Broken Links
What even is a website today?
A peculiar question popped into my mind recently: What even is a website today?
This question arose because I was trying to figure out how to consolidate over 16 years of writing, podcasting, and teaching online. I was staring at the blank page of my staging site and feeling, well, that blank page energy. I set out to build a new site that I could design and structure however made sense—finally liberated from the conventions of a blog, podcast, personal brand, or social media. Without those conventions, though, I didn't know where to start. Hence my question: What even is a website today?
In a digital ecosystem dominated by apps and platforms, non-app and non-platform websites atrophied. “I cannot remember the last time I actually went to a website and browsed, took my time discovering the way a person expressed themselves through code,” writes Gita Jackson, co-founder of Aftermath, in her recent ode to websites. The trendiest website designs are bare-bones, often single-page business cards with a contact form. They're beautiful—but what is their purpose beyond looking good and holding a domain name?
Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, often says that The Verge is the “last website on Earth," which he told Hank Green is 50% a joke. The site underwent a significant overhaul not too long ago with the idea of making it a destination for their staff and fans alike. They designed the site to be a place their journalists wanted to create content (including short-form content), and they wanted it to be a place that readers would visit daily (at least).
“…if you look around the media landscape right now … more and more people are starting to realize, ‘Oh, we should just make the websites more valuable.’ And the easiest way to make the websites more valuable is to have our talented people make more stories, and not just more stories but openly have more fun on the website.”
— Nilay Patel, on Decoder
Patel says he's preparing for “Google Zero," the day that search engine traffic, long the ultimate safety net for gaining eyeballs, finally dries up. By making the website a place people want to go rather than a place people end up, he and his team are planning for the site's long-term viability regardless of which way the internet winds may blow.
The Verge is a bustling tech news and analysis website for which I struggle to find a helpful analog metaphor. There are product reviews, but it's not a shopping mall. There is copious tech journalism, but it's not a newspaper or a magazine. There are videos and podcasts, but it's not a 24/7 news channel. There is breaking short-form content, but it's not a social media platform. It defies conventions. To paraphrase the great David S. Pumpkins, The Verge is its own thing.
1. Website Metaphysics
I’ve been actively building websites since 2008, both for myself and others. This new one—where you may or may not be reading this—has been the most challenging website project I’ve ever done, even though I haven’t had to write a single line of code (unless you count the 100+ redirects I mapped). This website wasn’t a challenge because building a website has gotten harder. It was a challenge because I had to figure out what this website would be before making any headway with the build. I had to decide on (or better, learn) its metaphysics before I could begin the more technical task of importing and reconnecting hundreds of articles.
And in the back of my mind, I worried about all the broken links.
And in the back of my mind, I worried about all the broken links.
Between 2008 and 2015 or so, a website owner could expect to drive a bonkers amount of traffic from a social media platform to their own site. After 2015, the amount of traffic a website owner could expect from social media went down (even as follower counts continued to climb). It was then that we noticed platforms, especially Facebook, started to treat posts that kept users on the platform differently from posts that invited users to click away. Posts that contained links wouldn’t get the “reach” that posts without links got. If no one sees your link, they can’t choose to click on it.
Website owners—including myself—responded by housing more and more content on the platforms themselves. I’ve been a proponent of this strategy and continue to be in the right situation. If you want to make it on social media, you need to put remarkable content on your chosen platform instead of links to remarkable content on your own website. The question is: do you want to make it on social media, or do you want to do something (anything) else?
Over time, the build-up of self-imposed obligation took its toll. We were (and are) enriching billionaires for the privilege of hustling to make content, respond to comments, and keep up with the latest trends (i.e., capitalist whims made manifest in templates of virality). Under those conditions, we started to lose ourselves. Or rather, I should speak for myself—I started to lose myself.
One effect of making things online for as long as I have is a sense of dispersion, a dilution, or maybe a decentralization of place. I've built websites at taragentile.com (later taramcmullin.com), explorewhatworks.com, and whatworks.fyi. And those are just the three sites that still exist. Or did, up until I did some domain magic with this here website.
Sites that I once tended, handmadeinpa.net and scoutiegirl.com, I handed over to other caretakers. Neither of those sites exists anymore. My very first blog, hosted at the defunct xanga.com, is minimally archived on the Wayback Machine. But is otherwise lost to time, as well.
