By Hanna Stokes, Junior Researcher
In my last blog post, I wrote about finding, contributing, and being on the Web Revival, a network of personal websites. I also wrote about how the designs of online experiences of Web Revival websites remind me of the philosophy and curatorial practice of pidginization, since both are the design of experiences directed towards making their guests feelhuman again. In this blog post, I will write about the role of nostalgia in indie web culture, specifically within the Web Revival movement.
Netstalgia
For many, the early days of the web were the good ole days, full of excitement about what the future might bring. For others, who are too young or for other reasons didn’t experience the beginnings of the web, nostalgia towards the early web seems to stem from an interest in a time when being online was more fun than it is today. From within both groups, there are those who today are heavily inspired by the past while creating websites and networks online.
The Art Servers Unlimited conference can give us a glimpse of what people today long for from the past. The conference was held in London in 1998, five years after the World Wide Web was opened to the public. The roughly 50 participants who attended spoke about “art servers unlimited”, a network of initiatives that supported the creative, noncommercial, and critical use of the net.
Figure 1. Art Servers Unlimited 1998 conference booklet.
According to them, ingenuity was happening outside of state funded or free market success-oriented projects; they spoke of a strong presence of self-organized “bedroom artists” and backyard activists”.[i] This could explain the choice of graphic design for the event, featuring a cluster of space invaders gathering from many directions, like a network of aliens occupying digital space. (Figure 1).
The same type of presence can be found on the indie web today. Each website is handmade and unique and often very open about politics. For example, it is very common to see “buttons” on Neocities websites. Buttons are badges, logos, or banners that indicate the website crafter’s politics, affiliations or web crafting tools (Figure 2). Many sites on the indie web are made using Neocities, a platform named and modeled after GeoCities, a late 90’s/early 00’s platform for creating and browsing websites.
Figure 2. Three buttons. All found on Neocities websites.
The popular Neocities aesthetic stems from GeoCities aesthetic. Buttons, but also gifs, ASCII art, and website layouts and more are often directly sourced from GeoCities websites or are created by mimicking the style or the technological restraints of past web crafters. Buttons are again a good example, since some are old, but others are made to look old by using the popular colors, fonts, shading and size of GeoCities buttons.
Users on GeoCities could drag and drop to create the layout of their websites, and even though this is not an option on Neocities, many have chosen to add widgets inspired by the widgets that were available on GeoCities, such as visitor counters and guestbooks.
More than just visuals have been brought back to life. Early web websites often had welcome messages for visitors on their home page (Figure 3), made their construction progress visible, shared code and connected via webrings. All of which is common to include on Neocities websites.
In short, independent art and activism of the early web is undoubtedly a huge part of today’s indie web crafting culture.
Figure 3. An older website (left) and a newer one (right)
Yesterweb
Nostalgia was prevalent on the indie web before the global pandemic, but one discord community called Yesterweb gained a lot of influence during this time. A time when people were seeking comfort, had more time on their hands, and needed to be online to stay connected with loved ones. Yesterweb was founded in 2021 and was a community that strived to change online culture by encouraging people to make personal websites and organize their own online communities for social change. The Yesterweb community promoted their cause on platforms like SpaceHey, made an online zine, collected manifestos made by members, created a Yesterweb webring, and organized a Yesterweb convention.
Due to the popularity of the Yesterweb movement, “Yesterweb” began to be used to refer to web crafting communities who weren’t a part of the Discord community. Some members felt this was inappropriate usage, so the term “Web Revival” became the umbrella term, with the new term still indicative of the large role nostalgia played.
