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The DIY internet
Oct. 21st, 2023 05:31 pmA few hours ago today, as the result of diving down a particular internet rabbit hole, I was reminded of a song with which I'd been briefly obsessed, back during the years I was a PhD student and spent most of my days at home, alone, writing, listening to music — frequently the same songs on continuous repeat for hours. I don't own physical copies of music any more — I haven't owned a device that could play CDs for years, and I finally cleared out my 1990s CD collection from my mum's house when I was in Australia in April. I don't own digital copies either — I used to have an extensive digital library of uploaded CDs and playlists (about which, more later), but that vanished at some point when the hard drive of my current computer had to be replaced in 2014 — and I don't listen to stuff on Spotify either. So basically the way I listen to music now, and have done since 2014, is to go to Youtube, and search for the album, live set, song, or playlist, and play it.
Doing this is always an interesting lesson in ephemerality. Frequently, the artists themselves have uploaded their own video clips or albums to their own official channel, but most of the time, this stuff is a lot more ad hoc. Sometimes I'll come back years later and find the same version of that 2001 album is there, uploaded by some random person in 2008, and sometimes it goes through various iterations. In any case, the specific song I was looking for used to exist as an official video clip, but now the first version I could find was uploaded by some Dutch guy in 2009, using the sort of cheesy, silly DIY tricks people used to employ when they had the audio files, but no appropriate video file: cycling through a slide show of photos of the artists, Amsterdam canals in twilight, crowds at shows, etc. I found myself oddly charmed — and incredibly nostalgic. It felt like an artefact from an older, slower, weirder internet, and reminded me of the sorts of things people used to do, back when we were trying to figure out how to be a community, fifteen or twenty years ago.
These specific artists (the song is a collaboration) were introduced to me by an old friend from my Philip Pullman forum days, the person who is responsible for about 1/3 of my post-secondary school musical tastes. He used to make these incredibly elaborate multipart playlists (frequently each part would have 20 or 30 songs), with cover art, detailed stories explaining the playlists' thematic coherence and the reasoning behind the specific ordering of the songs, his emotional state when making them, etc, etc, and would upload the files for the rest of us to download. Although I know many people who've introduced me to music, or with whom I share musical tastes, he's the only person I've ever met who understood and spoke about music in the same way that I do, in a way that I find extremely hard to articulate (to the point that I basically don't talk about music, other than saying 'I like this,' anymore), but really the crucial point is that these playlist efforts took hours and hours of work, about five of us ever downloaded them, and only I ever really talked with him about them.
Another one of my friends from the forum made an entire website — with message boards, art galleries, chat rooms, etc — for his group of schoolfriends, when he was fourteen or fifteen or so. He also made webcomics with another schoolfriend, and I remember at one point he used to give all of us forum friends printed bookmarks or cards with characters from the webcomics as birthday presents. He paid for all of this out of his own money, and I don't think anyone beyond his immediate social circles ever looked at any of it.
Another friend from this forum had a Wordpress blog where she'd write detailed reviews of Alfonso Cuarón films, or linkspams of news about, or interviews with, Cuarón — again, entirely for the love of it; I don't think anyone outside her immediate social circles ever read it (and even then only her fellow Cuarón admirers).
I could give more examples, but you get the idea. This was the pre-social media internet, and everything feels — with hindsight — much more effort, but with results that were comparably messy, handmade, and small-scale, done without any interest in monetisation or virality or even likes and subscriptions. I'm sure you could give similar examples from your own experiences, if you were part of any online communities back then. It was the equivalent of the Dutch guy uploading his ridiculous, clunky graphics-ridden slideshow video to Youtube, offered up at once to a small handful of friends, and to the vastness of the unknown internet: I like this; maybe you'll like it too.
