Culture
How Geocities Suburbanized the Internet
In the 1990s, AOL and Netscape got Americans onto the web, but it was Geocities—with its suburban-style “neighborhoods”—that made them feel at home.
As the internet first made itself known to an increasingly large audience in the mid-1990s—baffling Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel in the process—one of its earliest thinkers envisioned the web as a space beyond all physical limits.
In his iconic, hyperbolic, and ultimately misguided “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” published in 1996, technologist John Perry Barlow wrote, “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.”