The Early Y2K Internet Was Just Better

Feeling nostalgic for dial-up modems and offline MP3 players

These last couple of days, I’ve been listening to a bunch of really amazing vaporwave albums with a Y2K internet aesthetic. Yes, I’m talking late 1990s, early 2000s, sneaking-downstairs-on-sunday-morning-to-use-mom-and-dad’s-computer type of vibes.

Back then, surfing the web felt exciting and full of possibilities, especially for a neurodivergent young man who was really into weird music and speculative fiction.

For someone like me, the internet held so much promise – a far cry from that cesspit of hate and slop, ads and scams that we’re left with today.

It might just be a romantic distortion caused by nostalgia. I was young and probably way more naive. But the more I think about it, I come to believe a bunch of things were just better about those pre-wifi, pre-social-media and pre-smartphone days.

Mom and Dad’s Computer - clubhouse

At the time, we weren’t spending our entire lives online. Every once in a while, we were dialing up to the internet with a modem – just for half an hour per day, or maybe slightly more, but it could get expensive soon, like calling a friend abroad.

The great thing was that you’d usually get a bunch of free hours from your internet service provider. I’d regularly use those to jump into nerdy online forums, surf random GeoCities sites or chat with my new online friends in other cities over AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). I’ll admit that I might have downloaded a song or two from Kazaa as well.

Looking back, that Y2K internet felt like a place to learn and share and play, a place where outsiders could find connection over shared niche interests.

Obviously I’m not alone with these misty-eyed thoughts. The Swedish music producer Stevia Sphere hit a similar note with a recent Bluesky post:

“The more I interact with technology, the more I start thinking that technology was a mistake. Like, I'm not saying we should return to monkey, but maybe let's return to web 1.0 dial-up, no smartphones, no AI, screens are thick heavy things, the postal service still works for sending letters, etc. I'm doing my part by buying a printer and a filing cabinet lol. It's time to have physical synth manuals, game guides, etc again.”

This might sound like a joke, but I do think she’s on to something here.

I’ve previously written about my experiences and experiments with

• going back to physical records,

• switching from an e-reader to paper books and

• buying an analog watch (one of the best decisions ever).

More recently, we’ve canceled all our movie streaming subscriptions and returned to watching DVDs, which we’ve been buying used for cheap off the internet. Sometimes we’re not even watching anything at night but playing a board game, or taking a walk outside now that the days are longer. Next level luddism, right?

The final frontier would of course mean to ditch my smartphone, but even to someone like me, it seems almost impossible to do. The smartphone is just so central to life in the 2020s that deciding to go without one would mean to experience extreme inconveniences, and I’m not sure if I’m committed enough to do that.

crt paralysis - “Slideshow”

What I’m pondering right now is a different approach. I’m thinking about getting a good old MP3 player and using that instead of my iPhone to listen to music on the go. That way, I could leave my phone at home when I’m just leaving the house for a walk or to run some errands.

I could just go outside and listen to music without being connected to the internet all the time. I wouldn’t be lured into checking emails or messages, or looking up random stuff, or chasing little dopamine hits by checking news headlines while standing in a checkout line or waiting at the train station.

Instead, I imagine I’d be much more present and mindful of my surroundings. Sometimes I’d be bored and fiend for some distraction. Funny as that sounds – I don’t even think that’s such a bad thing. After all, I could still lose myself in music and daydreams.

I remember when I got my first portable media player in the early 2000s, one of those small oval USB sticks with a tiny display that almost looked like a pager. Soon I’d barely even leave the house without it. At one point, I would switch it for a 16 GB version of the iPod classic. It had a bigger display and a jogwheel, but it still had real buttons, not a touchscreen, and most of all, it couldn’t go online.

That was pre-wifi, pre-streaming, so you didn’t have access to every song ever recorded through your device. You were limited to a bunch of albums you’d actively decided to transfer to your player – a hand-picked, intentional selection. I remember how I enjoyed the ritual of cleaning up my iPod every few weeks and filling it up with my most recent musical obsessions.

I got an iPhone a year into my first real job as the editor of a magazine. I’d already been using a BlackBerry for communication, but merging the BlackBerry and the iPod (and the Digicam) into a small pocket computer still felt like a revolution at the time.

In retrospect, that is also when things started going horribly wrong. That’s a story for another time though – or rather one that I’ve already written about extensively.

These days, I’ve essentially turned my smartphone into something resembling a dumbphone. Then a few months ago, I read a fascinating article that Emily White wrote about the iPod’s unlikely comeback among Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

By getting an old school MP3 player, I thought, I might be able to carve out even more quality offline time in my everyday life.

Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find my old portable media players anymore – I probably purged them in my hardcore minimalist days.

Currently I’m seeing two options: Either I’ll jump on that trendy bandwagon and hunt down a rare iPod Nano on eBay or a Creative Zen Touch or something cool like that, or I’ll just get an affordable, simple new MP3 player with a little display and a jogwheel and some analog buttons.

Sure, you could also go real caveman and just get an old tape or CD walkman. In fact, that might have an even bigger nostalgia factor. I think I appreciate it more as an aesthetic than a practical choice though.

Those early offline MP3 players hit some kind of sweet spot for me: They’re light and shock-resistant, and they might offer just enough variety without triggering choice fatigue. I’m not sure I want to bring my Walkman and a bunch of tapes on my next train ride. There’s still too much of a minimalist in me.

creative zen – touch

Credit is due: Thanks to luxury elite for recommending the first two albums linked in this post (Mom and Dad’s Computer and crt paralysis) and making the third one (creative zen is one of her aliases)!