SPEAKER_10: Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything – your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel dot com slash invisible. That's the letters i x l dot com slash invisible. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If we've learned anything from watching the turnover of tech giants like Yahoo and MySpace, it's that internet darlings rise and fall, and there's something darkly fascinating about watching it happen in real time. Maybe we're seeing it now with Twitter and Facebook. Some of us will mourn the loss of the communities and connections that we've created in the virtual spaces owned by these billion dollar companies, while others of us will enjoy visiting the graves of these once unstoppable behemoths to tramp the dirt down. Either way, the values and trends and hopes and ambitions that go into the architecture of the virtual world say as much about us as the architecture of the real world. And that's what these two stories from 99 PIs past are all about. They're a couple of my absolute favorites. Enjoy. If there's one sound that instantly transports me back in time, it's this one. The dial-up modem tone. It reminds me of being in grad school in 1994. I was talking to one of my thesis advisors about the World Wide Web and how much cool stuff was on there and how distracting it was. And he recommended that I take the weekend to go through the whole thing and get it out of my system. The internet was so new that a person with a PhD thought you could literally finish it in one weekend.
SPEAKER_04: For me, the dial-up tone reminds me of being a kid in the early 90s when I thought the internet was just that thing that my older tech-savvy cousins logged on to yell at strangers. Now it's that thing that everyone logs on to yell at strangers.
SPEAKER_10: That's millennial producer Vivian Lay.
SPEAKER_04: It's weird to think about because I, along with probably the rest of you, have been spending about 97% of my waking life on Slack or Twitter or Netflix or Google Docs. But I'm just old enough to remember a time before the internet was a requirement to participate in society. A time before it was everywhere. It was this new thing that you heard about.
SPEAKER_09: I first heard about the internet.
SPEAKER_04: This is David Bonnet.
SPEAKER_09: I was reading a magazine, I think PC World or something like that. And I just thought, oh, this just sounds amazing. Today, David's a philanthropist and tech entrepreneur.
SPEAKER_04: But back in the early 1990s, he really wanted to do something great with this thing called the World Wide Web because the way he saw it, it was about to change the world for the better.
SPEAKER_10: David and his business partner, a guy named John Reznor, decided in order to be a part of this digital revolution, they would found an internet company that hosted websites. The plan was straightforward enough. David and John would provide the online space and some basic tools so that individuals or companies could build their own webpage. And the company would host those pages on its servers.
SPEAKER_04: And because their office was based in Beverly Hills, they named their company Beverly Hills Internet.
SPEAKER_09: It will go down as having one of the worst names in history.
SPEAKER_04: Actually, Beverly Hills Internet was doing okay at first. It was starting to get some visitors to its website, but John and David found it difficult to get the kind of sustainable traffic that they really wanted, mostly because of one huge early 90s problem.
SPEAKER_00: What is internet anyway? That is that massive computer network, the one that's becoming really big now. What do you mean?
SPEAKER_06: That's big? How does one, what do you write to it like mail? Allison, can you explain what internet is?
SPEAKER_10: A lot of people didn't really get what internet was.
SPEAKER_09: Nobody really understood at the time what it meant to create a World Wide Web of these kinds of connections where all computers were talking with one another and sharing information. So I had the challenge both trying to explain to my friends what I was trying to do and the wider world at the same time.
SPEAKER_04: Even though today the internet is woven into our everyday lives, it wasn't that long ago that people had to make this enormous leap from a world with essentially no internet to trying to conceptualize what a globally connected computer network meant or what they would even do with it. For search engines like Google or social networks or apps, the web seemed like this confusing nebulous blob of information. It was a strange new technology that was hard to wrap our brains around.
SPEAKER_10: Because David ran an internet company, his business depended on users having some grasp of what the internet was. So it was his challenge to get people comfortable on the web.
SPEAKER_09: We need to develop, we need to come up with something more.
SPEAKER_10: He needed a hook.
SPEAKER_04: And one day in 1994, it just came to him. His hosting site didn't need a technological innovation. It needed a conceptual one. Users needed a new way of navigating the web. So he sketched out a plan to make his website feel more like a real neighborhood.
SPEAKER_09: You'd go through what was a two-dimensional representation of a neighborhood where you would see streets and blocks and you would see icons that represented houses and you would actually pick an address that you wanted to create your website. And you had a sense that you were joining a neighborhood.
