Christian Cleberg, an independent developer, traces the internet across his lifetime, from the family Gateway PC in 2001 to the 17-step obstacle course it takes to read a headline in 2026. The essay is nostalgic the way a good memoir is: it names real years and real machines.
Once upon a time, the internet didn’t even exist. When it did, the internet was a place. It was a place you went. You selectively chose to visit the internet, based on your own free will. If you wanted to visit a chat room, or perhaps preview a fancy new Flash game, you visited the internet for a few minutes in the evening before going back to your family or friends. This has changed dramatically in the last 20-30 years. Today, it’s 2026 and woven into nearly every part of daily life for the majority of the Earth’s population.
The transformation Cleberg describes is behavioral, not technical. The internet stopped being something you opted into and became the condition of modern life. The independent web is now infrastructure you rent through friction and attention extraction, not just because of how we use the internet, but because of who decided what it became.
However, there was a dark side to this revolution. As these apps progressed, and the underlying technologies progressed, the companies and investors driving these efforts took a turn. Efforts pushed into the world of micro-transactions, psychological rewards for utilizing a platform, profits over value, and a slow descent into a disregard for the users.
To me, that 2012 era was a turning point. You may personally love a different era (1980/1990s gamer, anyone? Any former phreaks out there?), but to me, it felt like we kept making leaps in technological capability until we reached the point of economic profitability in the 2000s-2010s era, where corporations, investors, and governments took a serious interest in controlling the internet.
Cleberg’s closing distinction: the internet didn’t disappear, the experience of it did. The infrastructure is still there; the sense of it as a place worth exploring is not.
That loss already had a response. Jeffrey Zeldman—web-standards pioneer, founder of A List Apart, and longtime open-web advocate—wrote on his own blog after attending a preview of filmmaker Bao Nguyen’s documentary Code for the People, a film about the builders of the open web:
The answer to this destruction of our shared digital commons by a handful of billionaires is the same as it has always been: own your content on the open web (your domain on a server, like mine on this one), and replace proprietary software with open source alternatives.
Cleberg is writing about the disappearance of a feeling. Zeldman’s post is smaller and more practical: own your domain, publish on the open web, choose tools you can keep. That does not solve the larger fight for the open web, but it does make the response personal. A domain is not nostalgia. It is a small claim of custody over your own work.