I deleted my Twitter profile late in 2024, not long after I completely abandoned Instagram. My Facebook profile has lain dormant since 2017 (aside from a perfunctory post about my book in 2022). There are dozens of workshops withering in my Crowdcast account, probably thousands of forum posts in communities that I've either run or participated in, and about 100 podcast episodes lost in a series of layoffs at the company I worked with early in the show's run.
My digital identity has become a long series of broken links.
The digital world, which seems to encompass more of the “real" world every year, draws a very fuzzy line between permanence and impermanence. The content of the web seems to exist in a state that is both ephemeral and lasting. It is easy to lose your work, your friends, your reputation, perhaps even yourself on the internet. At the same time, because "the internet is forever," services exist to scrub or bury the lingering vestiges of former moods, misdeeds, or cringeworthy moments.
2. Digital Homelessness
There are bits of me strewn across the web—many, perhaps even most, are broken off from the network that loosely binds the accounts, domains, and mentions that I think of as 'active.' Some of these broken-off bits are tied to my old name. Some are tied to old brands. Others are tied to old opinions, interests, or relationships. These bits have been discarded (or forgotten), yet they persist. Before embarking on this website project, I didn’t really have a home on the web and hadn’t since the Obama era.
Writer Venkatesh Rao connects the experience of this kind of disaggregated digital life with the experience of homelessness. It's not a comfy parallel—the risk of false equivalency is real—but it is an instructive one.
Rao theorizes the experience of homelessness as the gradual disintegration of the boundary between private identity and public identity. The home is not only a shelter but also a “psychological boundary" that shapes one's private identity—that sense that home is where you can be yourself.
“Homelessness is about more than lacking a base that offers protection from the elements and material security. It’s about lacking an integrated identity, a ‘home’ persona that is contained and shaped by, and active within, the home as a psychological boundary.”
“This sort of collapsed, derelict condition," writes Rao, “can appear around any disintegrating dimension of being." He suggests joblessness as an example. Being without a job disrupts a critical sociocultural dimension of identity—the broken link between occupation and self challenges one's ability to belong in a society that prizes that connection.
Perhaps the booming nostalgia for the 90s and early 2000s generally—and the early web specifically—is in part a longing for an integrated, at-home identity online. Those of us who had a Xanga site, or a LiveJournal, or a Geocities page, or even a MySpace page know what it was like to have a digital home that was connected to a bigger social ecosystem. Early users of forums and bulletin boards know what it was like to have a digital neighborhood rather than #community. These services encouraged us to decorate our homes—paint the walls, add art and music, display meaningful items, etc. Yes, those digital homes were janky, mismatched disasters of design. But they were ours.
Pre-Newsfeed Facebook did away with the idiosyncrasies of personalization but still focused on the individual profile—even if it was reduced from a home to a “wall." Then, social media feeds coaxed many of us to shed our at-home digital identities and take on a public identity full-time. Our personal websites began to take on the bland sameness of a subdivision—lot after lot of variations on the same uninspired design.
Sometimes, I lounge next to my husband while he scrolls TikTok after work. I lay my head on his chest and watch the videos in his feed. His FYP is weird. As in, he's carefully shaped his feed to be as full of Weird TikTok as possible (he's done the same on Instagram). There's a lot of stuff in his feed that I don't get—even actively dislike. But it's a good reminder that content doesn't have to be the equivalent of Millennial gray to be seen or even popular.
This weekend, I helped my daughter set up a website—a blog, more or less. Independently of any suggestion on my part, she decided that she wanted the homepage to showcase the books she's reading and the vinyls she's listening to. She envisioned something eclectic and personal to house her work. At 16, she has no nostalgia for how the web used to be. She's never had a home online, but she still feels that same longing that I do. I think she's starting to realize that the suffocating sameness she consumes via infinite scroll is not the kind of vital media she wants to create.
I've long bemoaned the lack of risk-taking, creativity, and thoughtfulness among the people who market themselves online or aspire to be full-time creators. With glorious though rare exceptions, much of what passes for content on the web is the product of checklists and best practices designed to please machines rather than people. I've thought a lot about how the practical realities of making things on the web defy the vision we've been sold—that of unprecedented access to modes of expression. The so-called creator economy is merely the latest gloss on the schemes of men who've broken into the billionaire class.
