May 14, 2026, 9:58 a.m.
"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering from it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
I've been reading Calvino recently and it's inspired me to get back to this blog. The above is from Invisible Cities but I also highly recommend If on a Winter's Night A Traveller which surprised me with its forward-thinking commentary on the nature of art in the digital era, including AI - not bad for a book published in 1979! However it's Invisible Cities which I keep returning to and which will feature most heavily in my writing moving forward.
When I restarted this blog in 2025 I intended to post frequently, but quickly I filled up a notepad with about thirty things I wanted to write about. I've been chipping away at these slowly and hopefully will actually publish most of them this year. Today I want to cover three topics which I think are indirectly-but-kind-of related. The first is the end of digital culture era, which I actually think happened a long time ago; the second is the end of the social media era, which is much more recent; and the third is the re-emergence of the personal website. The connections are hopefully not too tenuous and I plan to go into a little more detail on each of these topics in later posts.
My first point is rather bold: I believe that "digital culture", which I would define as the historic period in which digital technology was a driver of cultural development, has ended, and in fact ended some time ago. This has been a revelation for me and has changed my thinking about our current moment enormously. I think the digital culture moment was relatively short. I would say it lasted roughly from 1982 until 2005, in musical terms encompassing the period between development of the CD to the emergence of the first content delivery platforms. Digital technology has of course become even more central to our lives since then, but it hasn’t been driving cultural innovation in any meaningful sense for a rather long time. This is perhaps a surprising statement from someone who makes digital music, but it's part of the current zeitgeist in which many of us are now feeling shackled rather than enabled by digital technology, and we are all starting to recognise that this is not the future we wanted or deserve. Part of moving on will be recognising the digital culture era as having been a very particular set of historical circumstances, and not an inevitable future that we were moving towards. If we want to get to that vibrant digital landscape again, we have to do so intentionally, through hard work.
"Digital culture ended in 2005" is an ambitious statement, but I do think future historians of culture will look back and identify a window of time from 1982 to 2005 in which an explosion of innovation took place, followed by a flat plane of relative stagnation. The distinction can be measured in terms of the emergence of new forms or conventions of cultural product. Focusing on music, in the 1980s we saw two major genres emerge, hip-hop and electronic dance music, predicated on digital sampling and synthesis. The 1990s and 2000s saw these go into hyperdevelopment with hundreds of subgenres emerging in a short amount of time - house, techno, jungle, trance, garage, dubstep, sampledelia. Each demonstrated new artistic possibilities within the digital space, different ways that communities could come together around technology. However, nothing on that scale of innovation has happened since 2005, despite the massive increase in the power of music-making technology. At some point, things levelled out and stopped moving forward. (Other digital art forms have followed a similar trajectory, for example videogames: virtually every form of videogame was envisioned prior to 2005 - JRPG, FPS, RTS, MMORPG, metroidvania, roguelike - and almost everything since then has been a minor modification of these forms, despite the enormous developments in hardware and software capability.)
What were the characteristics of this early digital period which made it so interesting? Hardware innovation is the most identifiable factor, and probably the area where things really stopped changing in the mid-2000s. Internet users of a certain age like to note that mobile phones used to come in lots of wacky shapes and colours previously but then became remarkably dull and similar once the iPhone was released. In musical terms, the laptop broadly replaced a huge number of physical devices from samplers to reverb units, mixing desks, hardware synthesizers, and eventually acoustic insutruments in the studio. This heavy degree of standardisation was, I think, not conducive to creativity. (In a recent episode of the podcast 99% Invisible, a guest argues that the touchscreen as a poor and now cheap substitute for more tactile interfaces has also been a step backwards for design. This more general standardisation of the digital landscape has, again, limited our imagination of what digital objects could be.) A degree of risk aversion around new physical products also entered the equation around the time of the 2008 recession, from which we don't quite seem to have recovered some two decades later.
In the software realm we can similarly point to a few developments around this time which had an ossifying effect on digital culture, but I think the main contender is the emergence of content delivery platforms, such as YouTube (2005) and Spotify (2006). The promise of this new kind of content platform was that: (a) you will not need to pay for digital information, but rather for its delivery; (b) you will not need to organise digital information, we can do that for you; and (c) you will not own digital information, and it will vanish back into the aether once you've finished with it. The simultaneous emergence of the modern social media ecosystem (Facebook, Twitter) and, later, smart phones, completed that developmental arc. Now, content will be not only be organised for you, it will be seemlessly delivered into your hand in the most digestible form possible. From a musical perspective, when we consider how different the new content-delivery-and-streaming paradigm was from the previous system of CDs, MP3 players, minidiscs, we can see why it was so appealing, not the least because it all appeared to be "free" whilst not being illegal. The digital culture era was therefore succeeded by the social media era (or, perhaps, the era of "Platform Capitalism" after Nick Srnicek's excellent 2017 book), a very distinct set of beliefs and practices and different ways that communities could form around digital technology. "You will own nothing and be happy", to quote the Danish politician Ida Auken in 2016, who thought that everything could become a service by 2030, including the physical items in your home such as fridges or TVs.
