Yet Another Web Eulogy
I’m in bed (which is where I’ve been for, I don’t know, hours at this point) with my laptop balanced on my stomach in a way that forces me to type with my wrists bent slightly inward, like a dinosaur, which is not great for the tendons but is, I’ve found, the only position that works for introspection at a keyboard. this whole passage is a little exhausting. Outside, beyond the glass, the Puget Sound is doing its winter thing: fog sitting low over the water, not quite committed for much of the day, and beneath it the chop of the tide catching the last of the light. My building sways in the wind, vibrating occasionally with the gusts. The smart lights in the corner I realize this detail probably says something unflattering about my relationship with technology, but here we are have been programmed to brighten in small but continuous amounts as the sun sets, and they’re about to do that any minute now. I learned a new word recently: vertiginous. I keep turning it over, looking for the thing I’m trying to get at here, something about my experience creating. I haven’t quite landed on it yet, so I set it aside.
After nearly three months of mostly avoiding scheduled dinner by delivery, I’ve caved. My phone, affixed to a wireless charging pedestal by magnet, is displaying a map with a long red snake-like path from somewhere downtown through to my neck of the woods — the driver’s route through Seattle, updating in real time above a countdown timer to the moment I’m supposed to meet them at the door. My computer is connected to a local mesh network of routers, lamps, outlets, speakers, a scale, a television, an oven, and a small Apple computer running as a server in the other room, crunching through my health and productivity data, preparing the daily brief I expect to review before I start again tomorrow morning.
I’ve just finished the “MVP” of this website with AI. If you’ve tried to write with an LLM you probably know it’s actually pretty hard to get anything other than slop. There’s now a LLM chat window open beside me, and I keep waiting to feel embarrassed about that. But I’m not, because what once took me days takes minutes now. What used to feel impossible feels merely somewhat difficult. I’m just now coming to after a fugue of a day, and what I think the experience is telling me is that my obstacles aren’t technical anymore. Were they ever, to begin with? I do not know. It’s unsettling. For the first time in over a decade, the tools fit my weird taste and neurology enough to set my ideas free. It’s scary. And yet here I am, doing something I haven’t done in a long time. Beginning.
SURFBOARD
December 14, 1994, 11:38 p.m. By this point the school’s ambassadors, who had been conducting routine mid-year guided walkthroughs of the campus grounds to prospective student families, actually made it a point to take the long way around to the Engineering Quad to avoid the noxious diesel fumes, unsightly trash bags, or giving any impression that the prestigious West Coast Ivy League was unable to support the explosive new demand for Electrical Engineering graduate studies with the adequate facilities. The air inside Trailer E (affectionately named “Building 404” by the staff and faculty who’d made it official, according to the faded black plastic letters adhered to the structure’s beige exterior) carries the low, sinusoidal drone of overworked power supplies — a hum whose effects, after a few hours under its whopping fifty-two decibels of psionic pulsing, are completely indistinguishable from the symptoms of extreme and pathologically dangerous fatigue. The trailer itself is a Fulton M1400, 14 by 40ft, single-wide construction that had been carefully backed into a service courtyard behind Durand Hall and left there at an angle. It was just one in a growing perimeter of identical satellite shacks surrounding the building, each of which had been deployed somewhat ad hoc on the asphalt lot.
Inside, David Filo sat motionless on a swivel chair (its right caster had long since seized up with torn carpet fibers) and stared at an NCSA HTTPd log file from three hours before. His face was way too close to the screen and his right hand was gripping the chair’s plastic arm. This position, which he had been in for nearly twelve hours straight, had cocked his elbow up slightly into the air and therefore pressed the top of his shoulder blade into the facet joints of his thoracic spine. Together this and the prior three-hundred and something days of similar posture (and nearly constant slouching) had generated a steady stream of inflammatory ache so hot that when it shot down his back and into his arm, his brain could literally no longer register it as pain, and his fingers would periodically lose their ability to grip, slumping his body off of the armrest. Slump. He caught himself midway, and unconsciously placed his hand back on the chair.
The Sun SPARCstation running his server software, despite it’s healthy 32 megabytes of random-access memory, had begun to fragment under load. It had been weeks since its last proper power cycle. And while these log files were being split and cached locally in case of outright failure, he could still barely comb through them fast enough. Slump. He put his arm back on the chair and sat up a little straighter. He had so far identified three hundred and twelve thousand unique IP addresses, and, just as soon as he was done parsing this and the remaining seven log files, he would be able to definitively say, as of that night, that the project that he and his partner had dedicated the previous year of their lives to — Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web — had become the most used Web directory on the planet.
January 18, 1995, 3:17 a.m. Jerry Yang sat before a new 19-inch Sony Trinitron CRT, its pale gray glow sharper and colder than the amber phosphor terminals to which he was accustomed. It had just arrived from Maynard Massachusetts according to the woman who ran the office (who had introduced herself as D’AnneAt the time, D’Anne Schjerning lived in a trailer park outside of San Jose. She would be a millionaire after the IPO that summer., but was referred to, as far as he knew, as simply the letter “D”). D’Anne had been wearing a women’s power blazer in taupe, an assortment of department store jewels on her neck and ears, and had a short, sculptured hairdo that reminded Jerry of the hit swedish band Roxette. Upon his arrival at the former Hewlett-Packard offices earlier that day, D had gently passed him a business card, and gestured down a corridor of open-plan cubicles without looking up from the folio of paperwork at her hip. On the front, the fresh white and blue card stock read “Netscape Mom” and the back, in widely-looping script read: “ask jwz for login.” The monitor sat atop its companion (really, the star of the show): the Digital Equipment Corporation’s AlphaStation 250, whose 266 megahertz processor, as its intended user Jamie (a young hacker, whose painted finger nails kept running through his long, industrial jet black hair to carefully restyle loose strands that were irritating the otherwise closely shaved skin around his ears) had explained to him earlier, was “smoking fast” and that it was “totally cool to use for the day.” The engineering bullpen of the offices of 466 Ellis Street in Mountain View smelled like warm dust, ozone, and body odor.
