Three.js / VR-enabled net-art piece, 2015 - 2021, created by Gilbert Sinnott. Launch website
Founded in 1994 and originally named Beverly Hills Internet, Geocities was the first mass-use free web hosting service, providing 15MB space to build and customise websites - or homesteads - using WYSIWYG editors and inline HTML.
By 1997 Geocities had become the 3rd most visited site in the world and contained over 100,000 user-built websites, later growing to 38 million websites. In 1999, it was bought by Yahoo for 3.57 billion dollars during the height of dot-com speculation, and 2 years later, valued at 8 million dollars prior to the dot-com crash of 2000/2001.
For early users of the internet, Geocities was also often the first and only website created. Predominantly North American, the skeumorphic websites of this era often reflect utopian ideals: informal and non-institutional communication, a “vernacular web” without “sickness, death or burial”.
By the late 2000s however this old world of MIDI and GIFs had come to be seen is a relic, if not embarassment for Yahoo. Talk shifted Web 2.0, signalling a shift toward metadata markets better served by gated platforms and analytics. In 2009, Yahoo announced it would be removing Geocities from the internet.
Pre-empting this change, archivists organised to preserve Geocities: at first with attempted cooperation from Yahoo, then via scripted bots. Partially scraped in it’s entirety, resources include the Archive Team torrent, and online mirrors such as Geocities Archive Project, Retrocities, Oocities and Internet Archaeology. Here it is possible to discover many thousands of user-created digital epitaphs and memorials.
The sites reproduced here reflect popular internet use at the turn of the millenium, and in many, an assumption by their creators of a permanent epitaph in an otherwise impermanent world.
In digital life there are perhaps many approximations of death and burial, and also desecration.
Text is adapted from a talk given at Butcher's Tears, Amsterdam, part of Digital Death Drive organised by Dr. Emily West and Stephan Schäfer.