At that time, content delivery and social media was thought of as a democratising effect on culture, doing away with the lumbering dinosaurs of the media and culture industry and allowing users direct access to artists and, by extension, culture itself. What instead happened is that the platforms themselves became a new set of intermediaries with increasingly nefarious intent. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Spotify began using various means control of the flow of cultural information, eventually leading to the newsfeed and algorithmic recommendation with which we are now familiar. Previous tastemakers such as magazines, TV channels, had fallen by the wayside but, flawed as they had been, they were then replaced with something less capable of encouraging or sustaining cultural development. Contrary to the narrative about digital democratization, I think that musicians have become less empowered in the social media era than they were in the mid-2000s or even the 1990s performing the same roles (performer, producer, label manager). The increase in wealth extraction, which allowed billionaires such as Spotify's Daniel Ek to thrive while artists suffered in poverty and obscurity, combined with the cost of living, has made risky creative careers near impossible. The music industry of the 20th Century was already predatory and this is perhaps a case of "new boss, same as the old boss", but the scale of wealth extraction here, and the jarring disconnect between the optimistic version of the internet envisioned between in its early years and what we ended up with, should have been cause for re-evaluation a long time ago.
That re-evaluation is happening now. Everywhere, I see people talking about getting off of social media, and away from subscription-based content delivery platforms such as Spotify, to the point where I believe that the social media era (or, again, "content platform" era) will also one day come to be seen as a relatively short, bounded historical moment. I would define it as roughly 2005 to 2025, starting with the launch of YouTube and ending sometime in the last couple of years. A change has been coming for a long time, but definitely in 2025 we saw a shift in how people were discussing social media and their relationship with technology. The cause is not quite clear but it's at least in part to do with the use of algorithmic recommendation to drive fascism in countries such as the UK and USA. (If I had to give a precise end date for the social media era, it would be Elon Musk's Nazi salute at the second inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20th 2025.) A particular moment is coming to an end, and everyone is casting around looking for something new.
This is not cause for gloom but rather for optimism about the future of the internet and its users. AI-generated content will almost certainly annihilate the current digital media ecosystem, especially the content delivery platforms, but then what comes after? Digital culture had already ended some time ago; there was already very little forward motion. Having realised this, we no longer have to accept the current technological state of play. We can go forwards, backwards, or sideways, with a critical eye for what works and what does not. We can take the best technologies of the last three decades and discard the things that aren't working in order to build the digital landscape that we deserve. We are already seeing resistance to certain new technologies which the incumbents are trying to force on us: for example the backlash against Microsoft's AI integration in Windows 11. What else can we say no to? The sky is the limit, and nothing cannot be discarded.
In this new era, I would like to make an argument for the personal website, hosted on a privately-owned domain. This had gone out fashion during the 2010s but is having a small renaissance in the mid-2020s as disillusionment with social media grows. (I'm not the only person to notice this: a quick search on any engine will return a number of articles on this topic.*) The cringe factor has perhaps eased up a little. By 2010 the personal website seemed like a vanity project - see Jim'll Paint It's brilliant parody "Andrew Lloyd Website" from last year, currently offline, but I'll post a link if it pops up again - indulgent and out of step with the Web 2.0 paradigm. Hosting a text-based page on something like Neocities or Angelfire was unthinkable by 2010, and more advanced website creation services such as Wordpress became targeted towards businesses rather than individuals or artists. Actually building and hosting a website was a skill that seemed largely irrelevant. However, as social media has bottomed out in terms of quality and power to improve our lives, hand-made webpages have become an increasingly attractive value proposition. Here we have control again not just over what we put onto the internet but how users access it, how long it sticks around, how it can be organised and valued.
Part of this is to do with connection rather than content. Personal websites help us to remember the organic modes of connectivity which made the early internet feel so vibrant. What matters here is the links between different pieces of information on the internet and whether or not these links are conducive to human curiosity. (Think of the difference between a Wikipedia binge and a TikTok binge.) People rarely talk about "browsing" the internet these days but rather talk about "scrolling", which is a distinct activity, often understood in negative terms. The former relied on hyperlinks chosen by domain owners, bookmarks saved by internet users to their browsers, and information pages carefully curated and laid out by human hands. Crucially, none of these techniques ever disappeared or became obsolete. They are still there and we can still use them to create durable online networks.