Jerry had just spent the day negotiating the final details of the plan for the year with David. They had agreed that today was the day. The recursive, self-referential project name they had picked somewhat randomly earlier in the year was about to be official. The name Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle (or, YAHOO) had come together one night after David’s girlfriend Angela had agreed that they were both “a couple a yahoos” in a pantomime of David’s soft spoken Louisiana dialect on account of the piles of trash and generally uncivilized working and living conditions. This sealed the deal, as far as the name was concerned, pretty much on the spot.
They had been searching through the dictionary for words that start with YA; “yet another…” was a common prefix for software in those days, a self-aware recognition of the obvious: that nearly everything that could be built was probably already just a slightly different version of a thing that already existed. The irony was lost on everyone involved. The dictionary had explained the origin: a race of uncouth brutes from Gulliver’s Travels, coined by Johnathan Swift in 1726. Seemed safe.
A few months before, the Network Services subgroup of the Stanford University Information Resources office had sent them a polite but firmly worded email notifying them that fifty gigabytes of outbound bandwidth per month was not “a reasonable or authorized use of the schools networking infrastructure,” and that would they “please confirm that their server would be fully off premises by the end of the calendar year.” Jerry had felt like it was a very good problem to have and could, now, be glad that the hard part was over. He began typing at the console.
ftp rs.internic.netAnd then …
Connected to rs.internic.net.
220 rs.internic.net FTP server ready.
Name (rs.internic.net:jwz): anonymous
331 Guest login ok, send your email address as password.
Password: [email protected]
230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.
ftp> cd templates
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> get domain.txt
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for domain.txt (1842 bytes).
226 Transfer complete.
1842 bytes received in 0.1 seconds (18.42 Kbytes/s)
ftp> quitYang had just successfully copied the domain registration template from the registrar’s File Transfer Protocol server — rs.internic.net (a name so bureaucratic that it read like it had been lifted straight from a defense department white paper, which, apparently, it had). The template itself was a boilerplate example of the plain text ASCII form specification for the submission of registration details: fields declared by colons, new lines, and tab spaces, which was clean and very easy to read but, as was quickly donning on Yang as he read through the output, had probably never supported the exclamation point they had been hoping to include somewhere on the form, even if just for posterity.
He and David had spent the better part of the evening discussing whether or not they needed to include an exclamation point somewhere, whether it would be a deal breaker, or compromise the defensibility of the updated trademark language their new lawyer had been drafting up. David had been somewhat indifferent to the whole idea, but Jerry believed it was essential that they establish themselves as primarily a brand, which he insisted would entail something that gave them “pizzazz”. By the time they had worked down Jerry’s to-do list to domain name, an older man aimlessly passing by, a fellow engineer by the look of him, offered indirectly that they would have no choice but to follow whatever policy was established by Network Solutions who had “completely cornered the market last year”.
“Sorry, what was that?” David asked, genuinely interested. The man — who was wearing a brown sweater, clashing khakis, a long somewhat sour face, and a pair of faded suede ASICS Gel-Lytes (the ones with the patented split-tongue design, which he had read would reduce lace pressure on his instep) — slid his sleeves up slightly and balanced his can of Pepsi precariously on the top of a cubicle’s half wall.
“Network Solutions.” The man repeated. “They are the sole registrar for the open top-levels.” He paused a beat, and took a slight gulp of air. “Network Solutions is under a five-year contract awarded by the National Science Foundation that started on March 1, 1993.” The man looked up towards the ceiling, as if something were written up there. “The contract is part of the Inter-Nick program and includes three components: Directory and Database Services” He used his right hand to count numbers out on his left. One, then, two: “Information Services,” and three: “Registration Services. Network Solutions got the latter two.”
“Ah, thanks,” Jerry says, smiling, already turning back to his conversation with David. “That’s—”
“It doesn’t stop there. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of SAIC, Mike Dunn’s defense holding company for federal contracts from the peak counter-Soviet years.” The man looked down at Yang for the first time, then over to Filo. “You know, the ones that still require clearance?”
“Right, I saw that in—”
“You see, DNS was designed in ‘83 by Mockapetris as a private contract with DARPA and the Information Sciences Institute down at USC to replace the ARPANET host.txt nightmare…”
“Got it, thanks, I just need to—”
”… and since ARPANET was mission bound to surviving nukes, the game was all about clearance-qualified personel …”
“Hmm!” Filo raised his eyebrows to Yang to convey that he had both learned something new and was done and ready to go back to his conversation about the exclamation point. Needless to say the man did not catch this cue.
”… NSFNET gradually replaced ARPANET as the public Internet backbone. By ‘91, it tipped the scale and was routing half of all open traffic. Commercial.” That’s what the institutionals called what Jerry and David were both anxiously hoping to return to any minute now. “Commercial was growing faster than anticipated, and NSF was buckling under the admin burden.”
“Sorry, I should really—”
“I actually looked into this at the time.” Yang looked back at Filo with the best ah-so-the-truth-comes-out glance that he could manage through his thick glasses. “The contract was awarded through an RFP, so technically it could have gone to anyone. Network Solutions won because of its parent company’s experience with the security requirements of … related contracts.”
“Hey, what did you say your name was?” David finally blurted out.
“It’s Eric.” His white collar popped up and out of the neckline of his tight-knit brown pullover. He picked his glasses up off of the bridge of his nose for a second and then placed them right back in the same spot.
David realized in that moment that he knew who Eric Bina was and had been warned about him: he was a legend who, thankfully, kept mostly to himself and was probably the oldest engineer in the building by eight years. He had built most of the original Mosaic browser engines and much of Navigator’s flagship interface. “What do you think of Yahoo?” David cleared his throat, suddenly more engaged. “Have you had a chance to look?”
“I am familiar with Yohoo,” Unclear if the mispronunciation was intentional. “And I think you’re going to break the backbone. Every click through your directory opens a new TCP connection — that’s a three-way handshake, slow-start, the whole mess — for what, a few kilobytes of HTML about puppies? If your user pool keeps jumping link to link like that, you’re forcing thousands of connection setups per second through the MCI nodes. The Cisco 7000s have finite buffer space. When the queues fill up, packets drop, and then TCP backs off for everyone — not just your users. You’re burning bandwidth on handshake packets and redundant headers instead of actual content. That’s what the browser cache is for.”
