#11: Webrings
Sometimes I suddenly become fixated on a word I haven't used or thought about in years, for no real reason except that my subconscious dredged it up. The other day, that word was "webrings." With a mixture of nostalgia and amusement, I considered how completely we extinguished the webring from the contemporary internet, yet for me they vividly evoke a specific moment when that internet was poorly commercialized, nerdy, and "good weird" (it is increasingly "bad weird").
If you were on the internet in 1998, you probably browsed across a lot of webrings. They were hallmarks of the GeoCities era of the web, in which, you, I, and six of our friends would have linked our websites together in a circular fashion, forcing visitors to work their way around the ring sequentially, a hilarious inefficiency (and primitive kind of SEO) that represents everything today's internet is not.
The aesthetic of webrings is a universe I'd like to live in:
As products of a burgeoning network that was beginning to envelop us all, the webring, in its name and usage, helped us understand the structure of that network (even if the circular structure wasn't its future), a rare concession. As we tend to our sad little profile pages on Facebook and Twitter, toiling away to produce data they can harvest and flailing in their oceanic immensity, let us all remember webrings for a moment and smile.
Reads:
Companies employ armies of human workers to train artificial intelligence to do what they want it to do (which in a way is the opposite of how it's supposed to work).
Silicon Valley's Cult of Nothing: creating artificial simplicity by concealing or ignoring the messy and the material.
Furbies being creepily destroyed by hydraulic presses (thanks Matt!)
Until next time,
Drew