Personal websites also have an aesthetic value which is missing from social media. We've got so used to thinking of our output as content to be uploaded to someone else's platform that we're forgetting that platforms can be projects in their own right. Learning to code, format, and design can be as fulfilling as learning how to write music. The overall layout and feel of a page is a reflection of the your personality, and you deserve to be able to share that with readers. Perhaps we're still running away from the cringe of Neocities and Angelfire, and we're afraid to learn HTML for reason other than employment. (It's funny how the ghosts of digital services long dead still haunt us.) However, changing the colour of the background or text is more important than we realised and we were right to get upset when this disappeared from the social media landscape after the collapse of MySpace. Control over our digital home is power, even when it comes to the trivial things.
Partly for this reason, certain types of long-form project were historically conducive to the website but didn't fare so well in the social media era. For internet users of a certain age, webcomics were an important cultural touchstone that was never quite replicated on social media pages. The layouts, designs, aesthetic, simply didn't work in the new paradigm. Similar long-form projects do of course appear within social media (think novelty Instagram accounts) but they are competing within a particularly aggressive, controlled ecosystem, and they are vulnerable to the whims of the platform on which they are hosted. (If I could recommend one digital activity to younger generations which has long since fallen out of fashion, it's the webcomic. It's Millenial cringe, I know, but you made baggy jeans and wallet chains fashionable again, so I believe in you!)
Most importantly, there is something proactive about accessing and reading someone's webpage which has been missing for the last few years. I have heard the following statement or similar from a few writers and podcasters: "I miss when the internet was something that I would do, not something that was happening to me". This is often in the context of smartphone useage, but there is a deeper point here about engaging with digital information. The difference here is between "information you want" and "information that wants you". The former is active, curious, participatory; the latter is passive, predatory, and not conducive to thinking and exploring. Companies such as Meta and Google don't thrive on curiosity but on siloing information, penning users into limited interactions with entities willing to pay for that connection. We can become curious again if we are willing to become librarians of information, cognisant of the effort required to organise information because we have re-found the value of performing that task by hand, rather than passively receiving it via algorithm. The "favourites" bar at the top of your browser is your friend in this endeavour. Try bookmarking your favourite personal websites like it's 2004. At the very least, it might stop you defaulting to Google or Facebook as the first page you access online.
The current popularity of physical music formats can be explained in similar terms. Listeners are realising the value of owning a collection of things that you can see and feel, and display on your shelf. Vinyl has that analogue glow which has driven its recent popularity. However, although the CD may feel obsolete because it's not analogue, the "physical digital" is still a powerful thing. It doesn't disappear like it does on a streaming platform, you don't have to keep paying for it forever, and although they are too small to see, you get to know where your 1s and 0s are kept. Having a collection of digital files saved on a hard drive may seem like the preserve of DJs and audiophiles but, again, it has enormous advantages over streaming for the same reasons.
Everywhere I look, the technologies of 1995-2005 seem to be resurging. In gaming we have seen the emergence of the "retro handheld", devices which look like old Gameboy consoles but with vastly more power and a hard drive to store a huge library of games. On the surface it looks like a kind of nostalgia, but there's something deeper here to do with engagement with physical/digital artifacts and the way that this helps you to understand cultural time. Manually organising information (in this case a ROM library) in a device with limited connective capability turns out to be a fantastic way of exploring a particularly segment of digital culture, and a way of more deeply engaging with the creative decisions of previous generations of artists. I believe that we are going to see a similar explosion of interest in digital audio players in the near future as people flee the AI-apocalypse on the music streaming platforms. In the handheld space, I increasingly see people referring to this hobby as a way of getting off of their smartphones. Perhaps a new generation of MP3 players can help us get off of Spotify?
I don't think this is just some kind of Stranger Things-inflected cultural fad; a CD player sold in Urban Outfitters, to be worn for a week and discarded. Nor is it about returning to some sort of prelapsarian utopia, or getting things "back on track". Our digital landscape is, on a physical level, vastly different to twenty years ago, and all the richer for the layers of knowledge we accumulated in the social media era. If you work in the digital arts, you are still in the business of imagining new futures. But don't stop imagining, and keep organizing.
(Edited for grammar 16/05/2026)
*
https://jefffinley.org/the-return-of-the-personal-website/
https://rolle.design/the-true-form-of-decentralization-through-the-bliss-of-personal-websites
https://www.vibesnscribes.com/2026/01/31/why-personal-websites-are-replacing-social-media/