Endlessly looping ourselves through the platform spiral. Just like in the myth of helping Theseus escape the labyrinth after killing the Minotaur, Meta prankster Ariadne gave us a thread, but instead of using it to help ourselves out of the labyrinth, we started frantically running around with it, hooking it on every possible nook and cranny of the internet. What was meant to guide us toward freedom became a net of our own making. A messy web of impossible to untangle links and inescapable obstacles. Every click tightens the thread. Every notification makes the labyrinth feel more alive, more infinite, and more impossible to leave.
This is how my generation learned to exist online. Somewhere between millennial fatigue and Gen Z irony, haunted by the promise of escape, nostalgic for a web we barely remember, and hopeless about a future we can no longer imagine.
We’re moving in a circular motion, and our aesthetics follow suit. By 2025, Internetcore, or Webcore has fully ripened into its own digital aesthetic category, but the core in question appears to extend beyond mere retro fetishism. Emerging as what seems a natural continuation of the Frutiger Aero resurgence that began circulating online in 2023,[1] this aesthetic revival can be read less as nostalgic escapism and more as a collective, affective response to the dominance of capitalist platform structures. A societal act of objection.
‘With any aesthetic, there is also the chance of someone missing it as soon as it goes away. As humans we are creatures that find comfort in the familiar while mourning what we have missed out on.’[2]
The shimmering interfaces, liquid reflections, and biomorphic transparencies characteristic of early-2000s design evoke a moment when technological progress was still imagined as coexisting with the natural world rather than consuming it. This was the utopian horizon promised with Web 1.0 and early Web 2.0, a vision in which digital modernity was breathable and promising.
Seen in this light, the return of Frutiger Aero and its Webcore derivatives represents a subtle form of cultural critique: a longing for an abandoned future in which technology remained human-scaled, tactile, and optimistic[3]. The aesthetic melancholy embedded in these revivals hints toward a worldview in which the internet could still be conceived as a shared, open ecosystem rather than a totalizing infrastructure of capture and control. Internetcore functions as a visual language of refusal – an attempt to reimagine the digital through the memory of a time when the future still had color, and the web resembled an impossibly blue sky, like the one in Windows XP wallpaper.
‘Windows XP’s famous ‘Bliss’, a photo of rolling green hills and clouds in a blue sky, creates the sense of freshness and open-endedness.’[4]
Mourning Digital Autonomy
Consider the case of Adobe Flash Player. Dead for five years now, Flash has achieved a mythic-like status. Mourned across timelines as the fallen hero of a freer web. RIP to the OG. We will never get you back. Capitalist platform birthed and then killed you, deeming you no longer needed. You couldn’t even join the 27 club </3. You were 24 when you passed. As old as I am at the moment of writing this. Some experiences behind you, but still a lifetime ahead… As I think of you from time to time, I make a promise. To live life in remembrance of what you offered us…
What Flash allowed for wasn’t simply interactivity, but autonomy. The possibility of building without permission, of experimenting at the edges of code and community. It represented the dream of a participatory, decentralized web: messy, creative, and personal. The promise of an internet composed of distinct, local worlds stitched together by curiosity and care has since been absorbed and neutralized by platform capitalism.
The melancholy felt for the old internet is not just about aesthetics, nor about some naive wish to rewind time. It’s a mourning for a topology of belonging that has disappeared. What we grieve is the local dimension of the web. The way early forums, chatrooms, and homepages felt like places we could visit, each with its own vibe and tone. These were digital neighborhoods, not infinite feeds. There was a rhythm of discovery that was slower, more intentional, and more distinctive.
