Somewhere in the archived remains of GeoCities there is a page about lighthouses, built by a stranger in 1997, with a tiled starfield background and a hit counter that stopped at 4,312. It is a terrible website. It is also, in a way that has become hard to explain, a place — an address someone picked, decorated badly, and kept. When Yahoo shut GeoCities down in October 2009, it deleted at least 38 million such places in one administrative decision, and the web’s first era of mass self-publishing ended not with a migration but with an eviction.
That eviction is worth dwelling on, because it contains the whole argument. For roughly fifteen years, the default unit of the web was a page somebody owned; since then, it has been a post somebody rents. The shift felt like progress — no HTML, no FTP, just type into the box — and in most ways it was. But something specific was traded away, and it wasn’t aesthetics. It was addressability. A personal site had a URL that belonged to you and could outlive whatever hosted it: you changed providers, the address stayed. A profile has a URL that belongs to the platform, and it lasts exactly as long as the platform’s interest in you. Your handle is not an address. It is a locker number.
Jeffrey Zeldman, who has been making this argument since before it was nostalgic, put it bluntly: build your audience entirely on someone else’s platform and “you aren’t a homeowner. You are a tenant. Or worse, a digital sharecropper.” The landlord’s powers are by now familiar. The algorithm changes and you lose your voice. The platform pivots and you lose your work. The company gets acquired and you discover you were the asset being traded.
The honest caveat is that ownership was never the force field people remember. Pew Research found last year that 38 percent of webpages that existed in 2013 are already gone, and most of that decay is individual pages deleted from otherwise living sites — owned pages, not just rented ones. A domain lapses, a hosting bill goes unpaid, and the lighthouse page goes dark too — the difference being that somebody could, and did, keep a copy. Permanence was always a practice, not a property. What ownership actually bought was portability: the right to pack up and keep your address. Renters don’t get evicted more often than owners lose their houses. They just can’t take the door with them.
So the personal website is coming back. You can hear it in the current chorus of essays urging everyone to get a domain, own the hub, treat the platforms as spokes. But listen closer and the revival sounds different from the original. The GeoCities page about lighthouses was made for no reason — that was the reason. The new personal site is recommended the way a blazer is recommended: as something a professional should have. The argument is no longer “express yourself” but “de-risk your career.” The same people who once built glitter-text shrines to their cats are now being told a domain is roughly the price of a coffee a year and an essential hedge against platform collapse, which is true, and also a tell.
The personal website died as a hobby and is being resurrected as an obligation — a résumé with better typography, maintained with the same weary diligence as a LinkedIn profile. We are getting the addresses back. What made them worth having, the pointless lighthouse page built by someone who simply wanted a place, is the part no one is selling.