The remains of a virtual city – possibly the first of its kind – can be found on servers all over the world.¹ Geocities was launched as a series of districts, alleyways, and neighbourhoods where its inhabitants could build their own webpages. For the first time, the internet was given a structure in a way that its audience could relate to it on a human scale. Today, around 650 gigabytes of Geocities’s data remain accessible thanks to archiving efforts that ensured the recovery of some of the 38 million individual websites that existed at the time of GeoCities’ final closure in 2009. [2] [3] [4] [5] 

GeoCities was first launched in 1994 by David Bohnett and Dick Altman as a web hosting service, allowing its users to store and manage their website files. [6] Its initial name, Beverly Hills Internet, already hinted at the creators’ intention to develop a neighbourhood of websites, which would later mature into a geography of cities. The service offered a free plan with a generous two megabytes of storage to all users, known as the homesteaders, who were asked to choose a neighbourhood to reside in. [7] All of the city’s inhabitants occupied a defined space, in a defined surrounding, where their homepages were arranged within neighbourhoods. Each cluster of pages was spatially close to those which shared similar content, while each neighbourhood was defined by the broader topic into which they fit. As such, the company created and thematically organised its web directories into six neighbourhoods, which included Colosseum, Hollywood, RodeoDrive, SunsetStrip, WallStreet and West Hollywood. New neighbourhoods, as well as their suburbs, were later added as the site grew, and became part of the members’ unique web address with a sequentially assigned URL “civic address” (e.g., “www.geocities.com/RodeoDrive/54”). Chat rooms and bulletin boards were added soon after, fostering rapid growth of the city. [8] Each neighbourhood had its own forum, live chat, and even a list of all the homesteaders who celebrated their birthday each day.  

By December 1995, when it changed its name to GeoCities, Beverly Hills Internet had over 20,000 homesteaders and over 6 million page-views per month. [9] Within this expansive organisation of web page clusters, a seamless sense of proximity between those who shared similar ideas naturally led to human behaviours such as kinship and affection between them.  

Neighbourhoods are intrinsic parts of our urban fabric and a self-evident manifestation of how the cities we live in are structured. [10] Yet, we still struggle to grasp a proper definition of their totality, given the complex layers within them. In 1926, progressive educator David Snedden defined the term neighbourhood as “those people who live within easy ‘hallooing’ distance”, illustrating it as a space where one can easily catch the attention of another. [11] 

This essay will explore the notion of an algorithmic neighbourhood, one that reflects – and derives from – parts of a physically built, “hallooing” urban neighbourhood. The internet lexicon of today descends seamlessly from a long lineage of architectural and spatial terminologies, such as firewall, coding architecture, homepage, platform, address, path, room, and location, among many others. In the translation from a physical reality that is shaped within our Latourian “critical zone”, some of these terminologies have shifted in their meaning when applied to new forms of digital space. [12] A parallel “digital critical zone” is generated, within which these algorithmic neighbourhoods sit.  

Neighbourhood as a site of kinship and proximity  

The artisanal web built through GeoCities allowed “user-generated content”, which had not yet adorned itself with pompous names or revolutionary pretensions. [13] It proved that even before the invention of Web 2.0 – which was later aimed at implementing social-media profiles – the web was, above all, a story of human beings who interact with one another and discuss the subjects close to them through the means at hand.  

Urban studies professor Looker defines the United States as a nation of neighbourhoods. [14] This essay expands on this exposure of the continental urban fabric by exploring the communities of algorithmic kinship that exist within GeoCities’ virtual borders. Similar to physically built neighbourhoods, GeoCities’ urban structure fostered kinship and affection among its inhabitants. PicketFence, for example, was built to allow residents to share tips and advice on ‘Home Improvement Techniques’. The more experienced ‘Home Improvement’ users became the neighbourhood’s go-to people for navigating daily issues, reinforcing a shared communal knowledge. [15] 

