I wrote my first line of HTML in 1997. I was a kid sitting in front of a monitor that weighed more than I did, using a dial-up connection that screamed like a fax machine having a panic attack, and I made a word turn blue and underlined on a screen. It linked to nothing. It didn't need to. The fact that I could make it happen at all was the entire point.
That was the internet I fell in love with. Not this one. This one — the one we use now — I helped build the infrastructure for. And some days I look at what travels across it and wonder if we took a wrong turn somewhere around 2009 and just kept driving.
It Was Ugly and That Was the Point.
The early web was hideous. Tiled backgrounds that burned your retinas. Neon text on black pages. Visitor counters at the bottom of every site proudly displaying a number like 00047 as if that was an accomplishment. "Under Construction" GIFs. Web rings. Guest books where strangers left messages like it was a bathroom wall with better grammar.
And it was absolutely, unapologetically beautiful.
Not because of how it looked — because of what it meant. Every one of those ugly pages was someone's. Not a brand's. Not a platform's. A person's. Some guy in Wisconsin built a page about his model trains. A teenager in Brazil made a shrine to a band nobody outside her friend group had heard of. A dad in Oregon cataloged every fishing spot in his county with hand-drawn maps he scanned at the library.
Nobody was optimizing for engagement. Nobody was thinking about conversion rates or bounce rates or whether their content would perform. They were just putting themselves out there because the internet was this wild, open thing and having a little corner of it felt like magic.
Every ugly page on the early web was someone's. Not a brand's. Not a platform's. A person's.
Then We Optimized the Soul Out of It.
I watched it happen in real time. I was in SEO and web work before most people knew those were jobs. I watched the shift from "build something interesting" to "build something that ranks." I watched content become a strategy instead of a thing people made because they had something to say. I watched the word "content" replace the word "writing" and I watched everyone pretend that was fine.
It wasn't fine. It was the beginning of the end.
Because once you start optimizing for algorithms, you stop optimizing for humans. You write headlines designed to be clicked, not read. You structure pages for crawlers, not people. You start asking "what does Google want?" instead of "what do I want to say?" — and the difference between those two questions is the entire difference between a website and a vending machine.
I'm not innocent in this. I did SEO work. I helped companies rank. I know how the sausage gets made because I spent years in the factory. But I always knew something was being traded away — the weirdness, the personality, the thing that made the web feel like a place instead of a tool.
The year I wrote my first HTML. The web had roughly 1 million websites. Today it has over 1.5 billion. It got bigger. I'm not sure it got better.
Social Media Ate Everything.
Here's what really killed the old internet: we stopped going to it. We started letting it come to us.
When the web was a place you visited — you opened a browser, typed a URL, explored — it had the energy of walking through a weird neighborhood. You never knew what you'd find. You followed links like alleyways. You stumbled into forums full of people arguing about things you'd never heard of and stayed for three hours because it was fascinating.
Then social media showed up and turned the entire experience into a feed. One stream. Algorithmically sorted. Designed not to inform you or inspire you but to keep you scrolling until your thumb goes numb. The internet stopped being a place you explored and became a place that was served to you — and the menu was picked by someone else based on what kept you sitting at the table longest.
Everyone became a brand. That's the part that makes me tired. Actual human people — with messy, contradictory, interesting lives — started performing a curated version of themselves for an audience they mostly don't know. Every post is a pitch. Every photo is a statement. Every opinion is calibrated for engagement, not honesty. And the platforms reward it — the more polished you are, the more reach you get, which teaches everyone that authenticity is a liability.
I'm on social media. I'm not pretending I'm above it. But I know the difference between being on it and being of it — and I refuse to let an algorithm decide what version of me people see.
The internet stopped being a place you explored and became a place that was served to you — and the menu was picked by someone else.
I Build the Pipes. I Know What Flows Through Them.
There's an irony I live with every day: I run a telecom company. I build the physical infrastructure — fiber, towers, the actual hardware — that makes the modern internet possible. The thing I'm describing, the thing I sometimes wish we could undo, runs on cables my company helped put in the ground.
I don't feel guilty about that. Infrastructure is neutral. The pipes don't care what flows through them — that's the entire principle of how this works. My job is to make the connection fast, reliable, and available. What people do with it is their business.
But I'd be lying if I said I never think about it. About the gap between what the internet could be and what it is. About the fact that we built this incredible thing — this global network connecting billions of people — and the primary use case became watching strangers argue about nothing and selling each other things they don't need through content that wasn't written by anyone who cared.
The infrastructure is better than it's ever been. The connection is faster. The reach is wider. The technology is staggering. And somehow the experience got worse. We built a superhighway and filled it with billboards.
I'm Still Here, Building by Hand.
This website — the one you're reading right now — is hand-coded HTML and CSS. I wrote it. Not a template. Not a builder. Not an AI. Me, in a text editor, at night, like it's 2003 and I still think <table> tags are a layout tool.
I do it because it's the version of the internet I still believe in. The one where a person makes a thing, puts it on a server, and says: here's what I think. No algorithm decides who sees it. No platform owns it. No metric determines whether it was worth making. It exists because I made it, and that's enough.
I know this makes me a dinosaur. I know most people reading this are doing so because a link showed up in their feed — the very system I just spent a thousand words criticizing. The irony isn't lost on me.
But the internet I fell in love with in 1997 — the weird, ugly, personal, slightly broken version of it — that internet isn't completely dead. It's just buried under a billion layers of optimization and engagement metrics and algorithmic curation. Every time someone builds a personal site, writes a blog nobody asked for, or puts something online without checking whether it'll perform — they're digging it back up.
That's what I'm doing here. Digging.
And I'm not stopping.