All Sites Are Under Construction!

Back in the 1990s, when the Web was first beginning, a lot of websites - especially on now-defunct hosting sites like GeoCities - had a few very familiar images - like the “under construction” gif. Some of these still blink, two and almost three decades later, as a tribute to the boundless optimism of the early Internet.

Jason Scott at the Internet Archive is the principle compiler of these amazing early images. They are a tribute to the early concept that your work could at some point be in a finally presentable form - which might be true, certainly; every author recognizes that at some point you can finally put your work out into the world in a form that’s presentable to everybody and can be read as a final draft.

The truth is, online text can be in a state of editing and creative flux basically forever. The Internet is one big draft, and it can always be edited. But the thing you also have to remember is what the Erica Albright character said in The Social Network:

The Internet isn’t written in pencil, it’s written in ink. Everything that you have written and released, ever, is still out there, in one form or another. If nothing else, it probably exists on the aforementioned Internet Archive, as part of the Wayback Machine. The enthusiastic GeoCities site you posted back in 1998? Still out there. The bitter rant you wrote last week about mask protocols? Also still out there, and no level of taking it back will take it down.