Melancholy has become a content engine. Platforms now manufacture nostalgia on our behalf through features like On This Day reminders, automated photo and video montages, and year-in-review summaries. This trend, popularized by Spotify Wrapped in 2016 and refined with a story-style interface in 2020 (allegedly created by an intern, who was never credited for their idea),[5] has since been adopted by countless other companies that started turning memory into a service optimized for engagement. What we are presented with is not memory itself, but a curated simulation, packaged and delivered according to algorithms designed to capture attention and maximize retention. In contrast, earlier forms of digital remembering, such as homepages, personal blogs, and bulletin board systems, relied on self-directed archiving and communal curation: users chose what to store, what to highlight, and how to revisit the past. Today, the past is reframed as a consumable product, a seamless experience designed to keep us inside a platform ecosystem rather than to foster reflection. Examining this shift reveals how contemporary platforms not only monetize memory, but also actively shape our experience of temporality and belonging.
Is it Still Possible to Imagine Places on the web?
Today, we exist in a web without a specific location. Platforms have dissolved boundaries into the endless flatness of the feed. Everything is accessible, but few sites feel familiar. Because of the widespread use of the internet, we no longer have a mainstream. Mainstream culture is scattered and exists in the gaps between trends and aesthetics. Anything niche can (and does) become a trend at some point. There is no true originality. Every person can be broken down into small aesthetic categories. Still, our labels don’t create communities. The result isn’t diversity but a new kind of sameness. A seamless, algorithm-driven surface where everything looks different but feels the same.
Our nostalgia, then, is for the conditions of locality. Decentralized, human-scale, sometimes awkward web architectures that allowed individuality and community to coexist. The longing we feel is political. It emerges as a quiet resistance to a network that has redefined participation as visibility and belonging as profitability. What we mourn is not the past itself, but a set of social and spatial conditions of the local, human-scale communities that have been systematically engineered out of existence by feudo-lord-owned platforms. The early web’s perceived decentralization and anonymity, its simplified and personal topology, fostered a genuine sense of belonging and experimentation. The new web, algorithmic, and extractive, produces engagement, but rarely connection.
Since the sense of nostalgia I describe in this context is largely experienced by a generation born at the cusp of Web 2.0, it suggests that the type of nostalgia felt is anemoia. As defined by the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as 'nostalgia for a Time You Never Experienced.'[6] For many late millennial and Gen Z users, the early web exists not as personal history but as a mediated archive: reconstructed through screenshots, interface revivals, aesthetic trends, and secondhand narratives. This does not make the longing any less valid. Instead, it points to a form of inherited affect, a response to present conditions expressed through imagined pasts.
Seen through this lens, anemoia becomes more than escapism. It becomes both diagnostic and directional. A way to understand the present emotional landscape, and a compass for imagining alternative futures. “…isn’t it time to reinvent the internet as a truly independent public infrastructure that can effectively defend itself against corporate domination and state control?“[7]
I want to stress that, yes. Now is the time. Now is the time, as much as it was 12 years ago, and as much as it will be 12 years from now. The deeper we sink into the technofeudal architecture of the web, the harder it becomes to imagine, let alone build, alternatives.
Functional Blur and Platform Convergence
Social media we’re used to are very much multifunctional platforms. It seems like now more than ever, the borders between platforms’ purposes are being blurred. Stories used to be only on Snapchat. Tweets used to be 140 characters per post. Instagram used to only be about photos, and Facebook…Facebook used to be just Facebook before it became Meta.
Nowadays, every major platform wants to limit our need for variety and supplement us with fractions of every emerging platform mechanic. An example of what is called a super-app is WeiXin, or, as it is known on the Western market, WeChat. WeChat was released in 2011, in the aftermath of the creation of WhatsApp and Facebook’s Messenger. For the first two years, it was just that — a messaging platform, until they introduced an in-app paying function. Since then, the app has undergone rapid and significant evolution. At present, here is a list of functions and services the platform provides its users: private and group communication; social media posting; mobile payments and digital wallets; e-commerce; food delivery; ride-hailing; travel and ticket booking; location sharing; live streaming; gaming; workplace collaboration tools; public service access such as utility payments and medical appointments; health and security verification systems; and app-like mini programs that allow third-party services to operate entirely within the platform.[8]
In practical terms, WeChat collapses communication, consumption, labor, mobility, governance, and leisure into a single interface. To some, the idea of an app that provides nearly every service imaginable and one that effectively eliminates the need to ever leave its ecosystem appears as a radical convenience in a seamless facilitation of everyday digital life. Yet this consolidation also concentrates an unprecedented volume of personal, behavioral, and transactional data within a single corporate structure. In the case of WeChat, this concentration is further complicated by persistent allegations of state involvement. The platform does not offer end-to-end encryption for messages, and its integration of multiple services has repeatedly raised concerns about surveillance, content censorship, and data-sharing practices[9] with Chinese authorities.[10] The super-app, then, outlines one possible direction in which capitalist platforms continue to move. Whether or not it is a future we want to imagine, it serves as an important counterpoint to decentralized alternatives, illustrating a model built not on dispersion and autonomy, but on enclosure and condensation.