Yesterweb’s own interpretation of the role nostalgia played can be found in the organizer’s final report before their withdrawal from the movement. Their reflections reveal that nostalgia “was often the first thing that stood out and appealed to new members”, but that nostalgia became a source of division in the movement.[ii] This was due to very different interpretations and actions stemming from nostalgia, which made nostalgia “largely ineffective as something to build a community around.”[iii] Some had too much of an emphasis on recreating the past, leading them to disregard the potential of newer technologies to build a better internet with, and led to uncritical views of what the internet used to be. The excessive romanticization of the early web was something they definitively distanced themselves from in their ending note to the world, saying that their name itself was now an “outdated and misleading term”.[iv]
It is important to note that the organizers also wrote about the important role the children and youth of the movement played. The children were “often the most rebellious and the most willing to transform the state of the web” and that children had a specific kind of nostalgia towards the past called anemoia.[v]
Anemoia
“Anemoia” is a word coined by John Koenig in his dictionary called Obscure Sorrows. It means to long for a past Time you’ve never experienced yourself.
The word, “anemoia” is composed of the Ancient Greek word for wind (ánemos) and mind (nóos). Suggesting an intangible, winding, and powerful force. A force much like the winds of Earth. Earth’s winds are created from differences in heat from varied amounts of exposure to the sun. The Earth’s greater winds affect smaller ones. Likewise, some aspects of history are “lit up” more than others, and a greater collective understanding of the world influences individual’s understanding of themselves. In this way, longing for a Time never lived can heat up one understanding and cool down another. The process thereby creates winds for the sails of the mind.
Figure 4. Me (2 yrs.) on a computer in 1998. Originally in color.
Koenig writes that one might feel inclined to jump into an old black-and-white photo and inhabit another era, but that it is not actually the wish to time-travel that is at the heart of anemoia. Instead, the simplicity from the flattened representation is what is desirable. The simplicity, a practical framework, can help us hold on to or change our present, personal narrative. He writes,
“The photo itself means very little, in the end. Maybe all we ever wanted was the frame. So we could sit for a few minutes in a world of black-and-white, with clean borders that protect us from the rush of time. Like a tide pool just out of reach of the waves- so clear and still, you can see your own reflection.”[vi]
Memealogy
The research conducted raises some questions, such as: Is the nostalgia craze of the indie web really nostalgic? What happens when capturing the “spirit of the early web” is the only focus? What is lost or missing in the picture of online freedom? Which histories are not being taken into account?
A question that perhaps encapsulates the above questions and my motives could be: What kind of understanding and engagement with the history of the World Wide Web can humanize ways of being online?
Figure 5. Ritual Quartet No. 6 by Abdias Nascimento. Acrylic on canvas, 102 x 152 cm. Ipeafro collection, Rio de Janeiro. Nascimento created a living graphic symbolic language through his painting practice using a range of symbols from various African cultures.
Returning to pidginization again helps answer this question. In the last blog post, I made a connection to pidginization and indie web crafting because they both are the design of experiences directed towards humanization.
Ndikung’s concept of pidginization is inspired by the practice of assembling and reassembling language as colonial resistance. Pidginization as curatorial method, is,
“a curating that combines works, ideas, practices, and languages in resistance to canonical conventions, cultural stasis, ossified practices, dead rhythms, and singular forms where and when there must be constellations of the pluriversal.”[vii]
It is a polyphonic, rhizomatic kind of cultural exchange. To accomplish a similar type of cultural exchange, web crafters of the indie web must highlight different pieces of history, cultural artifacts, to generate still spaces for deep reflection and strong winds for setting sail.
Longing for the Past Already
It has been a pleasure to be a Junior Researcher at ETHOS Lab. I know this isn’t the last time I’ll have a reason to go to the lab, but I will miss regularly seeing the 2025 cohort there. If anyone would like to follow along in my life/research digitally, then make sure to check out my blog (Figure 6).
Figure 6. My blog. It is called portmantog. Portmantog is a portmanteau, a pun and a riddle
References
[i] (1998). Art Servers Unlimited (M. Luksch & A. Medosch, Eds.). https://monoskop.org/images/a/a0/Art_Servers_Unlimited_1998.pdf
[ii] The Yesterweb – Reclaiming the Internet. (2021). Yesterweb.org. https://yesterweb.org/
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Koenig, J. (2021). Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows. Simon & Schuster.
[vii] Bonaventure. (2023). Pidginization as Curatorial Method. MIT Press.