THE ARCHITECTURE OF MEMORY WAS REAL

Sometimes, there’s a pattern I keep noticing in myself. It happens almost without thinking. I’ll open my browser, type a few letters, and the browser auto-complete takes over. Five sites, maybe six, always the same ones. It’s mechanical. I’m not looking for anything in particular; I’m not even expecting to find something new. But there’s still some part of me that believes that scrolling this time will yield something entertaining.

And maybe that’s what’s changed. The internet didn’t vanish, It... just shifted. Quietly, thoroughly. What used to be natural, strange, and alive just got paved over and packaged. It’s been completely renovated until nothing sticks. Every damn corner flattened into a single seamless hallway. Navigation has been replaced with inertia. We don’t explore anymore. We doomscroll, hoping for gold, like we’re placing our own mental bets on how long it’ll take for that sweet, sweet serotonin.

There was a time when every site felt like a room someone left the front door open to. A room with personality, with artifacts. Broken counters, blinking text. A background that was tiled wrong. Every click took you further into something someone actually made. And that made it feel like you were going somewhere, like you were moving through place.

Now, we move across things. A feed has no door, edge, nor memory. It remembers only what you’ve already done. It personalizes by prediction, not your presence. And without presence, there is no memory.

I used to remember URLs like I remembered phone numbers. I could navigate them by tactile feel. I knew what someone’s blog or personal site felt like. Now, I forget even what I just saw. I forget what I meant to come back to. Because the web doesn’t ask me to come back. It just tells me to keep moving.

...It’s hard to explain this to someone who didn’t experience it firsthand. That sense of orientation. That a website could have a mood. That a forum could hold things like a basement you snuck into with your best friend. That a bad layout was a kind of trust that it was real.

Memory anchors to place. And when we slowly lost the sense of place online, we started forgetting not just where we’d been, but what it meant to go anywhere at all.

THE POLITICS OF USELESSNESS AND FORGOTTEN JOY

The websites I used to make were really rough. The code was clunky, the images didn’t align, and half the links were broken, but they were mine. They were stitched together with love, boredom, and a kind of joy that didn’t care at all about being seen. Those sites weren’t trying to go anywhere, they just... were. And that was the whole deal. I was just having fun.

There was something fun about putting up a webpage with a flashing cursor and a guestbook that no one signed. It wasn’t for likes or reach. It was for the weird sense of satisfaction that came from making something and letting it chill in a corner of the internet like a name carved in a tree. I remember some kids writing HTML in Notepad and uploading jpegs from their mom’s scanner. That was the web I remember. A place made by people who had no reason to be doing what they were doing.

And it fucking ruled.

You could make a shrine to one Digimon. You could have a page called "stuff i like" with one link and a broken image. It was freedom. Mistakes were fine. Encouraged, even. There was room for odd design, overlapping images, and off-key background music. Things were allowed to be ugly because ugly meant you did it all yourself. It was proof of your effort. It meant no one had come in and polished it for you, and that meant it was still yours.

Now most digital spaces feel curated to death. The pressure isn’t just to make something for the sake of it, but to make it make sense. To make it aesthetic, and to be sellable. Even your weirdness has to be well-lit and captioned.

But I miss when the internet asked me to stay just a little longer. I miss stumbling into something that didn’t explain itself. Some weird site with glowing text and a MIDI file that played forever. A site with a layout that broke on your family computer, but for some reason worked just right at your uncle’s home computer.

Now the scroll gives me versions of myself over and over again. It gives me things it knows I’ll like, until I forget how to be surprised. Until I forget that I once came here to get lost, and not to be mirrored.

I used to post without thinking about the reaction. Now every damn thought is filtered through an imaginary audience. I wonder if the joke will land, if it’s too niche, or weird. I adjust before I even write it.

Even when I’m alone, I’m performing. I’m narrating myself. I’m polishing fragments that no one even asked for, because I’ve learned what gets seen and what doesn’t. And I’ve learned to want to be seen, even when I don’t like it.

But there’s something inside me that still remembers the thrill of typing something into a textbox and hitting “POST” just to see what it looked like. The freedom of knowing no one was coming, and still doing it anyway. The early web wasn’t efficient, but it was kind. You didn’t have to know what you were doing. Someone would reply with the code. Forums were places where we all taught each other how to torrent Photoshop brushes and make Winamp skins. It was collective illegibility.

Then came Discord, Reddit, Twitter. Everything consolidated, structured, and modded to hell. Horizontal knowledge got buried under karma scores and NFT influencers.

I didn’t learn how to do any of this from school. I learned it from strangers, and friends. From zipped folders of brushes I shouldn’t have been downloading. From copy-paste HTML that made your cursor sparkle. From forums that didn’t explain a thing, you just had to give it a shot.

It felt like a collective secret. A gift economy of code, graphics, and half-baked ideas. No credits, no copyright. Just pass it on.

We didn’t call it mutual aid, but it pretty much was. And it worked because no one was trying to go viral. We were just trying to make cool shit for each other.

That kind of play doesn’t fit inside modern metrics. It’s inefficient, and useless. But maybe that’s why it felt like joy.