Yet, I hadn't considered how the fracturing and disintegration of my digital self impacted me personally—as in, my identity. The politics and economics of the situation are clear. The challenges to my livelihood and any sense of financial stability are palpable. But until I read Rao's essay on digital homelessness, I didn't have the mental model necessary to make sense of the disorientation I felt.
Home is the ultimate anchor text.
Rao’s phenomenology of homelessness is one of broken links. Home is the ultimate anchor text, weaving various expressions of self together and shaping them into a cohesive, if not always consistent, internal system. In fact, home is a place for inconsistency. A place for idiosyncrasies. A place where the only person we have to make sense to is ourselves.
3. Google Hates Broken Links Like NIMBYs Hate Tent Cities
We might think of a hyperlink as a doorway from one piece of content to another. But a link is itself content. The link is capacious—containing information about relevancy, authority, recency, and quality, in addition to information about the relationship between content pages. This is why hyperlinks have been so important to search engine algorithms and, consequently, search engine optimization.
If Site A is a respected authority on Topic X and Site A links to Site B on Topic Y, then search engine algorithms deduce that Sites A and B are connected, Topics X and Y are connected, and that Site A's authority can transfer to Site B. Search engines, of course, have access to billions (trillions?) of these connections and can deduce all sorts of things about the various web pages they index.
In this way, broken links aren't merely a lack of signal. A broken link is its own type of signal—one that contains negative information. A handful of broken links isn't a big deal because the signal of the unbroken links counteracts the negative signal that the broken links broadcast. But a website full of broken links? That's bad news. Not only is it a terrible experience for the user who can't find what they're looking for, but a site full of broken links indicates to search engines that the site is no longer relevant or trustworthy.
Links have to be made to be broken, though, and the platformization of the internet has rendered linking almost passé. Simply put, sharing someone’s article on Bluesky is fine, but that act doesn’t have the same effect as linking to the article on my website. The platform is an intermediary that obfuscates the link’s content. When I link to Anil Dash’s article on the “web renaissance,” that link is contained in an essay reflecting on the current state of the website on a website that reflects on the current state of work written by someone with a modicum of authority on those topics. Further, the link itself is a bit of HTML that wraps a tiny bit of content—the anchor text—which further signals the topic under discussion.
We’ve been platform-pilled to believe that sharing is caring. Reposting, commenting, or sharing a link to content that’s not our own is a service we do for others. That’s not untrue, but it’s no substitute for a link from my site to another or from another’s site back to mine. When I share someone’s work on Instagram, for example, I contribute to Meta’s information ecosystem. When I link from my website to another, I contribute to the open information ecosystem of the wider web. Any bot that can read HTML can understand the content of my link and integrate that information into its index. A link is my chance to reach out and build a bridge while also shoring up my own foundation.
So yes, broken links are a problem. They’re a problem I’m currently working on. But the lack of links—the lack of signal—is making our wider information ecosystem fragile. A lack of links contributes to the disintegration of our digital projects as much as broken links.
4. Digital Hoarding
The term “unhoused,” rather than “homeless,” has gained popularity with some progressives in recent years. The Guardian reports the term’s first use on Twitter in 2008, but 2020 seems to be the year it became widespread among scholars and advocates. This terminology, among other things, aims to demonstrate that a lack of housing is a choice of institutions and policy rather than an individual choice. “Unhoused” highlights the systemic and institutional failings rather than implying a personal failing. This shift is an important one that can reduce stigma and pressure communities or governments to act.
Yet, a housed person can still be homeless if we accept Rao’s framing that being at home is the experience of passing through the boundary of public and private into a space where one can be oneself. (Outside of Rao’s framing, however, people who work in the field note that an unhoused person often does have a home—their city, encampment, group, etc.) Temporary housing, like a shelter, meets basic physical needs, but it rarely provides for the emotional and existential need of privacy.
Home, as Rao observes and as this shift in terminology can demonstrate, is more than shelter. Having shelter—even owning a house or renting an apartment—doesn't preclude someone from experiencing something we could call homelessness. For example, hoarding seems to create an experience akin to homelessness, as Rao describes it. In the case of hoarding, the self doesn't disintegrate as the boundary between public and private dissipates, but instead, the self disintegrates—or dissolves—into the accumulating stuff within the private space.
