There was a time when the internet felt like a secret. Not just metaphorically. It literally felt like something the adults hadn’t caught up to yet. Something you and your friends whispered about at lunch. Some of us found weird sites like stickdeath.com where we would watch the fever dream of an animation series called 'Superbeast' - among many others that I can't quite remember the names of but have very fond memories watching, cringing, and giggling with my friends over. We would go to a buddies house where his parents weren't home, we'd put a blanket over ourselves and the monitor and watched some of the most crude and violent flash animations I've ever seen before. Shortly after, we would be introduced to websites like Newgrounds where we would watch the Madness Combat animations or the old Egoraptor videos. We would visit Rotten.com to gross each other out, we would visit message boards and chat rooms to flame people who were trying to take role playing way too seriously. I believe we even saw the birth of the word 'UwU' in these roleplaying chatrooms. These websites and the internet felt like real places back then—and it's because that’s what they were, that's what the internet was, it was a *place* you could actually visit—it wasn't on a phone constantly attached to you, it wasn't wifi built into your washing machine - you physically had to go there, sit down, and visit with it. And when you walked away from your desk? That's where it stayed. We weren’t online to be seen. We weren’t posting for likes or followers. We were there to explore and gross ourselves out, discover new music, talk to people across the country in other little towns just like ours. The internet wasn’t so much something that you *used*. It was something that you *found.* It was an entire world of imagination and crude creativity at our fingertips.
If you were a kid in the late ‘90s or early 2000s, you probably remember the feeling of logging on like you were sneaking out of the house at 2am to ride your bike and meet up with your friends to explore the woods at night. You’d sit down at the family computer—bulky, humming, planted on this giant, heavy, wooden desk like a permanent fixture, the connection speed was impossibly slow but you didn't even know what 'slow' was yet— and you’d enter a world no one had mapped. No parental controls. No corporate onboarding. No algorithms or influencers begging for your 2 seconds of attention. No sign-ups or emails required to view the content. Just trial, error, curiosity, and discovery. Typing in random URL's and seeing what happened. Google couldn't even keep up with us yet, it was the new frontier for us. We didn’t know what we were doing—but neither did anyone else. That was the beauty of it. We were the first generation to grow up *with* the internet, but also the last to remember a world *before* it. So every website felt like this uncharted territory, we were there without a map and a compass, lost on the high seas. Every broken link, every niche anime and Final Fantasy fan site, every weird Flash animation— it was *ours* to find Like someone made this entire thing just for us to discover and explore around in.
We were digital natives, the first to step foot on this new continent. We didn’t have a manual, there were no guides. Just Neopets. Gaia Online. Runescape. Limewire. Newgrounds, and faint whispers of rumours from our friends at recess. We clicked through pop-ups like modern day expeditionaries dodging punji traps and poison darts. And somehow, without even realizing it, we were learning how the internet worked. Not from teachers. Not from textbooks. But from sheer exposure and childlike wonder. We learned that hyperlinks opened doors. That HTML could change the colors and size of text. That usernames offered a kind of peudo-anonymity that let you be anything you wanted in this brave new world. We taught ourselves how to code glitter text into our MySpace bios without even realizing we were learning how to create our own websites. It was our playground, but we were building too. We weren’t just 'users'. We were learning to be architects, we were becoming citizens of this new nation.
