Being a child in the early 2000s felt like learning to paint whilst riding a mechanical bull – all that was left were abstract markings and an electric bill – I tried my best, while the world entered the unsupervised infancy of Web 2.0; the second stage of the internet, with a new found focus for user-generated content and collaboration through easier means of communication – big words for my small brain at the time; which was just looking for colourful gross-out video games and creepy 3d animated parodies of popular music – which I’m sad to say were living in abundance.

My grandparents’ house was generally where I got exposed to many of these things early on, as I was sat playing Boogerman and blasting “Weird Al” Yankovic’s The Saga Begins – a unique time in my life for sure – and although most of this media was surely being downloaded through Limewire, this was still before I had any experience of actually using the internet myself. It wasn’t until I was around 9 or 10 that I started to understand the attraction of an online space – I was very (un)fortunate (still haven’t decided) that a friend of mine had a grandfather who owned an internet cafe at the time. Which is the long way of saying that Moshi Monsters corrupted my ass.

The dull gray machine that was just for admin and outdated media, was now bright and colorful, gleaming with potential fun and reward – everything you wished to find at the bottom of the cereal box. It was nothing short of an immediate addiction, although still fairly innocent overall – but this appeal to digital progression would lead to playing games for older kids like ourWorld (which I’m sure messed up loads of young minds), but it did introduce me to flash games through its in-game arcade.

Hosting stuff like Plants Vs Zombies and Bejeweled, leading me down the Miniclip flash rabbit hole, and eventually introducing me to Newgrounds – which is still thriving and full of that raw early internet creativity – With games typically being made by independent creators that prioritize fun, and when in contrast to our current equivalent of popular games; We would likely think to these over-saturated mobile ads where you’re a group of soldiers walking down a two lane street, expressing the success of this soulless commercialism we’ve come to expect. Games with the main selling point of playing exactly like the ad, a paradox you could only find in the current age of the internet.

While all this is not a one to one comparison necessarily, I do feel like the internet in the 2000s and early 2010s had an ability to jump out of the screen with it’s over the top design and intent on surprising the user. Everything had a lot more personality, and websites weren’t afraid to stick out like a sore thumb wearing a My Little Pony plaster. Everything currently has the same bland minimalist design, which lets you know that they’re afraid to try something new – it’s just a sad attempt at following this hive-minded design template – having the potential to appeal to anyone, because at this point that may be your best bet in an overcrowded online market space.

Even if you were to go look at the design of websites 10 years ago (which you can do using the wayback machine) and compare them to now, it’s insane how much things have changed for the worse. I feel like most popular sites slowly forced out every awkward visual kink in their user-interface, until they reverted back to a blank slate with an ability to host ads – which is also a big reason why I would imagine that these sites want to come across as not having any unique motivations or noticeable personality – because it allows them to appeal to every person, as well as every advertiser on that same sanitized basis. At this point it’s no secret that the best way to advertise to anyone is through their social media, which is a major part of the problem.

I mean, it’s a natural problem that was always bound to happen – but in the early days of the internet, earnest creatives ran rampant because they had a passion to create and connect with an audience. There wasn’t the same tug of war for attention that you see currently, with the advertisers’ content promotion always being prioritized. Just last year the US spent $225 billion on digital advertising – which is more or less 75% of all US ad spending.

So every corner of the internet that picks up a decent amount of attention is immediately a prospect for advertising – which is obvious enough – but it is still one of the main issues with the internet in its current landscape. It makes every creator question their morals and consider pandering in order to maintain advertisers, as well as downplay or straight up hide their opinions on certain matters in order to appeal to everyone – which will always be detrimental to genuine artistic expression – and speaking of expression, even the early animated Skype emojis are perfect examples for how we’ve pivoted from the fun chaos of the early internet. It’s unlikely we’ll ever have an emoticon of a man mooning again, and it’s a perfect symbol for how I feel about this corporate lobby we’ve found ourselves in.

I’m not so sure we’ll find ourselves out of it either. Greener pastures are too far out of sight now, and we’ve become predictable in the ways we approach looking for entertainment. I’d imagine the vast majority of people are being pushed into the content they’ve thought to find on their own terms. If you want to find things that are truly unique and undiscovered, it’s going to take effort. It’s weird to think about how often I just rely on the Youtube homepage at night when I have nothing to watch, scrolling in hopes of something that connects with me. I mean, I could literally think up anything on the largest video hosting database on Earth, but I am setting my boundaries around a single page that is just basing its recommendations on a very limited selection of things I’ve already seen.

So maybe that’s it, maybe we’ve become so accustomed to the things made readily available to us that we’ve lost our will to search altogether – existing happily in a boundless space with blinders on – like Plato’s algorithmic cave; and I understand that this is perfectly okay too. It’s our down time after all, but I still believe it’s worth thinking about. As there are always good things with no views waiting for us, they just take a bit of finding. Like the prize at the bottom of the cereal box (except these things still exist).