West Hollywood, which was subdivided into “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender topics”, is another example of such algorithmic kinship. This neighbourhood was a predecessor of today’s social-media spaces where users can gather and exchange (sometimes hidden or undisclosed) realities across communities. West Hollywood’s users could leave messages, sign a guestbook, and share contact information with one another. The neighbourhood gave people an opportunity to share similar experiences and daily struggles, form alliances with other communities, and tackle queer rights collectively. Moreover, West Hollywood fostered arenas of “block-level solidarity”, where “bonds and loyalties – whether as enacted on real-life pavements or as represented in stories, images, and speeches”, allowed connections between the intimate lives of users, their GeoCities pages, and the “city block”. [16] 

Proximity and reciprocal kinship were thus a foundational feature of GeoCities’ design: individuals, together with their personal pages, were at the centre of the Internet. In contrast, today’s platforms and digital services are structured in such a nested way that proximity is sometimes inconceivable, and individuals are reduced to anonymous consumers of information. Today, the information communications technology industry (ICT) is at the centre of the Internet. [17] Social media platforms still provide virtual spaces that allow communities to gather and share content with one another, fostering a certain degree of human interaction. However, the very structure within which they operate is fundamentally different from the ones used in early platforms such as GeoCities. While before, the digital matter – text, images, links – was spatially placed onto the transparent structure of the webpage, and you could clearly see the location of a jpeg file within the HTML lines of code, now it all runs through opaque interfaces. [18] These perfect facades are quasi-impenetrable for users, and hide the “black boxes” where algorithms operate as instruments of measurements and perception. [19] As a counterpart to algorithmic neighbourhoods, Caroline Busta defines social-media platforms as a grand bazaar, “with lanes of kiosks, grouped roughly by trade, displaying representative works to passers-by. At the back of the mini-shop is a trap door with stairs leading to a sub-basement where deals can be done”. [20] This multi-layered opaque architecture of the bazaar illustrates the complex structure that currently governs social-media platforms. In contrast, the algorithmic neighbourhoods of GeoCities attempted to encourage a transparent vision of the modes of portraiture in the digital realm, and defined tools for users to relate directly to it. 

Neighbourhood as a site constantly ‘under construction’   

A digital archaeologist scavenging through GeoCities’ remains would come across a vast number of “under construction” signs strewn across the neighbourhood’s alleys, outlining its “work-in-progress” state. Surrounded by virtual scaffolding, the pages under construction were built, line after line of code, by the homesteaders, slowly undergoing organic changes and upgrades. Each individual page was constructed by its creator, from its foundations to its decorative elements, in the HTML format – the HyperText Markup Language. The coding language not only allowed users to build their pages from scratch, but also to introduce multimedia resources such as JPGs and GIFs. A page under construction implies that there was a process of creation, which aimed at an eventual final form. Similar to a construction site, the individual web page could be openly observed throughout its making, as it could be visited by GeoCities inhabitants at any moment in time. It was a facade yet to come; a page that was shaped by the algorithmic manipulation of its users as they added another ‘about me’ section, a ‘guestbook’ to be signed, or a photo gallery of low-res pictures – to fit within the 2 megabytes limit – portraying their personal lives. 

Differently, the architecture of new forms of webpages and content aggregators is now conceived with an opaque algorithmic structure. Their virtual space is not one of proximity and distance based on intelligible parameters, but one of hierarchical appearance and disappearance based on unintelligible instruments of perception. [21] For instance, Google’s page-ranking algorithm mutates and evolves over time, leaving no traces behind, except the ones it uses to train itself. When presented with Google search results, users are faced with a series of temporary choices that are the result of a very intricate mechanism of automatic selection and classification. Vladan Joler defines algorithms as “instruments of measurements and perception”; thus, algorithmic architecture can be outlined by an operation of the more-than-human. Data collection and consumer profiling are the parameters upon which the current Internet is being built, instead of it being a conscious construction process carried out by its users. 

