What the Internet Felt Like

It's hard to explain now - to anyone who wasn't there - how clean the internet once felt.

Not clean like safe, or good. Clean like *empty*. Like snowfall. Like an unfurnished room waiting to echo.

You connected through a ritual. A modem crackled. Lights blinked. The world shrank to a command line or a loading page. It took effort - to dial in, to wait, to choose. But that effort was part of the silence. It made everything feel *intentional*.

There were no feeds, no infinite scrolls, no autoplay videos. You typed an address because you knew it, or you stumbled into something by accident - and it felt like discovery. Not recommendation.

And when you published something - a webpage, a journal, a line of text - it didn't disappear into noise. It sat there. It *waited*. Not for likes, but for someone to find it. Like a message in a bottle floating between continents.

The internet was a room you stepped into quietly. Protocols hummed beneath everything. No one asked who you were unless you wanted them to know. It was possible to feel anonymous without feeling lost. Alone without feeling unsafe.

Even then, some of us were already nostalgic. We wanted not just access to the net, but a certain *feeling* of connecting - dim lights, a soft CRT glow, a keyboard lit by aquarium shimmer. The connection wasn't just digital. It was *ritual*. It mattered *where* you were when you entered. It mattered *how*.

That internet is mostly gone now. Buried beneath layers of interface, commerce, and surveillance.

But some of us remember what it felt like.  
And that feeling -  
quiet, holy, full of doors -  
still lives in us.