A Dive into Network Platforms
To successfully plan alternatives to capitalist platforms, we need to have a clear understanding of their predecessors and the fundamentals on which they were built. Before we can meaningfully speculate about new structures, we have to revisit the ones that came before. The experimental, often imperfect networks that predated the platform era. These early systems were shaped by different assumptions. For one, that digital space could be communal rather than commercial, that users could be participants rather than products, and that the network might be woven into everyday life as a shared resource. By tracing their development, we can see how technical choices were also political ones, how governance emerged from web architecture, and how community was once a design priority rather than a side effect. They provide valuable reference points for imagining and designing new, more equitable network structures.
In an effort to trace the historical development of internet network platforms, I turn to a series of concrete examples that mark key shifts in how online communication has been structured and governed. I trace backwards from what’s the most familiar to me from the perspective of time. But, before I once again start diving into a capitalist platform example and ruin our mood, I want to indulge in the previously mentioned feeling of nostalgia, working in this context as a critical engine, and explore the project that proposed an alternative model of networked communication. One grounded in different technical, social, and political assumptions than those that prevail today.
The Community Memory Project, launched in Berkeley in 1973, is widely regarded as one of the earliest prototypes of what would later become the bulletin board system. Conceived as a publicly accessible, non-commercial information network, it allowed users to post messages, search entries, and engage in asynchronous communication through computer terminals placed in everyday urban spaces such as music stores, hardware shops, laundromats, and libraries. Community Memory functioned as an open, participatory infrastructure, allowing anyone to contribute, comment, or retrieve content. Its users employed the system for practical coordination, such as housing searches, carpooling, and event organization, as well as for cultural production, holding informal debates and advertisements.[11]
What made Community Memory historically significant was not simply its technical novelty but its political orientation. It imagined computation as a civic commons, managed locally, expandable through small, affordable nodes, and resilient through cooperative maintenance. In doing so, it articulated an early model of a decentralized, community-governed network that contrasted sharply with the corporate platform architectures that would later dominate the internet. As a precursor to later BBS cultures, Community Memory proved that digital communication could be embedded in physical public space and oriented toward collective needs rather than commercial extraction.[12]
If Community Memory represented a prototype for a civic-oriented, community-governed information infrastructure, then the emergence of MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) and later MOOs in the 1980s and early 1990s offered a parallel line of experimentation in collective world-building online. While often remembered through the narrow lens of gaming history, MUDs and MOOs were laboratories for distributed authorship, social imagination, and user-managed digital space.
Operating on university networks, personal hobbyist servers, and early internet backbones, MUDs offered text-based environments where players could explore, build, and narrate spaces through shared authorship. The boundary between user and designer was intentionally porous: participants could write rooms, script objects, create characters, or introduce new mechanics into the shared universe.[13] MOOs (MUDs, object-oriented) expanded this logic further by providing object-oriented programming tools directly to users, enabling them to modify the world from within it as an early form of in-world development that anticipated contemporary ideas of modding, open-source collaboration, and participatory design.
