I’ve returned to the surface for a brief respite from my expedition. I’ve been excavating, digging, and probing into the buried internet. You know, the one filled with small personal sites, eccentric blogs from passionate people about odd niches, and the zany w3c-defying, css-crime committing sites filled with 3d animations and madhouse layouts. And it has truly made me feel like an archeologist rediscovering the internet I grew up on back in the day.
I thought this part of the internet had disappeared. Until one day recently, I was checking the analytics on my personal site and I saw a referral come from a source I had never heard of: https://kagi.com/. It was a search engine, one that focused on privacy and disabled tracking. And it was paid. Ok, but why was someone using this? What makes this different? I dug around a bit more and learned of the small web, a part of the internet that didn’t quite go away but just got suppressed by tech giants seeking to monetize our attention on the internet.
And it felt like I was snapped right back to the past clicking through the Kagi small web the same way I would with StumbleUpon, bumping into random blogs where someone reviews every large clock in Britain to highly polished and well-maintained personal sites. These spaces were digital gardens being slowly and carefully tended by people over the years, often silently and in the background away from the overtly surveilling eyes of advertisers and tech corporations. This was so refreshing to see. The old internet hadn’t gone away, it just got buried. We just need the tools to dig it back out. Kagi was exactly that, a search engine that prioritized human voices and authentic sites instead of showing sponsored results and continually reminding you that you live in a consumerist, capitalist hellhole that is constantly tracking your every move, click, and view.
I found incredible personal sites, chaotically energizing personal spaces, and lots of Bear blogs. These digital gardens are exactly what I wanted to eventually do with my own site. I wanted a space to put up oddball experiments with technology and games, have a blog for musings and general thoughts, and have a space to showcase my actual professional work. Currently, it’s all very barebones and utilitarian, but the small web has inspired me to reach for greater heights. I’ve already started sketching and tinkering for cool ways to tend to my own digital garden.
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Every now and then over the past few years, I would often find myself longing for the cozy forums I used to hang out in or reading the small indie blog about new games and technology that I used to frequent as a pre-teen. The internet in those days for me was a refuge from a life that made no sense to me: random rules made up by adults that were religiously enforced, academic pressure with no room for error, and a societal construct for friends and relationships with its own unwritten rules of engagement that I couldn’t seem to immerse myself in comfortably enough as an introvert.
The pre-social media internet though, was different. I had small communities of interest groups sprinkled all over the place across what felt like a sprawling web of interests: design, pokémon, video games, cars, astronomy, photography, cricket, fusion music, the web, and so much more. I would log on every single day to catch up on what the latest news was, who replied to my posts, what’s causing a buzz in the circles, and just hang out with people who were into the same things that I was. It was a digital meetup group that asynchronously communicated and was ever-present with no expectations of how much or how often you needed to contribute to it. You could be a fly on the wall or share your opinion about every single thing. It didn’t matter. That’s what felt so freeing about it. A space you could observe from the outside and decide whether it’s worth engaging with.
I made real connections with so many people. I still have the online handles of dozens of close friends memorized, despite never ever having met them in real life or not knowing their real names or where they lived. What mattered is that they were there every day showing up on the same threads or sites chiming in with their take on whatever’s happening. My daily routine was to load up some music on Winamp, check AIM to catch up on DMs and statuses, catch up on the latest threads in my forums and chatrooms, check out interesting links, bookmark a few things here and there, read some blog posts, and then maybe jump into a video game for an hour or so before logging off. We did have limited time on the family computer, after all.
All of this had a real impact on my worldview, perspective, interests, and shattered the bubble that most of my physical community was inside of at the time. I discovered that design could be a real career that you could get paid for and started learning Photoshop tutorials. I dug deep into the art & technology behind how games are made and fell in love with how it allowed a creative vision to come alive with technical smoke-and-mirror wizardry. I taught myself all of the human history, wars, and conflicts from a global perspective that our highly nationalized curriculum didn’t cover in detail. I formed opinions about the democratization of software and how visual learning through prototypes that you can feel and play with changes your attitude towards that thing. The old web literally shaped me into who I am today.
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At the risk of sounding like a decaying husk of flesh on the shore, I’ll state the obvious: the current state of the internet is a shallow, dystopian, surveillance-filled nightmare that has been commercialized to such an unusable extreme that sales of dumb-phones and de-tech’ing yourself is on the rise. News websites are unreadable without either bombarding you with a dozen glaring ads or asking you to sign up for a subscription. Social media VPs make decisions based on trends and engagement that monetizes your attention and it’s gotten so bad that people are either numbed to it or tuning out entirely. Polarization, negativity, and hatred is so profitable that the majority of the internet comment sections are bots trying to lure actual humans into engaging with ragebait content or at the very least, getting them to spend enough time on it to alter their state of mind to a point where they’re desperate enough to want to do something about it. It’s completely nuts and is accelerating its death spiral as AI takes over in running and making decisions about the future of the web. It’s well on its way to becoming a bot graveyard and there won’t be anyone at the funerals.
Every time I pick up my phone to do something that’s not calling, messaging, or using some utilitarian app to complete some mundane task like depositing a check or paying a bill, I usually check one of three apps: Reddit, Instagram, or Bluesky. Those three were in my daily rotation for years (Twitter before Bluesky) whenever I wanted to know what the latest news is or what’s going on in the world. Every single time, I’d leave less satisfied than I was before I decided to check what’s happening. It doesn’t even matter if the news is positive or negative, it’s more about how it’s editorialized by the press and how it’s framed to inevitably start an argument online. All the sponsored content and ads on top of this made this a completely unusable experience. In fact, there’s a great blog post that I found on the small web about why our brains crave this habit even if it isn’t providing us with any real value: our feedback loops for what we find satisfying have been completely broken by social media.
Lately, that habit has changed. Instead of opening Reddit, Instagram, or Bluesky, I just go on Kagi. I just browse through the small web and read an incredibly detailed blog post about how the miniature toy industry is having a moment by someone who has been deeply and passionately tracking it for decades. They’re not a writer, they don’t write for a publication, they don’t make any money off the article, and they don’t have any ads on their website. It’s a heartfelt article written because they wanted to put it up, cared about the content and formatting, and what the reader would care about reading. This genuine authenticity is something that news editorials and tech giants will never be able to match despite all the hype about AI.
As The Boring Internet theory correctly points out, the web wasn’t built by people looking to monetize it. It was just a bunch of small protocols built by researchers to share files with each other more easily that slowly expanded into more and more with email and streaming and connectivity. Capitalism ruined the web. But “ruined” isn’t quite the right word, it just built its own corporate veneer on top of it. The old web is still alive and well, we just need the right excavation tools to find it. So head over to Kagi Small Web and check it out. It might just be the dose of inspiration you need to de-toxify your life from the poison that plagues it today.
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