I try not to indulge these episodes of self-satisfied nostagia too often: for starters, it's very possible that this kind of thing is still going on in corners of the internet that I don't frequent. (Why is nobody talking about this?: the eternal internet lament, when what is really meant is why is nobody talking about it in spaces where I'm likely to listen? — with my luck, this specific kind of internet exists on platforms that make me recoil in visceral horror, like TikTok.) Certainly Dreamwidth itself is the closest thing I've found to it (for which I am eternally grateful to the community of people I've met here). But every so often, I remember, and find myself missing the slowness of it, and the smallness, and the sheer messy, handmade earnestness of it all.
Doing this is always an interesting lesson in ephemerality. Frequently, the artists themselves have uploaded their own video clips or albums to their own official channel, but most of the time, this stuff is a lot more ad hoc. Sometimes I'll come back years later and find the same version of that 2001 album is there, uploaded by some random person in 2008, and sometimes it goes through various iterations. In any case, the specific song I was looking for used to exist as an official video clip, but now the first version I could find was uploaded by some Dutch guy in 2009, using the sort of cheesy, silly DIY tricks people used to employ when they had the audio files, but no appropriate video file: cycling through a slide show of photos of the artists, Amsterdam canals in twilight, crowds at shows, etc. I found myself oddly charmed — and incredibly nostalgic. It felt like an artefact from an older, slower, weirder internet, and reminded me of the sorts of things people used to do, back when we were trying to figure out how to be a community, fifteen or twenty years ago.
These specific artists (the song is a collaboration) were introduced to me by an old friend from my Philip Pullman forum days, the person who is responsible for about 1/3 of my post-secondary school musical tastes. He used to make these incredibly elaborate multipart playlists (frequently each part would have 20 or 30 songs), with cover art, detailed stories explaining the playlists' thematic coherence and the reasoning behind the specific ordering of the songs, his emotional state when making them, etc, etc, and would upload the files for the rest of us to download. Although I know many people who've introduced me to music, or with whom I share musical tastes, he's the only person I've ever met who understood and spoke about music in the same way that I do, in a way that I find extremely hard to articulate (to the point that I basically don't talk about music, other than saying 'I like this,' anymore), but really the crucial point is that these playlist efforts took hours and hours of work, about five of us ever downloaded them, and only I ever really talked with him about them.
Another one of my friends from the forum made an entire website — with message boards, art galleries, chat rooms, etc — for his group of schoolfriends, when he was fourteen or fifteen or so. He also made webcomics with another schoolfriend, and I remember at one point he used to give all of us forum friends printed bookmarks or cards with characters from the webcomics as birthday presents. He paid for all of this out of his own money, and I don't think anyone beyond his immediate social circles ever looked at any of it.
Another friend from this forum had a Wordpress blog where she'd write detailed reviews of Alfonso Cuarón films, or linkspams of news about, or interviews with, Cuarón — again, entirely for the love of it; I don't think anyone outside her immediate social circles ever read it (and even then only her fellow Cuarón admirers).
I could give more examples, but you get the idea. This was the pre-social media internet, and everything feels — with hindsight — much more effort, but with results that were comparably messy, handmade, and small-scale, done without any interest in monetisation or virality or even likes and subscriptions. I'm sure you could give similar examples from your own experiences, if you were part of any online communities back then. It was the equivalent of the Dutch guy uploading his ridiculous, clunky graphics-ridden slideshow video to Youtube, offered up at once to a small handful of friends, and to the vastness of the unknown internet: I like this; maybe you'll like it too.
I try not to indulge these episodes of self-satisfied nostagia too often: for starters, it's very possible that this kind of thing is still going on in corners of the internet that I don't frequent. (Why is nobody talking about this?: the eternal internet lament, when what is really meant is why is nobody talking about it in spaces where I'm likely to listen? — with my luck, this specific kind of internet exists on platforms that make me recoil in visceral horror, like TikTok.) Certainly Dreamwidth itself is the closest thing I've found to it (for which I am eternally grateful to the community of people I've met here). But every so often, I remember, and find myself missing the slowness of it, and the smallness, and the sheer messy, handmade earnestness of it all.