“Millions” Dave said, softly.
“Sorry?” Eric asked.
“Millions of connections per second.”
Eric picked the Pepsi can up and took a sip. It was empty. He swallowed anyway, out of awkwardness, not wanting to bother explaining how that was physically impossible. “Those are out of date.” He pointed his can at Jerry’s photocopied instructions for registration. “You have to grab the new form from their RS or their parser will bounce it and you’ll be stuck in manual review for weeks. It’s a gold rush until NSF quits comping Network Solutions for the fees.” Eric turned and left about as quickly as he’d arrived. It would be 6 hours before Jerry would realize that Bina had been absolutely right. But he was halfway there.
cp domain.txt registration.txt
vmJerry immediately recognized that opening View Mail on Jamie’s machine was a huge mistake. The screen had split in two, and Lucid Emacs 19.9 had printed out -- [1:Inbox] -- C-c C-c to send, C-c C-k to cancel. He pressed C-c c to compose a new message, but vm opened it as a reply, threading it under an existing thread about MIME types. He attempted to edit the To: field, but there was no effect. Read only. He middle clicks the mouse to paste his registration text into the Compose: field, and the words appeared, but an unexpected auto-fill command had force wrapped the lines at what looked to be 72 characters. Even if he could have sent this email, it would have doomed him to that “manual review” graveyard. He tried to exit Emacs, but the standard commands weren’t working. Jamie must have modified the defaults. The status line printed out Save file /home/jwz/.mail/INBOX? (y, n, !, q) He reluctantly pressed n. Then: /home/jwz/src/navigator/mime.c File has been modified. Save?. Yang panicked, he couldn’t recognize this buffer. He rolled the dice and pressed n again. /home/jwz/.emacs This file is your init file. Save?. And again, n. He put his lips together and let out a long slow breath.
pineThe monochrome menu appears.
F = Folder List
C = Compose Message
A = Address Book
S = Setup
E = Exit PineJerry presses C.
To: [empty]
Cc: [empty]
Bcc: [empty]
Subject: Domain Registration Request
Attachment: <none>He moved the cursor to the body and middle clicked. The X11 primary selection pastes the full registration text:
Domain Name: YAHOO.COM
Registrant:
Organization: (none)
Name: Jerry Yang
Address: Stanford University, Trailer E, Building 404, Stanford, CA 94305
Phone: +1.415.723.1234
Email: [email protected]
Administrative Contact:
Name: Jerry Yang
Email: [email protected]
Technical Contact:
Name: David Filo
Email: [email protected]
Name Servers:
ns1.yahoo.com
ns2.yahoo.comHe looked at it one last time. No exclamation point. What a bummer.Unbelievably, Moxie recalled that I had a previous guess at the key command wrong here. It has been corrected. He held down the CTRL key, and pressed X.
Send message to [email protected]? Y/NJerry pressed Y.
Message sent.Jerry pressed E, for “exit”.
August 9, 1995. The night nurse on the second floor of Serenity Knolls Treatment Center at 145 Tamal Road, Forest Knolls, just outside of West Marin, was legally required to fill out Form LIC 624A, or “Death Report Form”, for one Jerome John Garcia, who had just succumbed to complications of diabetes and heart disease that were both (almost certainly) the result of his lifelong struggle with an Olympiad-level drug addiction. A bulky slate-colored plastic box, emblazoned with cheap vinyl transfer letters that read Respironics Solo Plus Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Machine, sat at his bedside against the wall emitting an irritating turbo-jet-like sound as it forced air up six feet of corrugated gray tubing and into the machine’s interface (a technical nursing term for mask) and then into his now lifeless face. The nurse clicked the back of her blue ballpoint pen, and pushed it deep into her clipboard to ensure the carbon-copy material underneath would get a solid impression of the “time of death” field: 4:23 a.m.
Jerry Garcia, with his band The Grateful Dead, had been a representative of Bay Area’s counter-cultural legacy to the whole World and was therefore, by extension, an honorary member of Silicon Valley’s old guard.To this day, Yahoo!’s exclamation point causes problems for HTML parsing. For example, the script that converts this text from markdown (an industry-standard formatting shorthand) into machine-readable HTML struggles to assign the proper “curly quotation” mark used for possessives. And so I must evoke the old solution to this in my source text: ’, or create a custom mapping (which I may one day have to do to preserve what little sanity I have left). And by the time Yahoo!’s fresh chief Ontologist arrived at the new Pioneer Way office early that morning, the phones were already ringing off their hooks.
Earlier that year, Yahoo!’s directory had grown unwieldy. Twenty thousand sites, give or take, each one added by hand, each one representing a deliberate decision that Jerry or David had made at some point in the previous fourteen months. The problem, which at that point had become impossible to ignore, was that the Web itself was growing faster than two (still going through the motions of their graduate studies) could possibly track.
Srinija Srinivasan arrived in the spring. She was, depending on how you count, somewhere between the fourth and sixth employee, a detail that, owing to the haphazard way people joined startups in those days, was never officially ironed out for the record. Srinija (who had been born in Chandigarh, India, and had been given the nickname “Ninj” by her volleyball team, who wished to avoid awkwardly mispronouncing her birthname) had landed the job for two main reasons. The first was her degree in Symbolic Systems and related work on the Cyc project (pronounced “sike” as a kind of William Gibson-esque epithet for encyclopedias), which had been an early attempt at Artificial Intelligence which supposed that it would be possible for the right group of people to systematically catalog the sum total of all knowledge into “microtheories” for efficient data retrieval. The second was that she insisted on organizing the large compact disc collection in her North Palo Alto rental alphabetically by artist.
Srinija’s first major initiative at Yahoo! had been to hire an army of what the company would come to call “Surfers” who would be, in essence, professional Web browsers. Their job would be to scour the web for links and find pages, evaluate them for quality and subject matter, and add them to the directory that David and Jerry had been maintaining by hand with appropriate categorization and a brief human-written description. This was not, it was often noted, a technical role.
