Kate Wagner put together an absolutely amazing essay on the state of the web today and how it got that way. It’s achingly sad in a lot of ways, pointing out how much of the internet we’ve just straight up lost over the years, and how capitalism has ground much of the older web era’s creativity to a pulp. Don’t worry, though, it offers a little hope at the end, too.
A line I particularly liked from the section on vaporwave:
The pastiche compositions of Arizona Iced Tea cans and old Windows desktops were very quickly made available on all these commercial interfaces, which were not only feeding on a countercultural art movement—they were likewise consuming the ghosts of an internet they had long since murdered.
Read it here: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/404-page-not-found-wagner
And here’s a PDF in case that original link ever goes away:
404 Page Not Found by Kate Wagner PDF
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