SPEAKER_04: David didn't want people to think of the web as something you logged on to, but more like a physical place to dwell in, like a house. When you signed up for a new web page, that web page was your house in an online community of your choosing. This was all a new frontier and you were in a way a virtual homesteader. David and his team were endowing users with a sense of digital manifest destiny, one virtual neighborhood at a time.
SPEAKER_10: It was such a revolutionary idea that David and his partner decided to chuck out the whole Beverly Hills internet name and change their company to something that fully leaned into the spatial metaphor they were creating. They called it GeoCities.
SPEAKER_06: The story of GeoCities is just a fantastic parallel for a real building, for something that was conceived of and created to model real life, but in the domain of cyberspace and which ultimately had a catastrophic and dramatic fall in the end.
SPEAKER_04: This is James Crawford, the author of Fallen Glory, the lives and deaths of history's greatest buildings. GeoCities was not a physical place, but he included it in his book because the way he sees it, it was inhabited like one.
SPEAKER_06: That was something that I think GeoCities was really providing, was creating these communities and then conceptualizing them as places, as places you could go, as neighborhoods on the net. So you could be a citizen of a city, of a country, and you could then be a netizen of somewhere like GeoCities.
SPEAKER_10: The website was a collection of metropolises, each with their own neighborhoods built around shared interests. There was a region called Heartland where you could discuss tractor models or Petsburg where you could talk endlessly about your cats. Or in Area 51, you could find page after page after page of fan tributes to Dana Scully.
SPEAKER_04: As soon as David established the spatialized version of the web, GeoCities really began to click for people. David remembers how in the early days, he set up a little alert to go off anytime someone registered for a new account.
SPEAKER_09: So I'd be sitting in my office and we'd go, dang, and someone would say, what's that? And I would say, well, somebody just registered for their own page at GeoCities. And they said, oh, that's cool. Then it would go, dang.
SPEAKER_10: And then it really started to take off.
SPEAKER_09: Ultimately, it would just, it was just nonstop. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I mean, it would just, it was really, really exciting. You know, I would start to hear like, I'm, you know, this is happening a lot. And so I had, of course I had, I turned it off because it was too disruptive.
SPEAKER_04: David wanted users who built their web pages in GeoCities to feel like part of a community. But no matter how obscure their interests were, they could find a neighbor who felt just as passionately as they did about Star Trek or 12th century Norse mythology.
SPEAKER_09: I think a lot of that comes from my own experiences as a gay man and coming out and meeting other lesbian and gay people and understanding the power of meeting others of your own identity.
SPEAKER_06: I think people came to it with more open minds and less desire to be performative in how they were interacting online. It was this fleeting moment when users seem more interested in making human connections
SPEAKER_10: and honest self-expression than in cultivating a web persona. They just wanted to build something. They wanted to build something dedicated to Dana Scully.
SPEAKER_09: I was looking to give everybody the tools to create their own content and celebrate the terrific diversity and richness and tapestry of content created by users.
SPEAKER_04: There were, of course, some limitations to user-generated content. GeoCities was a website that was built by amateurs and it showed.
SPEAKER_10: The color palettes of most GeoCities pages seem like they were chosen randomly or maybe even chosen with the intention of making them illegible. Like neon green text over a neon yellow background.
SPEAKER_04: There were under construction signs, twinkling star backgrounds, grainy low res family photos, welcome to my homepage GIFs.
SPEAKER_10: Or GIFs of dancing babies. You know, it was the wild west, just different styles and different page layouts and different
SPEAKER_09: menus, bars, and even experimenting with menus and pages that were only menus. There was an absolute obsession with comic sans font, you know, all these kinds of things,
SPEAKER_06: flashing GIFs, all these things that are almost feel like a kind of early vomitus of the internet.
SPEAKER_10: Looking back to the lands of the flat design and minimalism that came after, it's hard to click through these pages without having a chuckle. It was a whole lot messier and much more chaotic, but the pages built on GeoCities reflected this amazing moment when people were attempting to figure out what the internet was and what it could be.
SPEAKER_06: It's this, this beginning of the creation of web culture. And that's what's so interesting. It's the beginning of personal website. It's translating your life, who you are and putting it online.