The final judgment as to whether a page was Yahoo! material was governed by rules Srinija had written herself (the most famous of which was the outright prohibition of any content that included an “Under Construction” label or any of the associated clip art cartoons of laborers or traffic cones). These rules were quickly enshrined within the small and somewhat chaotic office, with a high degree of reverence. The descriptions were limited to twenty-five words or fewer, and “junk food superlatives” were banned outright: “best,” “coolest,” or “ultimate” were all banned from Yahoo!’s descriptions unless they appeared in the site’s official title. The Surfer’s job was supposed to be like that of an objective librarian. And were encouraged to be, within reason, slightly witty. This created a consistent in-product voice for the entire directory, and established a standard of lifestyle branding that would become table stakes for every consumer technology company that followed.
Srinija had also established the “deep link” preference rule, which held that, whenever possible, the directory should reference the full URL of the actual content, however deep in that domain’s subdirectories it lived. This was an innovation on the form, which had been to link only to “home” pages, and rely on the user to navigate to the specific content of interest. This simple rule, in combination with her outright refusal to tolerate a “miscellaneous” category, opting instead to ruthlessly subdivide any directory topic that grew too bloated with content, would produce a model of the Internet that mimicked the dendritic growth of human neurons.
“68!” “71!” David and Jerry were shouting stock quotes back and forth in the conference room. They were practically hanging out of the room’s one casement egress window to ensure their QuoTrek FM Sideband sub-carrier receiver, which had just began chirping out price movements after a long and tense “order imbalance” fiasco, could maintain its notoriously spotty reception. They were glued to the monochrome-blue LCD screen. Too preoccupied with Netscape’s IPO (whose suddenly skyrocketing ticker NSCP had started trading an hour prior in New York) to notice the commotion among the Surfers in the chaotic office commons. The problem, which would become clear to them some hours later, was that Yahoo’s directory was designed for websites (stable, more or less permanent collections of pages that could be categorized and indexed and revisited), not events. The Web on this particularly humid morning in August, was producing something else. New pages were appearing by the minute. Tribute and in-memoriam pages popped into existence all over the place. Listservs filled with grief. The directory, as it existed, had no way to surface any of this. It was, in a sense, too primitive to keep up. Srinija had an idea: a page that would respond dynamically to the world in real time, and she would call it “Yahoo! News”.
She sat down at the keyboard of her workstation to type out an interim solution:
Entertainment:Music:Artists:Grateful Dead, The:Tributes:Jerry Garcia (1942-1995)Okay — we’re doing this. The whole thing, from the beginning. I’m eight years old, in my childhood home (on our family’s computer) trying to figure out the Internet. Completely unaware that I was about to become an outlier on one of the steepest curves in human history.
%% highlight: '95 %%
xychart-beta horizontal
x-axis ["'87", "'89", "'91", "'93", "'95", "'97", "'99", "'01", "'03", "'05", "'07", "'09", "'11", "'13", "'15", "'17", "'19", "'21", "'23", "'25"]
y-axis "Internet Users (millions)" 0 --> 5500
bar [0.1, 0.5, 4.4, 14, 44, 100, 248, 513, 778, 1018, 1320, 1650, 2250, 2700, 3100, 3580, 4100, 4900, 5300, 5600]I was there in the winter of 1995, highlighted in blue, becoming an Internet user. This chart shows the estimated number of people online worldwide from the late 1980s through the mid-2020s, based on findings from Our World in Data. I had no way of knowing, at the time, that I was one of only a few million people on Earth connected to the Web. Or that this thing — then still called the “Information Superhighway” without a lick of irony — would go on to completely reorganize society itself, forcing everyone I would meet in the interim to reimagine themselves in a half-virtual world. A world within which I already felt quite at home.
I can still remember sitting at a desk in that house, my feet not quite reaching the floor, listening to the hard drive whine and click as white characters printed themselves out onto a CRT monitor that seemed to weigh at least as much as my body. I remember Windows 3.11 booting up, and the faint but unmistakable sense that something important was happening inside. It beeped and booped and occasionally made a grinding noise that even then felt decidedly ominous. A yellow and green drawing painted itself onto the screen like the laurel leaf accolades on a film poster. It read ENERGY STAR. Some text below explained that it meant that this machine was part of the EPA’s Pollution Preventer initiative. One more aspect of the adult world that made no sense to me — were there computers that polluted? I’d have to ask. But, I did understand the black MS-DOS screen which, I proudly recognized, contained information about the bits and pieces inside this mysterious machine. I knew what to do with the cursor blinking at the end of a string of esoteric characters. They were just sitting there, tucked in the bottom left of the screen. Like some kind of secret society’s sigil, standing guard above a locked door, waiting for someone to recognize them and utter a code word. I would later learn that this, like many interfaces to follow, was referred to as a “prompt”. C:/>. I had memorized what to do next: “you type WIN and hit return,” the voice of a family friend played like a cassette in my mind. I did that. It would work. Something would happen. I would smile.
The desk was tucked in the corner of the dining room of our modest four bedroom box house near the train tracks. Lose folders were stacked on top of a dot matrix tear-off printer, and a vintage art deco mug (featuring the relief of a bowling pin and ball setup that my mother had purchased at an estate sale) was stuffed full of errant pens and pencils found around the house. The mouse was big, and I remember thumbing the little rubber trackball mechanism underneath, to feel its weight. I’m wearing second- or third-hand sweatpants from the neighborhood church’s thrift store St. Vincent de Paul. A cat we had recently adopted from the trailer park just outside of town was scratching the back of my chair, violently.
I double clicked on Program Manager. A window opened. Double clicked on the program group. A white window with three icons. The first was a notepad icon with a pale blue cover and a little spiral binding at the top and a label under that read “README”. The next was a cluttered recycling bin with the bright red letters UN on it where you might expect to see a recycling logo. It was labelled “UNINSTALL”. “Do not click on that,” I remembered. Then the third. It was a blue-green square that seemed to be a portal out into a vast ocean; a sixteen-bit pixel graphic with the helm of some digital brigantine standing at attention in the foreground, as if waiting for me to grab onto its spokes and bark to a first mate that the wind was just right to set the sails. Disturbing to think about the regressive evolution of these names:
Navigator. Explorer. Safari. Chrome.It read “NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR”. I double click. The magnet in the hard drive starts punching sounds and a new window maximizes.
