The Pop Corporation

For people of a certain age, it’s always bad news when the things of their youth become ‘retro’. However, with that, comes an appreciation of the things we loved from the past. As subscription fatigue takes hold with the global youth, the Wild West of the old internet looks appealing once more.

The premise of ‘if streaming isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t theft’ has really taken root with The Kids, and without the convenience of streaming services and their servers, people will almost certainly be looking toward something that isn’t their phones to store all the media they want to listen to. So will we see more tricked out iPods? Will some small company see an uptick in their rebooted mp3 players?

You can imagine the next generation might opt-out of online living, given that social media now feels like something that not only goads you into arguments and being polarised, but it also makes you feel bad about the way you look, despair of the world, and tries to sell you things you can’t afford.

Throw AI into the mix, and you feel that a generation is coming that’ll only use the internet like everyone’s using it now, when absolutely necessary. You’ll have already seen dadaist meme accounts yearning for Nokia 3310s and wired headphones.

Way back when, in the early 2000s, the kids were ripping music from torrents and when they weren’t burning blank CDs, they were using their laptops as a replacement for their HiFi systems. Messy folders with unreliable file names filled the desktops of PCs, and if you were wanting something different from the 3D pipes of Windows’ own media player, you looked to Winamp, with the custom, cyberpunky skins for some real personality (and more importantly, graphic equalisers, for the audiophiles).

In a technological world where pretty much everything feels like corporate slop (and mostly is), the skins of Winamp were delightfully offbeat, and the huge library of options were community made, from tasteful and simple colours, to the famous green head version where the equalisers erupted from the side of the skull.

There was functionality of course, but that wasn’t what made these skins so beguiling. Fact is, technology is so boringly functional, that we get excited by a crumb of graphic design once a year when Spotify does it’s ‘Wrapped’ thing, and after that, we go back to almost entirely ignoring the interface. Back when the internet was sillier, the rampant individuality of these Winamp skins said something about the way we approached our spare time with creativity and off-kilter humour.

The trope of choosing your MySpace friends was one thing – but the real juice was those who used the likes of cricketsoda to perform rudimentary coding in a bid to change the design of their own pages. The internet and early social media was a playground. Naturally, it came with a bucketload of problems and bad behaviour, but now, those problems have become mainstream without the light relief of bug-eyed skins, and the simple act of making new friends online, and defining yourself by the music you like, rather than idolising anyone in politics.

These skins showed what people were into at the time – be it Quake, Star Wars, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Max Payne, Aphex Twin, or whatever else – and while nostalgia plays a huge part in the charm of looking at these things now, they show a much simpler online experience, where Big Data hadn’t quite worked out how to encroach into every corner of our lives.

Will we see its like again? We don’t know – but if there’s going to be any reaction to the beigeification of modern tech and social media, you can bet that Apple, Meta, Google and the rest will not play ball in allowing young people to run their internet lives however they like, and if that’s the case, it’s to the Wild West of some other internet that mums and dads don’t understand… and that’s where the juice is, right?

For those who would like to roll back the years, there’s an online museum with interactive previews, which you can view here.