We talk a lot about how the generation below us is using the internet wrong. iPad babies are the calling card of a greasy first grader: “You got games on your phone?” are signifiers of what seems to be a growing generational gap in technology use. Where the latter half of Generation Z and most of Gen Alpha are adept at using ultra-simplified mobile operating systems but are lacking in the digital skills that elder Zoomers take for granted; things like how to use Microsoft Office, and how to use Google to find information. Educators are beginning to notice the ‘smartphone generation’ isn’t so tech savvy when you take away their iOS devices and plop them in front of a desktop computer.
It’s not hard to extrapolate why. If you were born after the rough set point of 2008 (give or take one year), you likely don’t remember using Instagram when the only posts on your feed were from people you followed, and you would scroll through them in chronological order. Or when Google pulled mostly organic search results that were shown to everyone who searched the words you did, and you would always click away from the search engine to access other websites. Now, your Instagram feed is roughly 20% posts from accounts you follow and interact with regularly, and the rest is photos and short-form content recommended to you based on data they’ve collected on your interests. If you even manage to scroll beyond whatever widget Google has at the top of the screen to stop you from giving any other site traffic, those search results are based not on what you actually searched, but whatever fits into those parameters someone with your advertising interests might click on. If you’re in high school right now, you have always known the algorithm, and the algorithm has always known you.
I was just young and precocious enough to grab onto the tail-end of Y2K internet culture. Many years prior to research that now indicates you should limit your toddler’s screen time, my parents sat me in front of their Windows 98 computer to play various CD-Roms we got out of cereal boxes. Soon, I moved on to the Flash games on the Nick Jr. and ABC Kids websites. By the time I was in Year 1, I was e-dating on Club Penguin. I was “good at computers” - should that mean anything to anyone anymore? I learned a bit about scene kids and MySpace culture just before it was swallowed by the ether in 2010, from teenagers on kids forums who knew I was eight years old and found me a bit grating. My last foray into the world of the big kids’ internet was my presence on Tumblr, which I maintained from the ages of eleven to seventeen.
I loved it all. All I ever wanted to do was be on the computer. When I became a teenager, and the internet left its stationary location on my family computer to creep into my back pocket, that changed. It wasn’t immediate, but slowly, being online began to trigger an impending sense of doom. I missed the way it had been when I was a child when there was always something new to learn, something to be excited about. Around the very late 2010s came the birth of micro-aesthetics. These are your -cores, and while they too were strained into marketing slop, and dumped into buzzword soup, their origins represent a generational malaise about our digital world. If cottage-core was about throwing your phone off a bridge and eating unidentified wild berries to feel alive, webcore (and its affiliates) were a less extreme adjustment. Why don’t we just turn back the clock a bit?
The target era of the internet captured in each iteration of these “webcore” aesthetics has changed with time. In 2016 - 2018, the Vaporwave aesthetic used 90s Microsoft motifs adjacent to 80s synth-wave music, Greek statuettes and NES-era video game graphics. 2019 - 2021 saw the rise of MySpace nostalgia adjoined to a wider Y2K revival trend - this included DIY HTML-coded webpages, garish glitterfied photos and those pixelated make-a-doll generators. Frutiger Aero covers a relatively wide time span, roughly the very late 90s to the very early 2010s. It’s sanitary, corporate and free of any grit or grunge, unlike some earlier 90s aesthetics. You often see the ocean and rolling green hills in Frutiger Aero, but they’re so spotless you can tell it is inorganic, simply the handiwork of a human at a computer. Everything has an unnatural sheen, a placating linearity.
Frutiger Aero is an unnatural aesthetic, the result of market research and an unbridled optimism about what those boxy PCs could do for humanity. It wasn’t yet conceived of what the internet could take away from us. What is bringing us back to this aesthetic, a roundabout twenty years later? Perhaps, generationally, it is the memory of the family computer in the study, when we were all younger with more time to waste. This was the internet that hadn’t been around long enough to ruin our teenage daughters’ self-esteem and compromise our elections with misinformation. We have all grown older, and we have much more to regret.
Eloise Wajon is a second-year Fine Arts/Arts student, majoring in Creative Writing. In her spare time, she likes to play video games and defend Taylor Swift in the comments section of Buzzfeed articles.