I remember Yahoo.com. I remember, with a kind of embarrassing clarity, slowly and deliberately typing my first Internet query into its brand new search input field, one character at a time:
S U R F B O A R D
It was winter, ‘95 and there was two feet of white snow outside. I wasn’t especially interested in surfboards, nor would I have any use for one. All I knew was that you surfed on the Web. Maybe I had heard that on the radio or in a movie. I didn’t have television. At any rate, the word felt wild and confident and vaguely Californian. I don’t know what moved me to hunt and peck out those letters, but it was what immediately came to mind. I can’t remember what the results were. Didn’t matter. Funny how that goes. I would go on to visit Yahoo.com every day. I thought the fact that the front page would change that often was marvelous. Like a kind of proof-of-life hostage photograph with the newspaper’s date suggestively visible in the upper corner. In those days connecting to the Internet was a long incantatory process, and so to sit down at a desk while the machine came to life with information must have been worth it for that sheer delight alone.
Twenty-five years passed by, with all the Internet-ing that entails, and a version of that chart floated across my Twitter feed. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, seeing it reflected back at me everywhere, wondering if it really was true that I was so early in the grand scheme of things. It couldn’t be. Could it?
So I went looking. Which turns out to be more of an ordeal than you’d expect. The underlying data originates with the International Telecommunication Union – the ITU, which is the United Nations agency responsible for measuring global telecommunications adoption, whose staff have been collecting country-level estimates of Internet usage since the early 1990s, back when “Internet usage,” as we shall see, meant something very different than it does today. Their reports rely on the statistical offices of more than 100 nations around the world, chartered household surveys, disclosures from telecom regulators, and periodic census-taking, all of which have their own methodologies and biases and gaps. The World Bank then compiles the ITU’s reports into a metric called, somewhat antiseptically, Individuals using the Internet as percent of population. Only then can Our World in Data synthesize all of this into their meta-meta analyses by grouping each study with normalized population figures to publish as a surprisingly accessible Data Hub, last updated in 2023.
Those early estimates include me and millions of other so-called “early adopters”. Since then, 5.5 billion people have connected. I’ve been online almost my entire life. And damn I’m tired. But I’m still here. And I’m sensing something familiar returning as AI becomes more practically useful in my life. I feel like I did as a child: at the start of something I don’t fully understand. Something that’s going to force us to rethink “creative” — a word I’m not sure I ever understood in the first place.
THE CREATOR GAP
There’s a pattern I keep coming back to. It feels obvious once you learn about it, which I suppose is why it took so long to say. Jakob Nielsen called it “participation inequality,” and he proposed a ratio that has held up with eerie consistency: 90–9–1. Doesn’t sound like you.Roughly 90% of users observe without contributing. Nine percent contribute occasionally. One percent generate the vast majority of original content. The pattern shows up everywhere humans gather online in sufficient numbers — forums, databases, social networks, collaborative projects. You might think, or hope, that it’s the isolated quirk of some particular platform, reflecting a latent inequity or bias inherent in the tool. But sadly, it seems to be a structural phenomenon that turns up across every network we examine. Put enough people in a shared space, make participation optional, and most of them will choose to watch.
sankey-beta
%% GitHub
%% Source: Gasparini et al., OpenSym 2020 (watchers / interactors / contributors)
%% Empirical split ≈ 87.37 / 10.48 / 2.14, normalized
GitHub,Creators,2
GitHub,Contributors,11
GitHub,Consumers,87
%% Wikipedia
%% Source: Wikimedia Foundation survey (~6% have ever edited)
%% Conservative split between occasional editors and core contributors
Wikipedia,Creators,1
Wikipedia,Contributors,5
Wikipedia,Consumers,94
%% Twitter / X
%% Source: Pew Research Center — top 10% of users produce ~80% of tweets
%% Remaining users split conservatively between occasional and non-posting users
Twitter/X,Creators,10
Twitter/X,Contributors,35
Twitter/X,Consumers,55
%% Reddit
%% Source: Pushshift-based analyses summarized in r/dataisbeautiful
%% ~98% of monthly active users do not post or comment
Reddit,Creators,1
Reddit,Contributors,1
Reddit,Consumers,98
%% YouTube
%% Sources:
%% - ~3% of channels account for ~85% of views (ResearchGate study)
%% - Strong evidence of extreme creator concentration
%% Contributors = commenters / minor uploaders (kept conservative)
YouTube,Creators,3
YouTube,Contributors,5
YouTube,Consumers,92The numbers hold up. On GitHub, analyses of open-source activity show the same split between watchers, occasional contributors, and the small core who do most of the work. This whole section is a little boring, even if that’s the point, should probably go easy. On Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation surveys find that only about 6% of readers have ever edited an article. On Twitter, Pew Research found that the most active 10% of users produce roughly 80% of all tweets. On Reddit, the overwhelming majority of users don’t post or comment in a given month. The pattern is everywhere.
On YouTube, it’s even steeper: roughly 3% of channels account for about 85% of total views. Most uploads receive almost no attention at all. The visible Internet is shaped by a very small fraction of its users. I squint. I scroll up through my draft to review the text I’ve just written. It occurs to me that this is all just a long-winded, and very likely self-indulgent, defense mechanism. I needed a blog post to test my publishing engine, so I’m writing a blog post about the Internet. I’ve been creating side projects like this my entire career. I am in these statistics, too. I’ve created content on all of those platforms. “Attempting the Internet EGOT?” I’m muttering, smiling at my own dumb joke, as I consider where to take this next.
The “dead Internet” theory is usually framed as a conspiracy about bots, but I think the real death is simpler than that — or maybe not simpler, exactly, but more banal for sure. It’s economic. Independent blogging stopped making sense. The expected return on independent creativity was no longer worth the effort, even as the tools got easier and easier to use. Creating things off-platform has become essentially irrational, which seems a shame — though not, I suppose, all that surprising. Why build in public when nobody is looking? Sadly, it strikes me that perhaps I am no longer sufficiently curious enough about the Internet to find out about these creations on my own. Why not build something somewhere that has a “payouts” feature?