SPEAKER_10: By 1998, GeoCities was the third most visited website on the internet, just after Yahoo. In fact, Yahoo was so impressed with GeoCities' rapid ascent that they bought the company from David.
SPEAKER_04: Executives at GeoCities believed that combining forces with Yahoo would put the website on steroids, but that wasn't what most GeoCities users wanted.
SPEAKER_09: Others had legitimate concerns that, you know, GeoCities will lose its independence and its identity, which is ultimately what happened.
SPEAKER_04: After the purchase, GeoCities users woke up to a notice saying they had to re-register, granting Yahoo the rights to The royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, not exclusive, and fully sub-licensable right,
SPEAKER_10: and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such content in all or part, worldwide, in order to incorporate it in other works in any form of media or technology now known or later
SPEAKER_04: developed. Meaning all of the content on the website would now be owned by Yahoo.
SPEAKER_06: Many threatened to leave the city in protest. And as a result of that, Yahoo actually agreed to alter their terms of service. It was, though, the first real sign of unrest in the city. If you like, it was the moment that signaled just the very beginning of the end.
SPEAKER_04: It was the beginning of the end not just for GeoCities, but for a ton of internet companies around the web. The dot-com bubble had been rapidly inflating throughout the late 90s because investors were pouring money into internet startups left and right and just crossing their fingers that one day they'd be profitable. There was actually a mantra that you weren't a successful dot-com company unless you were losing money. By the year 2001, the bubble had burst and corporations like Yahoo were losing their footing.
SPEAKER_10: But the internet was starting to change fast. Up until this point, a lot of users had been working in a static entry-level version of the internet. It was more homemade, identifiable by those vibrant personal pages hand-built by users. It's where GeoCities had thrived.
SPEAKER_04: But by the time the new millennium rolled around, the internet was evolving into a whole new experience. This internet was based around interactive social networking sites. You would punch in your name, age, and relationship status, and the site would spit out a manicured profile page. Users were encouraged to write on each other's walls and tag and comment. GeoCities had created this great spatial metaphor to help people understand the web, but users were outgrowing that metaphor.
SPEAKER_10: Having a GeoCities page began to feel embarrassing to a lot of users, which is basically a death sentence for any platform. I gotta check out my GeoCities account.
SPEAKER_10: Hold on.
SPEAKER_05: Let me crank up the computer. The computer got me.
SPEAKER_06: It needs more flow. I suppose because we're so close to it, and we know the people who created these. Maybe they're our parents. Maybe they're our older brothers or sisters. And we don't necessarily respect it.
SPEAKER_04: Yahoo stocks started to plummet shortly after it bought GeoCities, and year after year the site was losing more users. From a business perspective, GeoCities seemed like dead weight.
SPEAKER_06: July 2009, they send what they call a service announcement. And all it says is that GeoCities is closing and all files are going to be deleted from servers and will not be recoverable.
SPEAKER_10: GeoCities was about to be completely wiped out, as if it had never existed.
SPEAKER_06: Even if you look at something like the dropping of a nuclear bomb, that still leaves ruins. It still leaves people. Those people can then grow something from the ashes. This is an absolute existential deletion of existence. It is just taken and it is gone.
SPEAKER_04: This was the wholesale destruction of a website that changed the way that people looked at the internet. A lot of people believed that these pages deserved to be saved.
SPEAKER_10: And a handful of people decided to actually do something about it.
SPEAKER_05: There's this sense always that like the web is permanent. Like if you do something terrible, it's on the internet forever. And if you have one embarrassing photo and someone shares it, it'll never go away. And I'm here to tell you that now it'll probably all go away.
SPEAKER_04: This is Jason Scott. Jason actually has a few roles. He's a digital archivist, historian, software curator, angel of death.
SPEAKER_05: So the reason I'm known as the angel of death is because I have successfully let people know that when a certain kind of situation happens, call Jason Scott.
SPEAKER_04: The situation is that a website is on the brink of its demise and all of its digital information is about to be lost forever. Jason's job is to swoop in and download all of that data before it's gone for good. And like the angel of death, Jason's face is the last thing that a dying website sees before it's gone for good.
SPEAKER_10: Back in 2009, before he became the go-to savior of the old web, Jason was noticing more and more that old school hosting services like GeoCities were going dark. He couldn't stop thinking about all the user-generated content that was being destroyed in the process. The one that still haunts me is this woman who in 1994 made an entire website in HTML
SPEAKER_05: about her child who had died when he was two. And she's got a little, you know, candle GIF and a little MIDI song playing in the background. And this was her story.
