Web 2.0 offers convenience and accessibility, but these qualities come at a cost. We’ve relinquished the responsibilities of creation, curation, and even discovery to tech bros trafficking in packaged one shops for friendship, news, and entertainment. Social media platforms that promised to connect us instead seek to entrap and commodify our attention. Entrap and commodify are exactly what they’ve done. Spend enough time with Meta, Google, or Amazon and the algorithm is sure to notice. Before long, your feeds are inundated with more and more of you, your interests, your habits, your insecurities. There has never been a stronger recommendation system, one tailored to the ego and designed to keep you engaged, scrolling, and purchasing for as many hours a day as possible. As someone with a pervasive online footprint stretching back to 2016, I’m frankly just tired of the internet cannibalizing my soul. I genuinely believe that if I died today and were replaced by a cluster of atoms and cells programmed with my online presence, something that looks exactly like me, I wouldn’t be missed for years. When I made a spam account behind my mother’s back at thirteen, the tradeoff for actually communicating with my online friends, nearly five posts a day, was the hope that I could accumulate enough internet capital to make more (friends). To be seen. To become infinitely attractive, even when I wasn't physically. Something entirely different that the internets culture; and therefore the companies that control; has concocted. If that weren’t bad enough, these algorithms shepherd us into camps, inflame us with rage bait, and turn us against one another for little reason beyond increasing the time we spend glued to and spending money on their platforms. While we lose time, money, and empathy, the few companies that monopolize the web are fattened at our expense. With the pervasiveness of the smartphone, these tech bros have unwittingly unleashed a real-world analog of Orwell’s telescreen: a device used to pacify, stupefy, and enrage the population. There is nothing more terrifying than watching a video on a media platform talking about the growing distateful acts of the company that owns the platform and scrollling to the next video. The video was informative, yes, but I still am contributing to the problem though most are extremely aware of it. Even Orwell, however, hadn’t imagined that the real thing would do all this while simultaneously draining the people’s purses and contributing to levels of consumption that drive Earth’s sixth mass extinction. Worse still, this trajectory promises to deteriorate further, even exponentially, as the same figures push yet another so-called technological “advancement” down our throats: artificial intelligence driven by large language models. Armed with knowledge of Web 2.0’s very real harms, I’d predictably like to excise it from my life. But as someone for whom the phrase terminally online applies, I’m not ready to say goodbye to my entire virtual existence just yet. As difficult as it is to admit, the internet has long been and continues to be integral to how I experience human culture. I have dedicated myself to archiving live and rare music, art, interviews. I have made most of my friends and kept them through the internet. I don't hate the internet, rather what it is becoming. This is a small risk of course to my social life now...I'm luckily not 13/15/17 anymore. I (though it was hard and took a life shattering event to) have gained knowledge in what I need from friendships, and what I do not. I am reselute in my abilitys, and much happier by myself than in my developing years. The trade off of the world knowing my every move, location, interactions and wants for potential connection is not apealing to me. And so, I’ve come to Neocities searching for the ghosts of websites past. Untouched by the rot of late stage capitalism, the internet I remember was a place of experiment and exploration, inundated with personality. Websites functioned as both information reservoirs and digital art installations, offering glimpses into their creators’ inner worlds in ways no previous medium could. Features could be entirely superfluous. Utility was optional. Web pages were egos made manifes, molded by their creators and filtered through seizure inducing GIFs, tinny chiptunes, and low-res waifus. In seeking this past, I want to return to an internet rooted in creation rather than mindless consumption. One that serves my interests instead of demanding I serve it. While this website will no doubt become a distraction at times, I hope it will also act as a catalyst: a place where art and writing that might otherwise remain trapped in my head can finally exist. That head, after all, has a definite expiration date—perhaps seventy years, perhaps fewer if current trends continue. But beyond leaving any mark at all, I simply want to be engaged in the act of creation. I am happiest when I am practicing intellectual autonomy. I want to share, and be shared to. Theres no need to prefer a nice scrolly clean UI. I grew up in a computer lab, back to basics. I'm so exausted bruh. -Lauryn Ryals 1/14/26