolutely insane? Something something about “if the product is free, you are the product.” Fun fact (or maybe not so fun): Meta’s public SEC filings report that, per quarter, they make around $70 in revenue per user in US/Canada (source). Which comes out to $280+ annually per user. WTF.
In fact, we’ve even reached the point now where people roughly in my generation, born into the “information era”, have become successful artists and have started to make music talking about the effects of the internet and social media.
Secrets
I don’t wanna tell you everything about me
I don’t wanna feed more oxygen to
Your fire, your fire~Magdalena Bay - Secrets (Your Fire), on “Mercurial World”
So while I’m at it, I’ll just plug some artists I’ve been listening to recently and have really enjoyed lol. Magdalena Bay’s 2024 album Imaginal Disk is definitely one of my favorite albums of all time. I really love the synth-pop sound, and the narrative of the album, which kind of explores what it means to be human in the modern day and age, is also really compelling to me. But even without the overarching story, each track can still stand on its own, both lyrically and instrumentally.
I wanna fuck my computer
’Cause no one in the world knows me better
It says my name, it says, “Nina”
And no one in the world does it better~Ninajirachi - Fuck My Computer, on “I Love My Computer”
The past couple years have been amazing for electronic music fans like myself. There’s Porter Robinson’s Smile! :D, Ninajirachi’s I Love My Computer, Underscores’ U, Tsubi Club’s Trinket, and Frost Children’s Sister and Tweaker Poem, just to name a few. All of these I would recommend as really good albums.
Ninajirachi’s “I Love My Computer” more specifically focuses on, basically, what it was like to have unrestricted internet access as a kid and what it means to her. Because on the one hand, the internet is what led her to fall in love with electronic music and music production (fun fact: Ninajirachi actually produced the official demo project for Ableton Live 11), and now she’s an internationally acclaimed artist and DJ. But the internet also exposed her to things like snuff films when she was a child (as she talks about on the track “Infohazard”) and also toxic social media usage (on the track “Delete”).
I honestly relate a lot to this album (plus the songs are all bangers too). The internet 100% shaped who I am today, in the best way possible, and if I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t do anything different. But yeah, I definitely also saw some things on the internet that I probably shouldn’t have seen when I was a kid, and I also didn’t have the healthiest relationship with video games.
Could I interest you in everything all of the time?
A little bit of everything all of the time?
Apathy’s a tragedy, and boredom is a crime
Anything and everything, all of the time~Bo Burnham - Welcome to the Internet, on “Inside”
In my opinion, Bo Burnham’s 2021 musical/comedy special Inside is a really good reflection of the general “vibe” during the COVID pandemic when everything became virtual. It’s entertaining, a little bit depressing, but also kind of hopeful - though I haven’t watched it in a while so I don’t exactly remember, but in general I thought it was really good.
“So, the internet is both good and bad… how insightful!”
Well, my point is that the internet has become commoditized at the expense of the average individual. Ok, well then what can we do about it? Honestly, nothing really. The growth of the internet and of social media is driven by forces way larger than any one individual (hint: $$).
However, we do still have some power. In economic terms: “The one advantage the price taker holds over the market maker is the opportunity to be selective” (Victor Niederhoffer, in “The Education of a Speculator”). Or, in other words, we as consumers have a choice, not just of choosing which big tech company’s product we become, but rather whether we actually become a product at all.
This might be a little anti-climactic. Yes, obviously, we can choose whether to use social media or not.
But now I want to move to the second point of this blog post. I think that we can obtain the same level of connectivity and fantastical experiences that we would expect from the internet, but without cutting it out of our lives entirely, and without the enshittification that comes from big tech companies.
I can’t speak to it personally, as I didn’t exist until after Y2K, but there are many people online who talk about the “old web”, or “web 1.0”, or the “Indie Web”. Basically, back in the 90s, the internet was mostly small, self-hosted websites and blogs. People wrote about things they liked, linked to the webpages of friends or things they found interesting, and genuinely “surfed” the web for fun. The beauty of it was that no search engine was required - you started on one website, then clicked on a link to another, then another, and before you knew it you had stumbled across the most interesting website you’d ever seen, no matter what your own definition of “interesting” is (if that makes any sense).
And the thing is, because there is no profit to be made, and no incentive for SEO, what you would find is that these websites were truly authentic and personal, and they reflected the genuine and creative aspects of a real human being, even if they are anonymous.
So here’s the actual point of this article: this still exists. You won’t find it through Facebook, Reddit, or X, but tons of people do still host really cool personal websites. Many people host on services like Neocities and Nekoweb. People link to other similar websites through webrings and 88x31 buttons.
What is a webring, you might ask? Basically, the idea is that you can put your website in a “webring”, and then each website in the ring links to their “previous” and “next” neighbors, and these links go in a circle. So this is a way for people who have similar interests or hobbies to naturally form a network or community online. And then, anyone browsing a website in a webring can easily navigate to a similarly interesting website.
In fact, I recently joined a webring myself (started by a friend). This is what the “interface” looks like:
<-- Previous part of the Next -->
There are artists, programmers, writers, and honestly just completely random types of people who have made their own little “corner of the internet” which you can explore and browse. Sure, making a website might be a slight technical barrier to entry, but it’s genuinely really easy and anyone who can Google “how to make a website” (or just ask an LLM nowadays) can do it. People write about their day, about TV shows or books they’ve read, about programs they’ve written, art they’ve drawn, music they’ve made. It’s authentic and genuine, and I’ve lost many hours of my life surfing this new “old web” through webrings.
While browsing one day, I came across someone’s blog post about being in a toxic relationship for 6 months. I didn’t know this person, and I will likely never meet them, but I got a glimpse into their life and personality that seems almost too real, like I shouldn’t know these details. But even so, these were someone’s real thoughts, screamed into the void without caring about who is on the other side. It’s not algorithmically censored, or sponsored by a brand, or meant to advertise a product or build an audience for future monetization. It’s like I ran into this person in a bar, they told me their life story, and now we’ve parted ways and I’ll never see them again. I don’t remember how I navigated to their website, nor did I bookmark it, so I genuinely couldn’t find my way back if I tried. But either way I hope they’re doing better now.
I hope that one day people might navigate to my site through a webring and find my blog posts or projects interesting. I don’t really mind if they never reach out to me personally. I just hope that I’ve imparted my true thoughts to them, and maybe that they’ll learn something new.
I can’t really put it any better than this blog post I found (also through a webring).
I’m nostalgic for the web of the 90s and 00s. A time when it was full of small, handcrafted websites and blogs.
Our posts covered everything and nothing, sharing deep passions and silly musings with equal enthusiasm. Strangers would stop by, join the conversation, and sometimes those chance encounters turned into lifelong friendships.
Picture this site as an oasis: stop by, rest as long as you’d like, and enjoy what you find. I hope you’ll return for new stories. They won’t go viral, but they’ll be authentic.
I hope you maybe feel inspired to create your own little corner of the internet and fill it with whatever you desire. It’s fun and creative and cool (in my opinion).
And if you’d like to browse through some interesting sites through webrings, I would recommend XXIIVV, the Hotline Webring, and the No AI webring. But I will warn you, there are thousands of different webrings reachable through these sites, and tenfold more personal sites. How do I know this? Maybe that will have to wait for Part 2 of this blog post ;)