SPEAKER_10: Jason wanted to make sure sites like GeoCities and their data weren't just erased. So he connected with a group of like-minded digital preservation enthusiasts scattered around the world and they drafted a plan.
SPEAKER_05: Somebody should come in. There should be an A-team, an archive team that rushes in and makes a copy. Wouldn't that be something? So we announced that we're archive team. We're going to rescue your sh**. And that was our slogan. We're going to rescue your sh**.
SPEAKER_04: Archive team decided their mission was to keep an eye out for websites in danger of being shut down. The ones that they say are on death watch and download every piece of data they could before that site goes dark. Their goal is to preserve digital heritage no matter how small. And their first project, GeoCities.
SPEAKER_05: For us, it was worth it because we hate Yahoo. But it wasn't solely about saying up yours to Yahoo.
SPEAKER_04: Okay, well, that was a very big part of it, but it was also about something bigger.
SPEAKER_05: I also wanted people to kind of get knocked in the head about the impermanence of digital information that it was both brittle and easily lost, but also with a little bit of care, easily saved and kept.
SPEAKER_10: Archive team had a dual mission. In addition to preserving things, they also want us to understand that digital information is fragile. The profiles you build on any social media site, the videos you upload to YouTube, they all exist out of your hands and on some corporation servers. And they can vanish at any given moment.
SPEAKER_05: They have no idea that it can literally, literally disappear in a week or a day. And it just come to it and it's there's an error and it's gone. And I get to see that over and over and over again. So that's, you know, I'm delighted that they're making these worlds. And I'm cynical about how long they last.
SPEAKER_10: Yahoo had hinted in early 2009 that it would be closing down the service sometime later that year. So GeoCities could have maybe a few months or a few days. Archive team got to work immediately trying to recruit as many people as possible to help with what Jason referred to as GeoCities download-a-palooza.
SPEAKER_05: I started using whatever social media capital I had at the time. About 200, I think 300 people in total came in and it was really lumpy. They had their computers crawling Yahoo servers to pull out any piece of public GeoCities
SPEAKER_04: data they could get. And we were just doing it day in and day out and saying, OK, who wants to take this part
SPEAKER_05: over? Who wants to do this part? Let's look for this. Let's do searches on the web for every noun in the dictionary. Try to find every GeoCities site that mentions any noun and then try to compile them into a unique set and then assign it to people to download.
SPEAKER_04: Then on October 26, 2009, after six months of work, the day they all dreaded finally came. Archive team watched from their respective computers as the digital city slowly went offline for good. Jason said that watching Yahoo pull the plug was like something out of 2001, a space odyssey.
SPEAKER_05: It is exactly like shutting down hell. And we will be like, this set has gone down. They've now powered down this server. They've now powered down this server.
SPEAKER_04: Archive team was still working as fast as possible to grab whatever GeoCities data was left, while the servers went dark one by one.
SPEAKER_05: We're like, here it goes. We just lost this one. We just lost this one. Keep going, keep going. And we're just going until finally it's just not responding meaningfully at all. I mean, that's pretty much the ending of every one of these stories is us packing up the boxes, putting them on the pallets, you know, so it's, it's this pride that we got the job done, but it really feels like we lifted a piano up 20 stories and then took it down again, you know, 20 minutes later, like, yep, we were good piano movers.
SPEAKER_10: But it wasn't all for nothing. In the end, Archive team managed to extract a terabyte of data from GeoCities. And as it turns out, there were multiple parallel projects that were downloading GeoCities data. A lot of them have sent their data to Jason for safekeeping. All together, Archive team saved more than a million accounts from deletion.
SPEAKER_04: Archive team wanted to bring some attention to their work. So they took all of that GeoCities data they'd preserved, and they turned it into a torrent on the Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay is generally used for illegally downloading games, movies, and software. So no one really saw this coming. We were like, we have the hottest new ware for you.
SPEAKER_05: Here's GeoCities. And it was the largest torrent at its time. It broke everything. And when it got uncompressed, it turned out Windows machines couldn't handle it. People were furious because it's terrible. Like, why am I doing this? It's telling me I have 19 months to download. Surely it's some sort of top secret allocation of information of the darkest parts of the web. And it's like, no, it's cats. And it's lots of rock and roll fan sites. And it's families telling you that they're going to have a barbecue.
