When the Net Was Ours
Images from the Internet of the 1990s–2000s carry a promise within them.
That of a space still open, experimental, free.
The nostalgia they awaken today has less to do with their appearance than with what they held in potential: the utopia of an Internet that belonged to us, experienced as a place to explore rather than a system to feed.
That Internet stood on a threshold.
A fragile, unstable threshold, between a nascent network — still largely non-commercial, non-indexed, unsupervised — and what it was about to become. A space where everything seemed possible.
One entered it as an uncharted territory, without a definitive map, without a clearly established center. Uses were not yet fixed, forms remained indeterminate, narratives open.
If we look at these images with melancholy today, it is because, along with them, a certain idea of our freedom has been lost.
Thanks to the combination of six writers credited simultaneously under their Halloween names, it's safe to assume this moment in Treehouse of Horror IV holds the record for "Most Opaque Wall of Credits in a Simpsons Episode"
Kabura-ya (鏑矢) is a Japanese arrow used by the samurai in feudal Japan. Its sound was created by a specially carved bulb of deer horn attached to the tip & believed to chase away evil spirits before the battle 🔊