I’m in a band. No big deal. Bad Custer has been together for 10 years, and most of us have been playing music together for twice that. We rock, if I do say so myself. We play the kind of music you’d expect a rock band to play: loud, jammy, bouncy, with lots of guitar solos.

In our decade of performances, we’ve managed a small foothold in the Pittsburgh music scene. A couple of DJs put our new songs in rotation, we get invited to festivals, our last album got a review in the big local newspaper. We’ve given up on making a lot of money from the project, or from “making it big” on a regional or national stage, because two of us have little kids and selling merch is a drag and we have day jobs and partners and lives to live.

There’s less of a path to widespread recognition for bands like us these days. From the 1950s to the 70s, popular music was dominated by the electric guitar, and groups with talent and gumption could be swept up into stardom if they got lucky. But in the 1980s, the electronic synthesizer began to take hold as a foundational instrument, changing the face of pop music forever. Many big acts today have sounds developed wholly inside of a computer, and while there are still bands that emphasize the human performance of live music, there’s a ceiling on how big they can get. DJs have replaced live performers at school dances, weddings, and nightclubs, shrinking the job market more and more for talented performers.

But the electric guitar survives. It’s hard to beat how cool it makes you when you learn a few chords, hook them up to your emotions, and turn the dial to 11. There will always be sweaty teenagers thrashing and yelling and headbanging on dimly lit stages, playing for not much more than the other bands on the lineup, and partners, and parents. Take away all the incentives and you only make it more meaningful as a method for pure creative expression.

When I think about the state of the web in 2024, I get a similar picture. The mega-platforms that dominate our landscape want to turn all of human activity into a content slurry to be pumped across our touchscreens. Making it big in this environment requires selling out, to either advertisers or investors or surveillers. Making a living on the internet can be tough without learning the byzantine rules of one or more algorithms and scrambling after their capricious changes.

But in the cracks and crevices of the internet, web sites are blooming. Free of the constraints and the invisible barriers of social media, they can be whatever they want to be: loud, cozy, dense, sparse, or purple. I don’t know if the internet will ever be dominated by sites like these ever again, but I know for a fact that it will never be without them either. Like the electric guitar, the web site is too powerful, and too easy to get started, to ever fade away.