Comic Update: The Death of Geocities and the Robot Apocalpyse
October 26, 2009Today, Geocities dies a quiet whimpering death after fifteen years in operation. Along with millions of really bad web pages (such as ones I once made just after high-school involving neon colors and table-based ‘designs’), it dragged screaming into the void no doubt thousands of good web pages. Now, millions of links on the Internet point to nothing, to a void from which nothing returns. It’s not the link rot apocalypse, but it’s a small glimpse into what it could look like.
Jeremy Keith has made it very clear he’s mad about this, much more so than I could ever care to muster. I’m personally glad some of my past embarrassments are now quietly euthanized, but he likes to look at the long picture. This is a picture I can’t really bring into focus myself, but today’s comic (starring Jeremy) posits a future where, tragically, Geocities held a key we needed to save humanity.
When I look at this objectively (rather then in embarrassment at my own past efforts at web “design”) I’d have to say that the tragedy here is the loss of a large chunk of late-twentieth/early twenty-first century information about our society and culture. The Internet is notable for both its size and general lack of backups. The more of it we lose, the less our great-grandchildren will know about who we were. I don’t currently have children, but if I ever did, I’d like my descendants to know I spent a great deal of time obsessing over squirrels.
It’d be more than I know about my own ancestors.
I think the l.20th- e.21st century is a bit too obsessed with recording itself. That’s one of the great things about pre-internet History: most of the dross, smudges, lint, and other boring, ugly, and useless stuff goes away, leaving us with relatively interesting stuff. Societies need to self-edit to keep from drowning in crap.
It’s kinda like that box of “treasures” that you left at Mom’s that you never retrieved, and she ended up throwing out (and feeling a bit guilty about it) but she’s glad it’s gone and so, really, you are too.
I think it’s sad, because Geocities was such a huge part of internet culture. Not to mention the fact all my early efforts only had hosting thanks to Geocities; so there’s a personal nostalgia.
But something confuses me… Whose sites were still up? I lost mine a long time ago…after Yahoo acquired Geocities they periodically did things that resulted in my sites going byebye. I don’t remember if it was some “confirm you still exist or we’ll delete your account” thing or what, but my earliest sites from ’98 were the first casualties, and even later sites from ’01 and ’02 before I got my first hosting account went the way of the dodo.
It wasn’t like I deleted the sites or canceled the accounts; my sites just seemed to get purged. I think the one time it was when they changed the URL format — you had to sign in to get a new url instead of Tokyo/Fields/9962 — and some of them I couldn’t remember passwords and the e-mail accounts were long gone… I am quite curious to know what internet relics managed to escape that fate and how…?
Regardless, I will toast Geocities tonight.
There’s always Archive.org’s WayBackMachine: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
Ha! Skullbot – awesome.
As for Geocities, am I the only person on the Internet that didn’t have any sort of Geocities experience? Honestly, I remember visiting a few Geocities pages back in the day… but don’t remember what those pages might have looked like (other than awful). Anybody know of any awesome Geocities pages?
– manu
It is sad that GeoCities is going away. Whats even sadder is the manner in which Yahoo is not saving them.
The robot doesn’t look enough like a Dalek.
It’s sad that big chunks of our popular culture heritage are vanishing.
When I was an historian, I went to the Public Records Office in Melbourne – the place where they keep assorted things that it is deemed useful to provde to the public one day (often not for years, since Australians still sort of believe in privacy).
In there they have a “demo” where they look up a whole lot of information about a woman who was a school teacher in a village in the 1850s. Based on the public record-keeping standards of the day (in may ways far higher than the ones we have now), you could reconstruct a bunch of interesting information not only about this one person, but more importantly about the way the society worked – crucial to any understanding of the decisions they made both as individuals and as a society.
If you look into the 1970s you find lots of curled-up bits of thermal paper, whose contents have long since vanished. If you look into our era, backups are commercially held and random.
This is interesting for social historians. But it also matters in understanding some serious stuff. The meetings of various War Cabinets from 1939-1945 were scrupulously recorded, archived, and it is no possible to understand many many things that happened, how governments worked, and how the war was conducted. But the “fireside chats” and telephone calls between Bush, Blair, Howard and others that are a huge basis of the decision-making for the Iraq war have left no such trace, and we will have a much harder job of trying to learn from it when the main players are dead, or senility and vanity to combine to render their remaining memory useless.
There was good stuff on GeoCities. There was lots of drivel too. It’s a mine into our minds as they were, and while it’s nice to forget a few things that are still too close for comfort (like various bits of “web-design”) it is something that we are denying the future.
Vale…
PS If you are looking for a new way to burn off spare time can you please make a feed of the longdescs? It’s a neat way to get an idea of what people are talking about before I see the comic (or to share it with blind friends).
@Chaals – Regarding your postscript: That’s a great idea. I’ll probably fit that into my weekend, and attach the feed to the footer alongside the others.