RIP GeoCities: what the internet looked liked before the internet was cool

Remember when the internet was just for geeks and gamers and the sort of people who fell in love with pneumatic virtual reality babes? Before it was all “millennials” and super-styled pictures of dinner, it was a bright, flashy cornucopia of fucked-up alien heads and planets and stuff like rooms. Some of it looked a bit like how I imagine the inside of the heads of the sort of women who collect crystals and visi laylines look like. That WTF level of weirdness was in no small part thanks to GeoCities, a web-hosting service that made it possible for people to build their own home pages.

One man named Cameron Askin is rather nostalgic for those good old days of the world wide web, when “during the 90s, users from all over the world created personalised corners of the internet,” as he puts it. GeoCities started in 1994 and breathed its last glitchy breath in 2009 when the US service shut down, by which time there were over 38 million GeoCities pages.

So what do you do? Well, Cameron has painstakingly created a hilarious animated website collage Cameron’s World, drawing together the peculiar and familiar iconography that made the internet what it once was. “In an age where we interact primarily with branded and marketed web content, Cameron’s World is a tribute to the lost days of unrefined self-expression on the Internet. This project recalls the visual aesthetics from an era when it was expected that personal spaces would always be under construction.”