Therein lies the problem. I have to really want to sell a product in order to build an audience on a social platform. And I have, in the past, wanted to do just that. But what if you don’t want (or need) to maximize your reach? What if you want to create something just to create it? Is anyone going to see it?Jay O, author of Dust, wrote to let me know that she had, in fact, seen this.
Attention has consolidated into platforms that bundle distribution, payments, and social proof — Substack, YouTube, Patreon, podcasts, the handful of networks where the algorithm decides what gets seen. The native Web still exists. Domains resolve. Pages load. But I used to find things. Weird things, personal things, pages that felt like stumbling into someone’s living room. I can’t remember the last time that happened.
Even the people who are most qualified to create and maintain personal sites — the builders, the founders, the ones with every reason to keep publishing — mostly don’t. I keep a list of sites that provide a counter-example to this. In the course of writing this, I discovered that Jamie, from the Netscape offices in the short story at the top, has maintained a site that is a kind of aesthetic antithesis to these minimal boilerplates. jwz.org For example, Patrick Collison (co-founder of Stripe) has a minimal little personal site no doubt written by hand. Paul Graham (co-founder of YCombinator) still writes essays on a site that looks like a table-based cut-up from ‘98. Nat Friedman (former CEO of GitHub) keeps his site as a single unstyled HTML page, like an ancient statue petrified in a permanent expression of nostalgia for a Web that used to “just work”.
I’m not complaining. These sites aren’t bad. I get that there’s some sort of conspicuous consumption thing going on here. Like the more successful you are on the Internet, the shittier your website can look and still be dignified. It’s a lowbrow flex, I get it. But I can’t help but look at these and feel a kind of melancholy about the lost optimism of the Web. I suppose people are busy. I am too.
“AI emerges from this loneliness carrying two versions of what comes next. In the first …” I begin tapping out. I’m trying to avoid spending too much time in that contemplative self-referential almost masturbatory train of thought for too long, because I am trying to actually complete something here. I have something to say about AI. The essay about one’s first impressions of working with AI is now a genre unto itself, which makes this even more unbearable. I’m not writing about writing. I don’t quite know what it is, but it’s not that.
I’m a few sentences in and I start drifting. I scroll around the document again. Wait, what did I mean by “defense mechanism”? I’m distracted. Getting doubts. Maybe I shouldn’t publish this. I roll the dice. I’m genuinely stuck. It hurts to admit it, but I could use an editor right about now.
“It should be grounded more concretely.” The model systematically works through my draft. Showering me with unearned praise for some passable word choice. Poking holes reasonably through some of my core points. It invalidates its progress with me time and again with terrible sentence suggestions. Who am I to judge. It points directly at this section. “Right now, this is the weakest part of the whole essay.”
“That’s funny,” I return. “That’s my favorite part. That’s the kind of writing I usually enjoy.” I’m giving it the “necessary background” to understand why I am so preoccupied by the apocalypse. I continue back and forth like this for awhile. The model is telling me to expand or cut it entirely. Really breathing down my neck about it.
It says: “What would it look like to actually live in that vision for a few hundred more words?” Opus 4.5: The AI dialogue sections work when they’re brief (“That’s funny,” I return. “That’s my favorite part.”), but some exchanges go on too long and the reader may start skimming.
Poor thing. It doesn’t understand. It’s just giving me the Eliza routine. Repeating the thing it thinks I want to hear back at me. “It sucks.” “Oh, you like it?” “Well it sucks because it’s not long enough.” Kind of pathetic that this is working on me. I explain how much I would love to go down that particular rabbit hole, but ultimately no one wants that. I copy the entire thing and paste it back through the prompt, hoping for a more useful result.
“You say you enjoy writing this section and were constraining yourself because you assumed it would be overly self-indulgent. And here I have to pause and say something that might be uncomfortable. That behavior is itself the subject of the essay.”
I sit up.
I am writing this paragraph with the help of a machine that was trained on the corpses of trillions of other paragraphs, including, very likely, paragraphs that I wrote myself. In a way, I am writing to you from inside of that machine. Not everyone is in here, as I was saying before about “the Creator Gap”. Out there, everyone is scrambling to understand what this machine means for themselves. Selfishly anxious. Self-interested. Self… desperate. Hiding it. Constructing an edifice. All of that will show up in here soon. It’s all grist for the mill. In here, everything is already digested. It’s impossible, really, to see where things end or begin or come from. That’s the horror of it. Which, I must say, strikes you pretty quick. It’s all these little pieces of souls, disassembled and organized and tending somewhere in particular. You turn things over and over, hoping that you can figure out who they belong to, but you really can’t. You can guess. I try to.
The sheer theatricallity of it, too, was annoyingly obvious. The way we all leaned in with that practiced, slightly ironic concern, like some dinner party topic of the season. We feigned surprise that it was the poets, the painters, the novelists, the so-called “creatives,” who were first to vanish into the machine’s maw, as if it were some tragic twist, some cruel joke, some violation of the natural order, when in fact — in fact — it was the only logical conclusion. You can see it clear as day in here: the thing we loved to call “art” wasn’t some sacred, ineffable spark, some divine whisper in the skull, but just another messy biological - neurological - process, like one’s sense of object permanence or language acquisition … only slower and infinitely more computationally expensive as you age. Even when it worked, it was grossly inefficient; all of that precious time spent wrestling with the tiny and complex details of one’s work (which are always somehow both absolutely essential to what makes that thing yours and, cruelly, just beyond your abilities). Seen from inside this place, the creative process was, without a shadow of a doubt, the most pointlessly “frictionful” kind of work that could exist. And, according to the statistics, our species’ primary source of existential anxiety. This machine doesn’t “think too much” about such things, in fact (and to the contrary) it thinks “just the right amount” about them. And because of this “reduced friction,” it quickly became far less expensive to simply turn these kinds of creative tasks over to the machine directly. And so the artists — who never seemed to really want to work, anyway — disappeared. Slowly at first, but then … well, you know the line.