MySpace was the first place that taught me what digital identity *meant*. You didn’t just “have a profile". You didn't have this sterile page or timeline like how the modern Facebook profile is. You *designed* it. You had to create and build your profile, you gave it it's own personality, it's own life. We picked a profile song like it was our personal anthem, and whoever visited your page was going to hear it whether they liked it or not. We ranked our Top 8 friends with the seriousness of a legal contract, removing your buddy from your top 8 was an act of war. Removing your girlfriend from the top 1 slot was the signal to every guy in school that she was suddenly available. We scoured layout sites for the perfect combination of dark backgrounds, pot leafs, funny cat gifs, rotating stars, and embedded Smosh videos that would autoplay the second the page loaded. It was messy. It was loud. It was broken half the time, but it was an extension of our personality, an extension of our adolescent creative expression let loose on the world for everyone to see. I even got in an argument with Bam Margera in his picture comments because I called him out for being a wuss on whatever jackass episode I watched at the time, which was a core memory for me to argue with some celebrity across the world that actually took time to respond to some punk kid. I even remember I tried calling the cops on someone impersonating George Bush because he was sending nasty messages to a girl I was talking to at the time and I was trying to defend her honor. (it didn't work they kind of scolded me for tying up an emergency line) But it taught us to personalize, to tweak code snippets, to remix and edit. We were able to *own* our space online before “platforms” flattened everything into neat uniformity. Today, your social media profile is a clean template. You don't really have a 'profile', you have a 'timeline' Everything we do now on social media feels like a LinkedIn profile and our resume is just pictures of our latest vacation - or we post things as if we're living out a highlight reel. We post with regard to the way we want people to perceive how happy and successful we are in our lives, even if we're really not. But back then? Back when MySpace was the king? We treated our profile like it was bedroom wall, full of band posters, jerseys, autographs and polaroid pictures.
Gaming was also part of that same secret internet. But it wasn’t Twitch clips and esports leagues, it was giant walkthrough books thicker than the bible and gaming magazines. It was game sharks and forum posts. It was school yard rumors about how to get missingno in pokemon. It was Flash games on school computers with the volume on mute in a seperate window so we wouldn't get caught by the teacher. It was LAN parties in someone’s basement where you had to haul 50 pounds of equipment and cables across the neighborhood. I remember seeing someone hauling their tower and their old monitor in a rickety shopping cart across the cul-de-sac to go play Halo: CE at a friends house just because they didn't want to deal with split-screen lookers. Even the way we talked about games was different. They were just as much a part of the conversation as what we were having for dinner that night. You didn’t need to be good at the game. You didn’t need to stream. We weren't bogged down by early access and DLC that cost more than the game itself. I remember when Pizza Hut released Playstation demo packs and I would spend more time playing the Tekken or the Crash Bandicoot demos then I would actually playing any other old game I had in my cd folder. Games were spaces to *be in*, not perform in (unless you were playing counter strike). Old MMO's like Everquest were designed to basically be chat rooms with an entire game attached. We were experiencing the games, we would let ourselves get lost in their narratives and stories instead of trying to squeeze a bunch of b-roll footage out of them for our nostalgia trip YouTube videos. Gaming wasn’t a job. It wasn’t content. It was part of that same digital frontier— weird, unpredictable, and kind of chaotic in a world where the internet was there, but it still didn't have all the answers. It wasn't connected to every possible aspect or piece of media in our lives.
Eventually, schools started teaching “computer class.” But it always felt like they were a few years behind us. They were showing us how to cut, copy and paste in Microsoft Word while we were forming friend groups on forums and chat rooms or building our own web pages on MySpace. They were explaining Excel spreadsheets while we were torrenting entire discographies through Limewire or downloading and unzipping custom map packs in Warcraft 3. It felt like we were dual-wielding two different educations: One was slow, standardized, institutional, sterile…a foreshadowing of the world to come. and the other one was wild, messy, fast—and far more useful to us at the time. We weren't thinking of computers or the internet as some future career prospect or a tool to be used, we were using it as a playground and a source of inspiration and discovery. A way to occasionally leave and venture far away from whatever dustbowl town we lived in at the time. We were learning to navigate digital life long before any adult knew what that would even mean. They thought they knew better than us, and we gladly let them believe that.