Among them, LambdaMOO is a particular case I’d like to focus on. Launched in 1990 by Pavel Curtis at Xerox PARC, it became one of the first large-scale online social environments, hosting thousands of users in a sprawling collaboratively built mansion. LambdaMOO became a living laboratory for digital governance, collective decision-making, and the negotiation of rights and responsibilities in a shared virtual space.[14]
The community famously wrestled with the question of governance after the series of events documented in Julian Dibbell’s A Rape in Cyberspace,[15] which posed a completely new cyber construct and forced participants to confront what kinds of real forms of accountability were required in answer to violence committed in a virtual environment. The outcome was the creation of a community-driven petition and voting system, arguably one of the earliest examples of online democratic governance.
LambdaMOO also raised questions about identity long before the idea of profiles became standardized. Users fluidly constructed, abandoned, or transformed their online personas within which anonymity, pseudonymity, and multiplicity were understood not as problems to be managed, but as conditions for experimentation and play. Unlike today’s policies and two-step real identity authentications, these structures encouraged narrative play, collective authorship, and an understanding of identity as relational rather than fixed. The freedom to be someone else, or many someone else’s, produced a culture of personal exploration that would not be impossible, but definitely hindered under today’s regimes of authenticity and online behavioral profiling.
In the absence of an algorithmic feed, engagement-optimization, and extraction of user data, sociality in MOOs unfolded through presence and conversation. As a result, the MOOs were slow, sometimes chaotic, and often inefficient, but these very aspects are what enabled true and honest forms of encounter on the early web. What distinguishes these systems from today’s platforms is a shift in assumptions about how social relations online should be mediated. At present, these assumptions have hardened into centralized infrastructures optimized for engagement and have proved the possibility of leaving such platforms to be increasingly constrained.
Platform Boycotts– Do they Change Anything?
Earlier this year, a wave of calls to boycott Meta platforms swept across the internet, triggered directly by the company’s radical overhaul of its content moderation policy. In January 2025, Meta announced it would discontinue its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S., replacing it with a user-moderated ‘community notes’, while simultaneously relaxing restrictions on politically sensitive and borderline hateful content. What began as a public outcry turned into a loosely organized Lights Out Meta campaign, in which users pledged to log off platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads for at least a week. It turned out to be a test of collective refusal, which failed not because of negligent indifference, but due to the addictive and FOMO-inducing design of the platforms.
The act of temporary log-out also signifies a softer approach to the platform boycott in the history of social movements against Facebook. In 2010, Facebook experienced one of the first large-scale acts of civic refusal against unclear privacy policies. On the 31st of May, a date announced as Quit Facebook Day,[16] a little under 24,000 users committed to completely quitting the platform.[17] When the time to delete their platform presence came, even fewer pulled the trigger. The difficulty of leaving, even in moments of collective protest, already hinted at a deeper attachment — one rooted not in agreement with the platform’s policies, but in the social and emotional structures it had come to host.
In July 2025, the Facebook Museum Foundation opened its temporary doors to visitors at Utrecht Central Station. Marissa Memelink, project leader, could listen to and gather valuable testimonies from the platform’s users. It didn’t come as a surprise when she noticed people sharing their experiences in addiction terminology.[18] What turned out to be the feature that creates this Stockholm syndrome-like refusal to leave Facebook was the groups on there. Memelink writes how a feeling of belonging found in various groups creates a sense of attachment. People find communities in a variety of themes. Groups serve as a way to connect over similar interests: You want to take up knitting, but don’t know where or how to start? Join a Facebook group. You want to perform living as an ant in a colony? Join a Facebook group. You or someone close to you got diagnosed with a terminal disease, and you feel like you need to find comfort in a community with similar experiences? Join a Facebook support group.
When my cat was diagnosed with epilepsy (I know, talk about the first-world problems..), I found myself turning to one of these groups. I didn’t know how to care for an animal whose life suddenly depended on milligram-precise medication and 24-hour monitoring. Someone sent me a link to a Facebook community for owners of epileptic pets. It helped me find specialist veterinarians, identify early symptoms, stabilize medication dosage, and get through a time I felt unequipped for. I experienced firsthand how the architecture of platforms embeds itself into moments of vulnerability. Facebook doesn’t just host communities, but becomes the sole inhabitant of them. Comfort turns into dependence. And when comfort lives inside a platform, leaving means losing not just an app, but a support system.