SPEAKER_10: Jason wasn't sure what people would actually do with the GeoCities data. But that really wasn't his concern. He just wanted to make sure that it was safe and available to anyone who wanted it. And maybe if he was lucky, something useful would come out of it down the line.
SPEAKER_05: I long ago got out of the argument of what good is this?
SPEAKER_04: Actually, a number of people have downloaded the GeoCities torrent and have made some really cool projects with that data. A good amount of GeoCities pages have been restored, and you can browse through them online.
SPEAKER_10: Since saving GeoCities, Jason and the archive team have preserved a number of dying websites around the internet, from Yahoo! Groups to Justin.tv. It's all accessible on a digital archive called Wayback Machine, where you can find over 477 billion saved web pages. The Wayback Machine was founded by the Internet Archive, where Jason Scott is now an archivist.
SPEAKER_04: A lot of time and energy went into rescuing GeoCities, along with a ton of other archaic sites from this generation of the web. But I want to be clear. None of this was salvaged as examples of how well the web worked back in the day. No one needs more Netscape Now buttons or Backstreet Boys fan pages. I think we're good on Backstreet Boys fan pages. The point is, these archives should be studied. Because our web history is our history, no matter how goofy it might appear.
SPEAKER_10: If the Internet's history were sketched to look like the March of Progress, that famous illustration charting human evolution with an ape on one side and a man on the other, GeoCities would be like that third guy from the right, a little hairy, a little clumsy, but definitely an important link that made us what we are today.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, it's not necessarily art, but it's absolutely culture.
SPEAKER_04: James Crawford again.
SPEAKER_06: You know, this is what we've always done as humans. You know, going back to the earliest marks we put on the caves, is you're presented with a surface and what do you do with it? How do you mark it? How do you represent who you are on that space? And you know, a number of people have made this comparison between the kind of cave paintings of Lascaux and what was happening on GeoCities. And it seems like a bizarre, almost absurd comparison to make. But actually, if we fast forward another 10,000 years and look back, that's absolutely what it was. It was people grappling with a new technology and how to represent their humanity in that space.
SPEAKER_04: You can imagine thousands of years from now, past the boundary of the cringy recent past to a future human dusting off an old PC desktop from 1997, finding a GeoCities torrent and taking an anthropological exploration of what's inside.
SPEAKER_05: So the first thing they're going to do is just waste a week trying to figure out if they're getting the colors wrong. Like they're going to look at these backgrounds and they're going to be like, this is objectively illegible. And they're going to check the specs, check the specs and go, nope, those people had no taste. What was going on there? And the answer was the sky was the limit. So why not yellow on pink? Why not? And then you have a blinking text saying that this is your homepage and then an animated GIF with three frames of a waving Care Bear right next to your description of, you know, love for Jesus.
SPEAKER_04: This future person is going to discover a tiny window of web history where people were trying their best to chart a course through completely unknown territory, where users took chances and weren't ashamed to look a little messy or garish or hopeful.
SPEAKER_05: They're going to see this boundless joy of people who are unfettered by feeling that they have to sell themselves to present their best faces. And they'll see a lot of lies, a lot of truth, a lot of honesty, but it's going to come from a person talking to you because GeoCities made it easy to work in the code of the web, but it didn't teach you to be a performer. So that's what they're going to find. And they're not going to believe it. They're going to assume this was all a trick. Nobody could be this nice. Nobody could be this forward. No one could be this personal, but they were.
SPEAKER_10: We have another story about a different virtual apocalypse after the break. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you want to give your body the nutrients it craves and the energy it needs, there's Kachava. It's a plant-based super blend made up of super foods, greens, proteins, omegas, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and probiotics. In other words, it's all your daily nutrients in a glass. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious protein-packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scoops of Kachava super blend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. Treat yourself nice. Take a minute and treat yourself right. You'll get all the stuff that you need and feel great. Kachava is offering 10% off for a limited time. Just go to kachava.com slash invisible, spelled K-A-C-H-A-V-A and get 10% off your first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A dot com slash invisible. Kachava dot com slash invisible. Article believes in delightful design for every home. And thanks to their online only model, they have some really delightful prices too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good at doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the geome sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. Go to article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_10: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. So we're back with Vivian who brought us that story about GeoCities. Hey Viv.