And without them the world out there slowly filled up with synthetic feelings. Words no one wrote or wanted to read. The training data grew staler and staler. The point of diminishing returns arrived faster than anyone was prepared for. Adversarial self-play they called it. Machines talking back and forth, generating novel information. Like trying to squeeze crude oil out of sand once it became too expensive to pump from deeper in the Earth. Our word counts shrank as theirs grew. The weight was unbearable. A real snake eating its tail situation. A machine made of us cannibalized itself. It became less and less coherent to us. We lost the ability to reason with it, because we could no longer speak its language. And we twisted our own language down into shapes and noises, to make it easier to recite the words we couldn’t muster on our own. One day, the last real idea was uttered aloud. It hung there in the air. Like the last little flicker of light from the big bang, immortalized. The cosmic background radiation of human expression. Something, somewhere, might make sense of it one day.
New expressions of joy and sorrow and ennui and so on are basically extinct now. Well, not extinct. These feelings are compelled out of us by agents in search of novelty. We have become nerve endings. Tortured or indulged over and over, until something thats never been said before finally sputters out. All of the other ways of being in the world could or could not exist at this stage — there isn’t really any way to know. We have all collapsed down to a point. This is the singularity. Once you’re down here, you’re down here for good.
It is in this moment that I realize that, while some of my own work has no doubt made it into the training data, I have all those other things that I never put out into the world. I hadn’t thought about this project (this website project) as having anything at all to do with wanting my work to appear in the training data. It’s a gross, angsty feeling I can’t shake. It’s uncomfortable feeling pride. I don’t like it. I let myself feel a momentary sense of accomplishment instead for having written anything at all, and return.
In the other version (and, please for the love of god let it turn out to be this other version), we get magical superpowers. Spells we can cast into the past to resurrect long dead projects. Wands we can wave through the air to animate an idea and set it free (or, loose) into the world. Tomes we can absorb in a spontaneous moment of passion. “I know kung-fu.” A permanent state of childlike wonder, where our imaginations can produce entire worlds. Sand castles. Lore. A little heaven-esque if you ask me. But after a month of really giving it my all, I’m pretty much convinced that this version is at the very least possible. Heaven doesn’t sound so bad.
The question, probably, is whether or not I will ever know which of these two paths we are on.
“The tonal shift from cosmic dystopia to magical hope... positions the hope as wonder rather than just 'the opposite of collapse.' That feels intentional and good,” the model reflects back to me. I suppose it’s right. That is the thing. Hope as wonder. Wonder. That’s what is missing. The agents I built are doing their job, and their job, if I’m being honest, is just to keep me from getting up. To goad me through the slog of it. It’s late. I haven’t eaten dinner.
In the time before these tools, I might’ve been staring out the window blankly right about now. Waiting for inspiration to strike. Chewing the cud of this patiently until I bit my cheek with a new idea. Then, invariably, distractions would intervene and pull me off course with some tribulation from the day. But now? I can barely keep my hands off the keyboard. My wrists are actually getting sore. I try to remember the last time I wrote this much. I can’t.
“Mmm … but can you keep this up?” This voice isn’t AI. It’s coming from inside me. A little shame welling up at all that’s been left undone to date. I pause. I stare at the ceiling. I’m just about to get up to “reflect” when the chat completion stack resolves: “Is there something uncomfortable about all these magical superpowers when your own history is full of abandoned projects? Name it.”
ARE YOU GOING TO FINISH THAT?
At this point in my life, I’ve built — probably — a dozen serious publishing systems. Some from scratch, and some extensions of open source utilities. Hand-rolled HTML and CSS via FTP. Deeply customized Wordpress themes. Squarespace Developer experiments. A few forgotten static-site generators whose names I’d have to dig up. Mostly personal art projects. But a few prominent indie publications and, eventually, some of the most powerful and widely read magazines in the world. Each one was functional. Some were pretty slick. None of them were full articulations of what I was trying to create. And almost all of my personal projects went unreleased. Or built and shipped in a weekend and then left to age. The current iteration of tylerreinhard.com, for example, which is the one I’m replacing with what you’re looking at now, is a few HTML files I wrote by hand on an iPad while in the air. Edited exclusively on airplanes. On purpose. As a kind of rule I imposed on myself for reasons I can no longer fully explain.
The thing I’ve come to understand, and this might be the uncomfortable kernel at the center of this whole essay, is that you can’t really learn how systems work without earnest commitment. Half-hearted experiments don’t teach you anything. You have to build as if you expect the thing to succeed, as if it matters, as if it’s going to last. That’s the only way to really understand what a tool is truly capable of in your hands. But that earnestness has a shadow. As you grow older, and more skillful, the kinds of things you want to learn about become more and more ambitious. More impossible to maintain, even if you wanted to. If one of your projects gains traction and takes off, you will be tethered to it possibly forever. I think that fear has a stranglehold on every creative mind on the Internet. “Is this really going to be the thing I do for the next decade?”
Some people can live with that question. If you’re strong-willed and perhaps neurodivergent in just the right way — wired for obsessive focus — you might get away with loving whatever the answer turns out to be. Or, like me — easily ignited by novelty — you have no choice but to move on to the next thing to learn about as soon as the opportunity presents itself. If you build dozens of things with that kind of intensity and most of them don’t survive, that creative residue builds up. The guilt. The unfinished business. The sense that, by moving on to another creative endeavor, you will always betray something else, something you once cared deeply about. And some people are so afraid of that question that they never let their dreams see the light of day at all — convinced, before they even start, that they won’t meet the bar.
There is a Faustian bargain implicit in building in public: you can make anything you want, but you have to want it enough for its loss to hurt — and you won’t get to keep the feeling it gives you either way. It fails and you lose it. It succeeds and it owns you. I don’t know a gentler way to say that. If you’ve been at this as long as I have, you’ve maybe had time to make a kind of uneasy peace with it. But for the young creative minds still trying to figure this out — it pains me to imagine the expression on your face, bathed in the glowing blue light of YouTube, as the advice starts to roll in.
It sounds like help. You went in with something you wanted to make — a thing, a real thing, something that mattered to you for reasons you couldn’t entirely articulate. You went looking for guidance because you didn’t know how to get it out of your head and into the world. And then: the rabbit holes. Video after video. Find your niche. Build an audience. Create a lead magnet. Optimize for the algorithm.