Leaving a platform, then, is not simply a question of willpower or ethics. Its infrastructure, over the years, has evolved into a place where care circulates and memory accumulates. Resistance to Meta has happened before, though through different means. In 2011, Europe vs Facebook emerged as an early legal challenge to the company’s data practices. A grassroots attempt to confront platform power in court rather than at the level of individual choice, led by an Austrian law student turned privacy activist. Max Schrems, initiator of the project, began by requesting access to all of his personal data stored by Facebook, uncovering over 1,200 pages of information and exposing how the company retained, duplicated, and profiled user data without meaningful consent. He filed a series of complaints with Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner (the regulator with authority over Facebook’s European operations), alleging vague consent policies, excessive data processing, and illegal transfers of European users’ information to the United States. These legal efforts eventually forced Facebook’s practices under scrutiny at the European Court of Justice, and reshaped how global platforms manage European data.[19] What began as a personal complaint evolved into a wider strategy combining litigation and regulatory pressure, ultimately growing into NOYB – None of Your Business, one of the most influential privacy watchdogs in Europe. This trajectory reveals that meaningful resistance to platforms, even when it begins with personal refusal, has the highest chance of success when it is supported by interventions that confront the legal and infrastructural systems through which platform power is maintained. Individual exit remains symbolic, unless the legal and infrastructural conditions that sustain platform dominance are challenged collectively.
A need for a cultural shift
What seems crucial at this stage is not another platform launch, but a political and cultural shift in how we understand participation online. Alternatives already exist, in abundance. Over the past fifteen years alone, projects such as diaspora* (2010), Friendica (2010), Signal (2014), Are.na (2014), Mastodon (2016), Pixelfed (2018), Lemmy (2019), Bluesky (2019), and more recent experiments like Bitchat (2025) have emerged in response to the failures of dominant platform models. The problem we face is no longer a lack of options, but a lack of collective uptake. Technological diversity has outpaced social mobilization.
Many of these projects share a common lineage through The Fediverse– a loose constellation of platforms connected through the ActivityPub protocol that offers a working example of decentralized social networking at scale. Services like Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, Friendica, PeerTube, and others can communicate across instances while remaining locally governed. This architecture rejects the logic of the singular feed and centralized ownership, instead favoring smaller, moderated communities with their own norms and values.[20] Yet despite its technical maturity, the Fediverse remains marginal for many users. Migration often stalls at the point where friction appears: unfamiliar interfaces, smaller audiences, slower growth. Convenience, once again, persists.
Other alternatives challenge platform logic more quietly. Are.na, for instance, does not position itself as a social media platform at all. There are no feeds or pressure toward personal online performance. Instead, it functions as a shared research environment, a tool for collecting and connecting ideas across time. Content circulates through intentional curation rather than algorithmic amplification. Are.na’s value lies precisely in what it refuses– virality.[21] It demonstrates that not all online sociality needs to be reactive or extractive. Some forms of networked life can remain slow, partial, and process-oriented.
Still, it would be a mistake to romanticize alternatives uncritically. Decentralized platforms come with their own challenges: fragmentation, cloudy moderation, and accessibility barriers. Nostalgia, if left unchecked, can flatten these complexities into myth. And the goal should be not to reproduce the early web as an object of recovery, nor to idealize its exclusions and failures. Rather, to identify and salvage its emancipatory principles, such as locality, user agency, anonymity, communal governance, and adapt them to contemporary conditions.
What becomes evident, then, is that the conditions of social life facilitated through the internet will not be determined by code or UX alone. They are shaped by collective habits, regulatory pressure, and a cultural willingness to accept friction in exchange for autonomy. Individual acts of departure remain difficult and often stagnate. Structural change requires coordination beyond personal choice. The question is no longer whether alternatives are possible; they already exist, but whether we are prepared to reorganize our everyday online practices around them.