While the architectural backdrop of a platform is constantly being redefined based on who is interacting with it, its facade – the interface – is pure and familiar. This interface which we constantly visit, however, obscures what’s beneath it. Even if it is a clear manifestation of rules, as it tells you what you can or cannot do, it does not reveal through which mechanisms it gathers and conveys information, nor how the user’s actions are exploited for profitable means. The algorithmic design of GeoCities, based on neighbourhood alliances, had not yet allowed for this opacity, avoiding instances of power structures, black boxes, and opaque interfaces. It also avoided entering the black hole of rhizomatic surveillance that now permeates the virtual realm. [22] [23]  

Algorithmic neighbourhoods can also help to expose the physical infrastructure hosting them. Similarly, to the opaqueness of interfaces, our built neighbourhoods are shaped by an underground infrastructure of fleshly cables and routers. Data centres, globally connected by a web of cables, host our digital selves, which wander through the unmeasurable geographies of the Internet. They are out of reach, transcending any geographical boundary, as they mirror the ubiquitous nature of algorithmic spaces. Cables and data centres are, in fact, the physical side of the Internet, its thickness on our planet. They are the physical neighbourhood mirroring the algorithmic one, hosting the latter through servers, cables, connections, and energy. The physical neighbourhood which creates the digital infrastructure is not, however, a direct reflection of the algorithmic one. It is instead expansive, ubiquitous, fragmented, and absent, as it is designed to operate under strict safety protocols and privacy regulations.  

Neighbourhood as a site of civic participation and resistance  

In June 1998, in order to boost brand awareness and advertising impressions, GeoCities introduced a watermark on its users’ web pages. [24] The watermark, much like an on-screen graphic on some TV channels, was a transparent floating GIF image that used JavaScript to stay displayed at the bottom right of the browser window. Many users felt that the watermark interfered with their website design, and threatened to move their pages elsewhere. A year later, in 1999, Yahoo bought the platform and consequently implemented its “Terms of Service agreement” leading to a unanimous reaction by the homesteaders. [25] The “Haunting of GeoCities” was the users’ response to the threat over content rights and access control. Each neighbourhood became a ghost town, where homepages were stripped of their content and colours, replaced with excerpts of the offending Terms of Service. As authors Reynolds and Hallinan point out, “users sensed that Yahoo’s unfettered access to this content threatened their creative control and diluted their power to make decisions about how and where to display their content. … some enterprising homesteaders sought to foil Yahoo’s legal and digital access to their intellectual property by removing it from the service altogether”. [26] The collective operation, moreover, represented a strategic mobilization of GeoCities design, defined by co-founder David Bohnett as “a bottoms-up, user-generated content mode”. [27] [28] The homesteaders’ remarkable political response allowed them to preserve a certain degree of control over their content, interfering with the dominating “Terms of Service agreement” which regulates, even more so today, every action we take within a platform. 

The “Haunting” protest represented a point of resistance towards the tendency of tech-giants to channel social traffic through a corporate digital platform ecosystem – a ubiquitous model in today’s internet. [29] The organized response by the homesteaders was only possible by the virtue of the very architecture of GeoCities. Neighbourhoods allowed a bottom-up response that could contrast the overarching corporate control put in place by Yahoo. It was a gathering that was empowered by proximity and affection, while it could exploit the temporary nature of the homepages’ construction as a medium for political change. In 2009, in response to the termination of GeoCities by Yahoo, new mechanisms of neighbourly rebuttal emerged. The German hosting provider JimdoWeb, for instance, attempted to host the nomad homesteaders by launching the Lifeboat for GeoCities webpage. Simultaneously, efforts of internet archivists started to meticulously archive each homepage of GeoCities in a countering act to preserve memory and gather residues of the city. 

