This is a short, very personal little essay. It's a short scroll, but I hope you enjoy it.

When I think of the internet, I dream of a place I cannot recognize today. In my mind, the internet is something entirely divorced from the reality it embodies today. To me, the internet is what it could have been, what people had hoped it would be at its inception.

When the internet entered society, it promised a space for connection and expression that wasn't limited by the physical world. It was 'the new frontier' at the turn of the century. The web was the new 'big bang' of the design world. There were those who saw it as purely function (Prof. Dr Style), those who wanted to push the boundaries of what the web could be, and then those who saw paths to profit (dot com bubble).

While I wasn't born early enough to experience a time when I might be truly overjoyed to hear the sound of a notification, it is a reality that I one day hope to experience. I imagine that it must have felt sci-fi in nature to experience that for the first time, being able to receive mail through the computer, from a stranger that you never really had to meet.

In my mind, the internet is a place where individuals can run into each other, discover one another, and be exposed to the individuals behind the screens. In my mind, the internet is the means rather than the end.

In the beginning, I feel like this was what it was. MySpace had people learning HTML and CSS to make their websites. GeoCities had people hosting their own websites from scratch. The early web was full of things that were extremely flawed, some ugly, some beautiful, but all were exploring what the internet could be.

But as time's passed, it feels like that's creativity has withered in favor of consistency. There's been an uptick of 'template sites', where sites begin to look like one another, even if they were developed in isolation.

Sites like awwwards.com and siteinspire.com tend to feature sites that feel the same.

If everything is so smooth‚ why am I so sad?
— the title of a book by Anastasia Kubrak about urban digitality

and so I wonder, what would it take to make the web feel like itself again?