Anielek Niemyjski is an Artistic Research graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and an intern at the Institute of Network Cultures. Their research practice is centered around early net art works, alternative exhibition practices on the web, and collective digital memory.
[1] Laura Holliday, What is frutiger aero, the aesthetic taking over from Y2K?, Dazed Magazine, 3 February 2023, https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/58103/1/what-is-frutiger-aero-aesthetic-tiktok-msn-messenger-windows-vista-noughties.
[2] Sofi Xian, What was the Windows 10 Aesthetics?, INC longform, 15 November 2025, https://networkcultures.org/longform/2025/11/15/what-was-the-windows-10-aesthetic/.
[3] Ibidum
[4] Sofi Xian, What was the Windows 10 Aesthetics?, INC longform, https://networkcultures.org/longform/2025/11/15/what-was-the-windows-10-aesthetic/.
[5] Andrea Bossi, Before Spotify Wrapped Became A Cultural Phenomenon, A Howard Intern Helped Shape The Viral Tradition We Know Today, essence.com, 5 December 2025, https://www.essence.com/news/money-career/howard-intern-spotify-wrapped/.
[6] https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/concept/anemoia
[7] Geert Lovink, Introduction, Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives, Institute of Network Cultures 2013, p. 11, https://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/%238UnlikeUs.pdf.
[8] Arjun Kharpal, Everything you need to know about WeChat — China’s billion-user messaging app, cnbc.com, 3 February 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/04/what-is-wechat-china-biggest-messaging-app.html.
[9] Kloet, J. de, & Poell, T., Why the everyday is essential: Navigating censorship and surveillance on WeChat in China. Media, Culture & Society, 0(0), 2025, https://doi.org/10.1177/01634437251380415.
[10] Benjamin Talin, WeChat Explained – Understanding the Chinese Super App, More Than Digital, 28 March 2024, https://morethandigital.info/en/wechat-explained-understanding-the-chinese-super-app/.
[11] G. S. Williamson, Ambivalent Memories of Virtual Community, https://www.foundsf.org/Ambivalent_Memories_of_Virtual_Community.
[12] Mike Tully, On Community Memory, Are.na Annual 2022, 19 May 2022, https://www.are.na/editorial/community-memory.
[13] Fred Williamson, Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs): What Are They? And How to Play, Medium, 4 July 2020, https://medium.com/@williamson.f93/multi-user-dungeons-muds-what-are-they-and-how-to-play-af3ec0f29f4a.
[14] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/controlling-the-virtual-world/history/mud.html
[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_in_Cyberspace
[16] Geert Lovink, Join the Facebook Exodus on May 31!, https://networkcultures.org/geert/2010/05/27/join-the-facebook-exodus-on-may-31/.
[17] Jeff Bertolucci, ‘Quit Facebook Day’ Looks Like A Hard Sell, PCWorld.com, 28 May 2010, https://www.pcworld.com/article/506847/quit_facebook_day_looks_like_a_hard_sell.html.
[18] Marissa Memelink, Na het Facebook Museum willen we sociale media niet meer verslavend noemen, setup.nl, 29 August 2025, https://www.setup.nl/artikelen/na-het-facebook-museum-willen-we-sociale-media-niet-meer-verslavend-noemen/.
[19] https://www.informationactivism.org/en/europe-vs-facebook.html
[20] Jason Koebler, Mastodon Is the Good One, 404media, 20 October 2023, https://www.404media.co/mastodon-is-the-good-one/.
[21] Carolina Valente Pinto, The long-gone joyful randomness of the internet: an interview with Daniel Pianetti, co-founder of Are.na, The Hmm, 29 April 2024, https://thehmm.nl/the-long-gone-joyful-randomness-of-the-internet-an-interview-with-daniel-pianetti-co-founder-of-are-na/.