Nostalgia for the internet’s early days is on the rise. This longing for dial-up modems, glittery GIFs, and the thrill of “surfing the web” is sentimental, but it also reflects the internet’s transformation into a profoundly hostile place for creativity and connection. Naturally, this concern has begun to seep into policy debates: one such example is the activist group Teach Us Consent calling on the government to require social media platforms to give Australians the option to disable their algorithms.

Francesca Procaccini writes that although social media continues to be thought of as leisure, it does, in fact, meet all the necessary criteria to be considered labour. Routine online actions such as typing, clicking and scrolling generate expansive stores of data that create profitability for social media platforms. This shift in framing has significant implications: if social media is labour, then it becomes thinkable to use labour laws to regulate it. The issue, however, is that we don’t appear to be any closer to thinking of ourselves as the “online working class”. This is where our nostalgia for the ‘90s can become useful.

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In 1994, David Bohnett founded a service that allowed anyone to create a personal website within an online “neighbourhood” organised around different interests. Originally called Beverly Hills Internet, it would later become known as GeoCities. At the height of its popularity, the service hosted more than thirty-eight million personal pages, covering everything from My Little Pony fandom to virtual pet memorials.

Unlike the platforms that currently dominate the internet, GeoCities was, at least in part, an activist project. In 1980, while studying at the University of Michigan, Bohnett — who is queer — had volunteered as a counsellor for an LGBTQ crisis hotline. Many of the people he spoke with were contemplating suicide, overwhelmed by isolation and despair. Years later, he drew on this experience in order to imagine a World Wide Web that could function as a space to empower people and give them a voice. It would eventually become a prototype for the social media platforms we use today.

In order to build a personal page on GeoCities, it was first necessary to teach yourself HTML. Given the time required to learn the language and plan the content, pages were often left in a continual state of “Under Construction”. In other words, working on a page mattered more than finishing it. This may seem insignificant, but the phrase “Under Construction” essentially framed the work of constructing and maintaining an online self as manual labour, as tangible and ongoing as repairing a road or building a house. The wording encouraged us to see ourselves not as passive consumers or content generators, but as workers actively building a shared environment. As platforms evolved — and we were reconfigured into users — our labour became invisible.

“Under Construction” could also be read as a conceptual untethering from any sort of productivity or reward. Writing about computer games, David Golumbia has suggested that instead of fostering play for its own sake, games often exploit the natural pleasure we get from completing tasks with clear endpoints and hierarchical measures of progress. This logic extends to other forms of computer use as well: editing a photo in Lightroom, for example, unfolds as a sequential process oriented towards a finished result. The cumulative effect of these actions is disciplinary: we are constantly being trained to meet capitalism’s productivity demands.  

GeoCities lacked any framework for optimising pages in service of a particular outcome. Success and failure were largely indistinguishable. To move through the platform was to surf webrings and follow curated lists of links, producing a fundamentally non-hierarchical experience. Some pages definitely looked better than others, but at most this inspired you to slap another “Under Construction” GIF onto your own. GeoCities itself had no way of knowing what a “successful” page might look like.

With no algorithms, there was no seduction. GeoCities “workers” were free from the shackles of recognition or ranking, and instead spent their free time exploring their neighbourhoods. “The captains of the digital age do not want us to use our ‘free time’ for imaginative play, or anything else that might interfere with their ceaseless pursuit of data extraction and profiteering”, writes Jenny Huberman in The Spirit of Digital Capitalism (2022). On GeoCities, work and leisure had not yet collapsed into a single site of exploitation — did the appeal of aimless surfing lie in the impossibility of commodifying the process?

Perhaps GeoCities’ most important legacy is that it demonstrated how online labour could be organised. When Yahoo acquired the platform in 1999, it swiftly revised the Terms of Service in an effort to assert broader legal control over its enormous body of content. The community retaliated and initiated the Haunting: a coordinated act of resistance in which pages were stripped of their colour, text, GIFs, and links. The Haunting was essentially a strike — a collective refusal to contribute content — grounded in the recognition that it would meaningfully disrupt Yahoo’s business model. After a highly public back-and-forth, the company retreated. It issued a revised, plain-language agreement that opened with an explicit concession: “Yahoo does not claim ownership of the content you place on your Yahoo GeoCities site”.

The Haunting raises some interesting questions: what if, in 1999, GeoCities workers had unionised? Could such an early assertion of collective power have altered the trajectory of online labour practices, opening the door to unionisation decades later for the people who produce value on content platforms today? Would solidarity even be possible at that scale? Would we still be discussing the effects of social media using the language of mental health, or collectively bargaining our way to a fairer, less exploitative, and genuinely public internet? 

In the end, GeoCities’ significance is ultimately symbolic. It is not a blueprint for the internet of tomorrow. Right before being acquired by Yahoo, it became the subject of what was then an unprecedented legal challenge over privacy breaches — an early iteration of the crises that now surround platforms such as Facebook. However, GeoCities remains an important reminder that collective labour on the internet is not new — and that recognising ourselves as workers is the first step towards organising as such.

Right now, we’re teetering on the edge of a worldwide, forceful resistance to the digital gig economy. In Australia, we can already see the results of delivery platform workers organising, and in the United States, SAG-AFTRA’s 2021 influencer agreement marked a significant step toward extending union protections to digital creators. What’s stopping us from expanding the category of “digital worker” to include those of us whose time, creativity, and attention generate inconceivable profits for social media platforms? That, by the way, would be almost five billion people.

Image from the wonderful GeoCities collage website http://www.cameronsworld.net