SPEAKER_04: Hello, how are you?
SPEAKER_10: I'm good. I'm good. So one of the reasons why we do these codas is we have all this stuff that's on the cutting room floor that doesn't quite fit into the story, but it's so good that we just want to talk about it. So let's talk about it.
SPEAKER_04: So something that we kind of alluded to in the main piece, but didn't really spend a lot of time getting into was the afterlife of the GeoCities data that was saved by Archive Team. So we kind of focused on like the life, death, and preservation of GeoCities. But we didn't really dip into what people have done with it afterwards because the story kind of felt complete on its own. But there's a lot there.
SPEAKER_10: Right. Right. So what are people making with this GeoCities data?
SPEAKER_04: Basically one of my favorite projects is this website called Cameron's World dot net, which was created by this web designer named Cameron Askin. And I don't really know how to describe it other than saying it's like, it's like everything that the Space Jam website wishes it was like, I don't even like I really don't know how to explain it. But it's just a really cool way to kind of click through and view old GeoCities pages. And like there's this theme song that loops around that's been playing in my head for like the last two months. Like it's great. So you should definitely look at it. Another website that's worth checking out is called deleted city dot net, which is this awesome like interactive map created by a designer named Richard Vigen, where you could browse through the GeoCities neighborhoods as if they were like neighborhoods on it like a city grid. So it's really cool to be able to zoom in and like see it. Like if it were an actual city, this is what it would look like. That's cool. That's cool. But one project that I really want to talk about is called one terabyte of the kilobyte age. And it was created by two people named Oliya Lielina and Dragan Espenshied. And it's an archive of almost 400,000 GeoCities pages. And I originally spoke with Oliya for the piece because she had this really interesting relationship with GeoCities and the old web because she was a webmaster and web design professor back in like the mid 90s. And she told me that she used to save web pages like the ones in GeoCities so she could show her students examples of like how not to build a good web page.
SPEAKER_10: Like don't use like twinkling star backgrounds or a million different colors or, or those under construction signs that are never taken off. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_04: Like don't do this. But you know, she said that she was noticing the shift from, you know, web 1.0 to web 2.0 in real time towards the end of the late nineties and the beginning of the early two thousands because it was getting a lot harder for her to find like the twinkling star backgrounds or the welcome to my homepage GIFs. You mean homepage GIFs?
SPEAKER_04: GIFs, homepage GIFs. Like we're not going to start this right now. Okay, keep going. But like, you know, because she started seeing that they're like disappearing, she really
SPEAKER_04: started to study these things and like really loved the design of the early web because of what it represented.
SPEAKER_01: Because of very pragmatic reasons, I started to collect them, just, you know, save graphics. And it was not because I thought at the time that you should archive the web or it can have some historic significance. But then I realized that it's not just some that some funny websites are disappearing, but visions of how the world wide web should be. They are getting changed.
SPEAKER_04: So when the GeoCities torrent got released on the Pirate Bay, Oli and Dragan like immediately downloaded it and have been studying it ever since. But what I really like about the work that they're doing is that this is not a nostalgic exercise. You're really looking at what these early web elements can teach us about our relationship with the web in the 90s and early 2000s. Like if you look at something like the under construction sign, for example.
SPEAKER_01: On the construction sign, it's not just a funny picture. It's not just a symbol for the old website. But I try to explain what does it mean exactly? Why is it important?
SPEAKER_04: So basically, the under construction sign was a symbol for this moment when the web was being hand built by amateur users. And there was this general acceptance that a website could be a work in progress. Like you could take your time and it was OK for people to get a glimpse of the building process before it was finished. But that all changed with the introduction of Web 2.0 because more professional web designers were taking over and big social networking sites were taking over. Under construction sign was really the first one that professional designers started to
SPEAKER_01: remove from the website. And that was a kind of over how can it be that something is not ready?