The archived remains of the virtual city stand as an alternative approach to the complexity and opaqueness of the algorithmic layering of contemporary web-hosting services, as much as they reveal the ‘trans-scalar’ infrastructure of the Internet. [30] These neighbourly entanglements help us make sense of the current digital “global village”, offering an entry point to analyse how it is being shaped by the effects of globalisation, market economies, and imprudent media. [31] [32] Moreover, they display how the global village is being governed by algorithmic interdependencies, which in turn affect the architectural formations in both virtual and physical realities. [33]  

References

[1] Archive Team. Archiveteam.org. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page (accessed April 16, 2022).

[2] R. Vijgen. “The Deleted City”, http://www.deletedcity.net/, (2017)

[3] Restorativland, “The Geocities Gallery”, https://geocities.restorativland.org/, (accessed March 1, 2022).

[4] “OoCities”, https://www.oocities.org/#gsc.tab=0, (accessed March 1, 2022).

[5] O. Lialina & D. Espenschied, “One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age”, Rhizome.org. https://anthology.rhizome.org/one-terabyte-of-kilobyte-age, (accessed March 1, 2022).

[6] A.J. Kim, Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities (United Kingdom: Pearson Education, 2006).

[7] B. Sawyer, D Greely, Creating GeoCities Websites, (Cincinnati, Ohio: Muska & Lipman Pub, 1999) .

[8] Ibid.

[9] C. Bassett, The arc and the machine: Narrative and new media, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

[10] J. Jacobs, “The City: Some Myths about Diversity”, The death and life of great American cities, (New York: Random House, 1961).

[11] R. Sampson, “The Place of Context: A Theory and Strategy for Criminology’s Hard Problems”, Criminology 51 (The American Society of Criminology, 2013).

[12] B. Latour, Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).

[13]  B. Sawyer, D Greely, Creating GeoCities Websites, (Cincinnati, Ohio: Muska & Lipman Pub, 1999).

[14] B. Looker, A Nation of Neighborhoods: Imagining Cities, Communities, and Democracy in Postwar America, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015).

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] C. Busta, “Losing Yourself in the Dark”. Open Secret, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, https://opensecret.kw-berlin.de/essays/losing-yourself-in-the-dark/, (accessed April 16, 2022).

[18] S.U. Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism,. (United States: NYU Press, 2018).

[19] V. Joler, “New Extractivism”, Open Secret, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, https://opensecret.kw-berlin.de/artwork/new-extractivism/, (accessed April 16, 2022).

[20]  C. Busta, “Losing Yourself in the Dark”. Open Secret, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, https://opensecret.kw-berlin.de/essays/losing-yourself-in-the-dark/, (accessed April 16, 2022).

[21]  V. Joler, “New Extractivism”, Open Secret, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, https://opensecret.kw-berlin.de/artwork/new-extractivism/, (accessed April 16, 2022).

[22] D. Savat, “(Dis)Connected: Deleuze’s Superject and the Internet”, International Handbook of Internet Research, 423–36 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009).

[23] K.D. Haggerty, R. Ericson, “The Surveillant Assemblage”. British Journal of Sociology, 51, 4, 605-622, (United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell for the London School of Economics, 2000).

[24] J. Hu, “GeoCitizens fume over watermark”, CNet.com, https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/geocitizens-fume-over-watermark/ (accessed March 1, 2022).

[25] R. Ku, Cyberspace Law: Cases and Materials, (New York: Wolters Kluwer, 2016).

[26] C. Reynolds, B. Hallinan, “The haunting of GeoCities and the politics of access control on the early Web”, New Media & Society, (United States: SAGE Publishing, 2021).

[27] Ibid.

[28] B McCullough, “Interview with David Bohnett, founder of GeoCities”. Internet History Podcast, http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2015/05/david-bohnett-founder-of-geocities/, (accessed April 16, 2022).

[29] J. Van Dijck, T. Poell, M. De Waal, The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

[30] A. Jaque, Superpowers of Scale, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

[31] M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).

[32] T. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). [1] M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographic man, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).