And then there was the music. We didn’t scroll TikTok for trending sounds. We didn’t wait for the Spotify algorithm to feed us a playlist based on whatever top 40 songs the corpo heads of the industry want us to listen to. We hunted for music. We mined it. We discovered it like buried treasure, passed it like contraband on burned CDs and Limewire folders labeled things like “Do Not Delete – Fire.” We found bands like Modest Mouse, Bright Eyes, Atmosphere, AFI, MFDOOM, and Aiden—not because they were pushed to us, but because someone three forum posts deep on a World of Warcraft message board had their entire playlist in their signature. Music wasn’t passive. It was proof you had been somewhere—proof you had found something before the world touched it, before the polish, before the algorithm smoothed the edges off. It was a source of pride to be the guy that found a new band and was the first one to listen to it before all the posers in school started talking about it. We were almost in competition to see who could find the most obscure band or album at the time. We downloaded .mp3s that were sometimes mislabeled or cut off halfway through. We downloaded tracks called "LILWAYNEMIXTAPECARTER3LOSTTRACKSFEATURINGLINKINPARK" and immediately infected the family computer with 16 viruses and the track was really just a bootleg of The Lion King soundtrack. We listened anyway. We memorized half-finished songs, convinced they were rarities no one else had heard. And sometimes they were. This was a time when music felt like it belonged to you personally—when your taste said something about who you were in the world, even if you never said it out loud. Your playlist wasn’t curated for virality. It was curated as the soundtrack to your life while you looked out the car window on a rainy day. It was the background to a scuffed flash animation on Newgrounds. It was your MySpace song—set to autoplay the moment someone landed on your chaotic profile page. It was the new ringtone you wanted to put on your razor flip phone. That kind of discovery—raw, awkward, beautiful—was killed off almost overnight.
Eventually, the world caught up. The adults showed up. The brands showed up. The investment portfolios and marketing teams showed up. And slowly, what was once a weird, wonderful wilderness became a strip mall. Sites started asking you to log in just to see anything. Creative chaos was replaced with sleek templates. Message boards got replaced with comments you couldn’t format. Every username became a “profile,” and every profile became a “personal brand.” We didn’t even realize it at first. We thought the internet was growing with us. But really, it was being bought out from under us—bit by bit, domain by domain. Tumblr was sanitized. MySpace was gutted. Forums got archived. Flash died. Adobe stopped supporting it, and with that, thousands of bizarre, hilarious, grotesque little pieces of internet art blinked out like stars in a sky we’d never see again. And yeah, part of it was that we grew up. We started using the internet differently. Not because we wanted to, but because we had to. We needed it to do our jobs. To pay bills. To network. The internet stopped being a place to be and became a tool to use. Our curiosity was replaced with convenience. Our freedom with functionality. And the saddest part? A lot of people today will never know what we lost. Because for them, the internet was always corporate. Always surveilled. Always structured. They never saw what we saw. But a few of us remember.
Not everything is gone, though. Not completely. If you look hard enough—if you really dig—you’ll find that some of that old internet spirit is still alive. Tucked away in the corners, away from the SEO-optimized websites and influencer click funnels. You’ll find it on NeoCities—a modern revival of the old GeoCities dream. A community of weirdos, artists, hobbyists, and coders still building hand-made websites in raw HTML. No JavaScript frameworks. No tracking cookies. Just raw personality baked into every background GIF and blinking marquee. It’s messy. It’s hard to navigate. It breaks all the rules of good UX. And it’s beautiful. NeoCities is one of the last campfires still burning in the ruins of that early internet frontier. It's proof that there are still people who don’t just use the internet—they live in it. Who don’t need permission to create something strange and imperfect. Who remember that being online was once a weird, joyful, rebellious act. And if you’re like me—if you sometimes feel like you’re screaming into a digital void that used to feel like home—go there. Poke around. Look at someone’s weird fan page they built last week for their favorite obscure anime. You might even find my blog. But maybe you’ll remember something. Something that matters.
We were there for it. The golden age of the weird web. We grew up with it, and it grew up with us. And even though most of it is gone—scrubbed away, monetized, platformed into submission— we carry it with us. In how we write. In how we code. In what we miss. In what we try to make, even now. That secret internet might be buried… but it’s not dead. It’s just harder to find. And maybe that’s the point.