My decades-long love affair with the Internet is over. That seductive nebula of infotainment and community that introduced me to obscure indie bands to fangirl over, allowed me to nurture long-distance friendships entirely through memes, and made the pandemic lockdowns survivable—tolerable, even—eventually lulled me into an empty state of zombie-brain scrolling.
Once an exciting place of discovery, the web has changed for the worse. It’s now a never-ending loop of contoured cheekbones (that you must aspire to), beach-friendly book covers (that you must buy, but never read), and social change campaigns (that every armchair activist can support from the comfort of their couch). Today, everything feels like an ad, a vapid echo chamber where everyone has the same thoughts, same interests, even the same clothes.
I longed for the sparks I felt when I was introduced to the online world as a teenager—discovering and downloading strange music on LimeWire, writing away my teen angst on Blogspot, and painstakingly searching for literary quotes and song lyrics for my Orkut profile (yes, I know my mid-30s is showing).
To rekindle some of that old enthusiasm, I went down a rabbit hole of ’00s Internet nostalgia and returned with some very cool relics from the digital archive. If you, like me, would like to escape the deluge of bite-sized content even for a little while, here are some websites you could give your attention to instead:
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No, the Internet doesn’t fully suck. And these websites prove it
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by AVANTIKA SHANKAR
Adventures with Anxiety by Nicky Case
I’ve never felt so seen by a video game. This interactive RPG developed by Nicky Case allows you to play as Anxiety and the aim is to cause your Human as much distress as possible. Not only is it super fun, but my therapist says it can actually be a great tool to help you dissociate from anxious thinking!
Forgotify
This site by Lane Jordan, J Hausmann, and Nate Gagnon should win a Nobel Prize for Breaking the Algorithm. The premise is simple: it plays songs from Spotify that have only been played partially or never at all. Spotify recommendations can feel spot on at times, but there’s a special joy in discovering music that flies under the algorithm.
Always Judge a Book by Its Cover
A fun find for book nerds, this website by Tim Holman lists real books with bizarre covers (and links to Amazon). Some books, like the one about talking to cats about gun safety, are purposefully satirical, but others, like the one that teaches you to outwit squirrels, are delightfully sincere.
Jackson Pollock
On the other side of the cerebral spectrum is this site that allows you to relive your MS Paint days (I know, my 30s) by splashing virtual paint around, Jackson Pollock-style. It’s a surprising time-suck, I noticed 15 minutes too late in the middle of a workday, but also weirdly relaxing. Pro tip: play Forgotify in the background to enhance your creative flow.
QuickDraw with Google
Since we’re all unwitting participants in the AI revolution, whether we accept it or not, we may as well have fun with it. This interactive site lets you teach a neural network to recognise human doodles. It’s like playing Pictionary with a baby and by that I mean you could draw the most meticulous leaf and it will still be called a “boomerang.”
Radio Garden
Also defying the homogenising algorithms of music-streaming services is this nifty little site created by the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision and a few other institutes, that lets you tune in to airwaves around the world. Bonus points for a fun interface that makes me feel like Carmen Sandiego.
Language Squad
It was more than a decade ago that Lars Yencken broke a tiny corner of the Internet with The Great Language Game, a site that played an audio clip and made you guess the language it was in. While the original no longer exists, I have enjoyed playing Language Squad, another language-guessing game, self-admittedly inspired by Yencken’s original.
Endless Horse
I see it as a testament to human resilience that everyone on the Internet, including myself, has spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to get to the end of Colleen Josephson and Kyle Miller’s relentlessly unending site. I guarantee you will too.