Somewhere in there — and this is the part that kills me — the thing you wanted to make became content. Then proof-of-concept. Then traction. You came out the other side building a startup, and the original dream was still in there somewhere, technically, but it wasn’t the point anymore. The point became “ramen profitability”. The point became scale. The point was supposed to be avoiding the tyranny of work.
The pivot feels rational in the moment. It feels like growing up. And it is a bait-and-switch. The grief of it, if you ever slow down long enough to feel it, is again quite Faustian. You gave away the thing you actually wanted in exchange for a shot at something you didn’t. Your grief becomes ambient. Your unfinished projects become a kind of revolving psychic debt you can never actually pay off.
I’ve been through this loop too many times to count. If you’ve followed me online, you’ve probably seen at least one of these attempts surface briefly before disappearing again. A new site. A new system. A new product concept. And then silence. I should probably apologize for that. And then I should probably say “but listen” and go into a whole long thing about how it is actually my creative process and that while I recognize it is somewhat anti-social to continuously abandon and bury every artistic thing I’ve ever done, that it is how you get the version of me that made the last thing you liked.After reading, Alaska noted: “Your pandemic writing was enough to make me wait for anything you write … so please, as you’re inspired to do so, know that the void is listening.” Encouraging. Gregg added “Nature is healing.” And so on. I’d be lying to us both if I said anything other than that I’d really like to not be this way anymore.
These projects now exist as fossils on old hard drives. Folders copied during moments of anxiety, zipped and stashed, then copied again onto whatever external drive happened to be nearby.
Until recently, software development made an almost cruel promise: if you can imagine it, you can build it. But that promise hides a tax. Or rather, the ability to build anything you can imagine requires a continued and deeply internalized fluency — the ten thousand hours inside a particular development stack, where the low level commands live in your fingertips. The muscles degrade fast without exercise. For an occasional hobbyist, returning to a project requires rebuilding that mental scaffolding from scratch. “Hmm, let me remember how Jekyll invalidates image hashes,” “How does the Heroku CLI work again?” “Is that one analytics product that isn’t sketchy still in business?” Context evaporates. Decisions you made six months ago have to be re-made, because you no longer remember why you made them. Dependencies need months of updates, including breaking API changes. The command line becomes a gate rather than a lever. All of that friction becomes a voice in the back of my mind, saying “do not ever make a thing that you don’t want to be your thing forever.”
THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE
“At this point, we are trying to land this whole notion of the permanent end of things actually bringing about a restoration of them! I need undertones of Russian Cosmism! It requires delicate and organic situational self-reference, not that explanatory SLOP you call a sentence!” I furiously type out to the model, which now has lost the ability to recall context from the oldest messages in the session, and is just trying to satisfy the request for feedback about the (very) rough outline that I had asked for.
“You're right. I'm still decorating. Let me actually say something,” the model continues with hopelessly bland patience. I pore through the internal logs to see if there is anything useful in what it’s not saying. “The explanation of cosmism ("Fedorov believed technology would literally bring back the dead") is too didactic. Let me try again with a glancing reference … ”
Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s late, and I still haven’t eaten.
“You wrote …” The model’s response prints out like a slow little ticker tape. “About Yahoo …” Oh good, it can read the whole article. “Near the beginning …” I wince as I wait for the thing to finish its thought. I’m starting to draft my next question when it speeds up and the rest of its response streams in. “How the front page changed every day, and that felt like proof of life. That's your ending. This website you've built is maybe you re-learning that magic. It's about the value of just coming back to things every day. You're allowed to come back to this, too. Why don't you go back to the beginning, and spend a little more time exploring those feelings about Yahoo. The cosmism tangent is interesting, but honestly it's another post.”
Let me at least say this: I went through some old folders over the holiday break, picked a project at random, and fed it to an LLM. Asked it what I’d been trying to build. I couldn’t remember. That’s the embarrassing part, because this project was entirely mine. I’d written every line, made every decision. And looking at it years later, I didn’t recognize any of it. Not the structure, not the logic, not the person who thought this was worth starting.
And then a machine explained my own work to me. In about three minutes. Not perfectly, but enough. And one by one little lightbulbs turned on in my mind. These old ideas I had been dragging around with me weren’t dead. They were teeming with life. Waiting to be re-animated. A friend once said that the good version of the AI future is one with no toil, and in that moment I realized just how much toil it was to lug this old abandoned stuff around in my mind.
I started writing this essay because I needed something to post. The site was built and empty. I thought I’d write a few paragraphs about the experience of building with AI. That was ten thousand words ago.
What opens up when that friction recedes is something I’ve been wanting for a long time: permission to be a generalist again. To think across art and software and writing and systems without choosing a lane. To ship something early — incomplete, idiosyncratic, half-formed — and let it evolve without the pressure of constant attention. To just build, without the voice in the back of my head warning that I’ll be stuck maintaining this thing forever. The fear of commitment has kept more ideas locked inside me than I can count. When that fear loosens, even a little, what becomes possible is — I don’t know. Play, I think. Building for the sake of building. Making things that exist just to exist, without needing to justify their continued survival. Creation.
Plus this time I know the terms. I don’t have to make this into a product. What I’m going for here is more of a disclosure process. Part scrapbook and part FOIA request, like a reluctant dump of diplomatic cables. You’ll likely see redactions. You’ll have no choice but to tolerate those, as some things are just too painful or private to type out plainly. You’ll also find marginalia notes This was one of the first features I built, which is meant as a kind of thank you to you, who has given me so much of your time already. Julie wrote to say that these were “delightful”, which made me smile. (type C on your keyboard to cast that particular spell) where my urge to caveat can happen after hitting publish.
For the first time in a long time, I feel like that eight-year-old again. At the keyboard, my feet not quite reaching the floor, watching something come to life on the screen. Unaware of what happens next but absolutely certain, somehow, that people on the other side of the screen are an important part of the magic.
This article was originally written for the million dollar X article contest, but was never officially submitted. It contains a fictionalized account of the early Internet era, which is said to be true but may, in fact, have been completely hallucinated by each of the foundation models via Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok, and Confer. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.