SPEAKER_10: I never thought about that before. Like the disappearance of the under construction sign really signaled this move towards a kind of corporate version of the internet.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that's what Olya believes. And like this is just one aspect of how GeoCities is being studied. But I thought this was cool because projects like this basically show that it's possible to apply some sort of like archaeological lens to this website that a lot of people wrote off as useless.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, I mean it totally makes sense to me. I mean, you would tell us what we were thinking at the time that you needed to put up a site so badly like within 10 minutes that you had to put an under construction sign on there. But you might take with it or you might just leave it. You know, like why not? Yeah, exactly. Who cares? At this time who cares? Yeah, why not? So tell me her project's name again.
SPEAKER_04: So it's called one terabyte of the kilobyte age. That's such a good name. I love it.
SPEAKER_10: I mean, people should definitely check that out because it's like they'll have a whole new appreciation for under construction signs and what we think of as ugly graphics that really made the web what it is today.
SPEAKER_04: Yes, exactly.
SPEAKER_10: The whole time that we were putting this piece together, I was reminded of this story that I did originally for Stomp Judgment, but we played it on 99PI before about the, you know, the destruction of an online community, which was also, you know, a really sad story in many ways. And so I wanted to just like attach it here to play it for you. So you can. Yay!
SPEAKER_04: I love this story. Here it is.
SPEAKER_10: A few months before the end of the world, Paul Monaco posted this message on YouTube.
SPEAKER_02: Hello, everyone. Paul Monaco here. Buddha Paul, as most of you know me as. You probably all heard the news. EA land, the Sims online closing down.
SPEAKER_10: The world that was ending was called the Sims online. It was an online version of one of the most popular computer games ever made.
SPEAKER_02: You've all been wonderful. You helped me through a hard time in my life when I first got online.
SPEAKER_10: But ironically, the online version of the Sims was not very popular. They ended up losing tons of subscribers and changing the name to EA land. And then they finally pulled the plug.
SPEAKER_02: Thank you. Please, let's try to stay in touch. And if not, good luck with whatever you choose to do and move on to.
SPEAKER_10: As you can probably hear, EA land is not a normal video game. There were no monsters, no killing. And although it had some competitive elements, for many players, competition wasn't the point at all.
SPEAKER_08: Unlike a lot of other games where you might be shooting people or slaying dragons or something, this was a game about socializing.
SPEAKER_10: That's Robert Ashley.
SPEAKER_08: I'm Robert Ashley.
SPEAKER_10: He produces a very popular and fantastic internet radio show that's been on a very long hiatus.
SPEAKER_08: I'm the creator of A Life Well Wasted.
SPEAKER_10: A Life Well Wasted.
SPEAKER_08: It's about video games and the people who love them.
SPEAKER_10: And EA land was a video game that a dedicated few absolutely loved.
SPEAKER_08: The crowd that attracted it, I think, were people who just wanted to get together and sort of chat, meet strangers.
SPEAKER_10: It was a nice place.
SPEAKER_08: Over time, it became a kind of intimate, almost bar, like the cheers of video games.
SPEAKER_10: Where everyone knows your name. And at the moment that Paul Monaco, aka Buddha Paul, found EA land, it was exactly what he needed most.
SPEAKER_03: My wife had a long term illness. She had blood transfusion. She had hepatitis C. In the last three years or so of her life were pretty, pretty much a challenge for both of us. And after she passed away, I had absolutely no function other than to wake up, go to work and go to sleep again. With her illness, I didn't get out and socialize much. We weren't able to go out to the bars and meet up with friends and have dinner. I totally de-socialized myself. And this game was kind of a way for me to just kind of get back into living again. It was pretty amazing. And Paul began to live for EA land.
SPEAKER_10: He would play it for hours and hours. It was the first thing he did when he got home from work.
SPEAKER_03: You're treated to a big warm greeting. Everyone would, you know, say hi. You know, your high Ms would be beeping along and you'd be imitated with that. It made you feel really good.
SPEAKER_10: It wasn't the real world, but his friends were real friends. In virtual worlds do have an upside.
SPEAKER_03: Your race, your color, your religion, all that can be totally masked and you're truly judged on who you really are and how you present yourself. There's no, no prejudice. There's no preconceived anything. It's just, you're really taken at face value.
SPEAKER_08: People could really like break loose and be themselves and have some fun.
SPEAKER_03: It just feels really good.
SPEAKER_10: But Paul's utopia didn't last because EA land started hemorrhaging money. The writing was on the wall. The server was about to go dark. And this event, this virtual apocalypse might only exist in the memory of the players. If it weren't for Dr. Henry Lowood.
SPEAKER_08: I had just stumbled across this project by Henry Lowood. My name is Henry Lowood. Who is this archival researcher at Stanford. And I had a project called How They Got Game, which is on the history of digital games and
SPEAKER_08: simulations. We're going to be playing video games for future generations. You know, 50, a hundred, 200 years from now, how are we going to save that history?
SPEAKER_08: You know, like we've got to save the video games. So Dr. Lowood and his colleagues preserve what happens inside video games.
SPEAKER_10: Now for a single player game like Pac-Man, for example, this is easy. You effectively take out the Atari cartridge and put it on the shelf. But saving multiplayer online games is not so simple.
SPEAKER_11: Saving the software alone is kind of a barren exercise.
SPEAKER_10: If you save the code for EA Land and turn it on a hundred years from now, you'd enter a world and nothing would be there. All the things that Paul Monaco and his friends love would be impossible to find.
SPEAKER_11: You need to document what people are doing in these spaces. That situation is much more like what a historian or an archivist would do when faced with the problem of documenting the real world.
SPEAKER_10: So when Dr. Lowood caught wind of EA Land shutting down, he had the opportunity to record something a historian or archeologist would die to witness firsthand in the real world.
SPEAKER_08: See what it would be like when an online world came to an end.
SPEAKER_11: What happens when a virtual world closes? The end of a culture.
SPEAKER_11: What is it like to be there in the last minute and when it shuts down?
SPEAKER_10: So the tape is rolling and the last few hours of EA Land are being recorded and the most dedicated diehard users are there exchanging virtual hugs and reminiscing. The players are typing messages that appear like comic book word bubbles. You hear all these avatars cry. And you also hear all the coos and moans in the gibberish language of the game known as Simlish.
SPEAKER_08: And you know, they sound like they're going to be bummed and everything, but it's not like a big pity party. But then toward the end of the night, there's this radio station that you can listen to in the game called Charmed Radio. And they had this DJ there named Spike. He is sort of the only voice that you end up hearing at the end of the world.
SPEAKER_10: And as soon as he starts talking, you understand what is being lost.
SPEAKER_07: Hey guys, the last time you're going to hear me speak, well, the last time before TSO goes down, I just want to thank you all. It's been an amazing experience. It really has. And I promise I wouldn't make myself cry, but I can't, I can't stress enough how much you guys have meant to me over the past however many years it's been. It really has been awesome. Some people don't get attached to things, but when you make friends, a lot of people have in this game. It's actually really hard. So we're playing the last song. It's Sarah Brightman and Andrea Brichelli. Time to say goodbye. Hopefully you guys will keep in touch. My yahoo id is 12345 D*** A**. EY 12345. Good luck in life everybody and best wishes. I love you all and it's been great knowing you. Take care guys and let's just, I just want to, even if you haven't got a drink, just propose a toast to Parazad who has been absolutely amazing. Parazad, we couldn't have done this without you. Thank you.
SPEAKER_11: You get this feeling like being on the deck of the Titanic.
SPEAKER_03: Anyone who actually stayed to the end was very much invested in the game on an emotional level.
SPEAKER_10: When they pulled the plug on the server, bits and pieces of the world started disappearing. The environment began to disintegrate. The texture on the trees flickered and all the people froze. It became blank out of existence.
SPEAKER_11: The actual ending was, was, you know, not with a bang, with a whimper.
SPEAKER_08: And the last thing that they saw was basically just an error message, a server disconnect message.
SPEAKER_10: And then the world ended. That story was originally produced for the great public radio show Snap Judgment in 2010 based off a story from the podcast A Life Well Wasted, which after a nine year hiatus released a new episode at the end of 2022. It was marvelous to have it back. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Vivien Leigh. Original episode mixed by Bryson Barnes, remixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Rial. Jelani Hall is our senior editor. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Chris Berube, Jason De Leon, Loshma Dohan, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. Special thanks this week to Olia Lialina. You can find a link to her project One Terabyte of the Kilobyte Age on our website. James Crawford's book is called Fallen Glory, the Lives and Deaths of History's Greatest Buildings. GeoCities is just one small section of that book. There are a ton of other fascinating stories about lost and ruined buildings. We'll have a link to that as well. 99% Invisible is part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me, at Roman Mars, and the show at 99PI.org, or on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.
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