Hoarding often begins as a way to feel safe, buffered from the scarcity and meaninglessness of the wider world. But eventually, the stuff itself becomes the threat—physically, emotionally, and psychically. Letting go of the stuff seems impossible since the stuff has become an externalized part of the self. Adding to the stuff buoys the self, if unsatisfyingly, while getting rid of the stuff means losing oneself.
Hoarding is also part of the experience of digital culture today—again, I realize I’m risking false equivalency for this metaphor. Digital hoarding is often why we download new apps, set up profiles on new platforms, and keep finding new trends and accounts to follow. It's why we buy domain after domain. Why we start podcasts and abandon them after publishing the first episode. Why we produce more and more and more content.
While IRL hoarding focuses on consumption, accumulation, and an inability to move on from possessions, digital hoarding can encompass both digital consumption and digital production. We produce—or take baby steps toward producing—more and more because it feels safer than doing otherwise. Frenzied production acts as a buffer against platform-imposed scarcity. The more we say, the more we can rest assured we must be saying something meaningful. Making stuff online takes on the same affective characteristics of buying and amassing stuff in the material world.
Philosopher Rahel Jaeggi argues that alienation is a "relation of relationlessness." The work the alienated subject does and the stuff they consume exist separate from their capacity to act on it. The alienated subject lacks a relationship with their work or their stuff. They are rendered helpless, reduced to tools for reproducing and enshittifying the aura-less material of daily life.
Rebecca Falkoff observes something similar in her book Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding. “Hoarding," she writes, “marks a dangerous threshold at which control over objects cedes to a sense of helplessness before the material world." Digital hoarding, we might say, marks the threshold at which control over one's digital identity cedes to a sense of helplessness before the digital world. We once exercised control over the stuff of our digital identities; now, we submit to the feed, the algorithm, even the follower or subscriber. We once possessed an online presence; now, the online world possesses us—something ever more salient amidst the ascendant tech broligarchy.
I began groping at this theory to explain why I did indeed feel helpless as I stood before the mountains of stuff that had accumulated in my digital homes and contemplated the future of my online presence. The sense of helplessness stemmed from not only my disinterest in most social media platforms but also my seeming inability to devise a plan for reintegrating and consolidating my digital work (and hence, my digital identity). Building a website or joining a new online community once sparked joy. Now, I struggled to decide what went into the keep, donate, and discard piles.
Broken links, like piles of old newspapers or an overflowing 'collection' of glass bottles, aren't just messy; they indicate a separation from the flow of foundational systems and infrastructure. Broken links are relations of relationlessness. Broken links are instances of disconnection and disintegration.
Like the hoarder, I tell myself that this article or that free download might be useful to someone. I worry there will be less of me without the clutter of content that marks the boundary of my online identity. I agonize over what the bots who crawl my various websites will do if it's all gone tomorrow.
In her book American Bulk, Emily Mester wrestles with the drive to consume, whether as a hoarder, a compulsive shopper, or just a person trying to keep up with a world that seems to have few pleasures outside of retail. The hub of the essay collection is a 3-part piece about her father’s childhood home in a small town in Iowa. Mester’s grandmother lived in that house for 36 years, accumulating the objects of a long life while disposing of very few. When she retired and moved closer to Mester’s family, she simply closed the door on that house, abandoning it and the stuff that filled every corner. Before the visit, the only other time Mester had seen the house was as a child and only long enough to “fetch” her grandmother:
“As I sat in the idling car, I watched my dad walk up and ring her doorbell. I watched the door swing open just wide enough to let her slip out, two plastic bags in hand. She closed and locked it behind her.”
Mester begged to go inside, but her grandmother replied, “Honey, you don’t want to see that boring thing.”
While attending graduate school in Iowa, Mester resolved to visit, finally, her grandmother’s house. Mester writes:
“Nobody knew what she left it in, and nobody knew what state it was in now. We knew she took almost nothing with her. We knew she never wanted to go back. We knew she had been in a fight with the water company for months before she left, and that she refused to pay her bill, though we didn’t know why. We didn’t know how she managed without running water. We heard from an acquaintance that the lights occasionally flickered on and off. It might now be a meth lab. It might contain a family of squatters. It might be gutted, and left unlocked, an open secret. It might have a hole through which the world poured in. Or it might be untouched, the exact same but rotting.”
When Mester and her girlfriend arrive at the house, she’s unable to pick the lock to the front door. They peer in the window as best they can and surmise that no squatters or amateur chemists have been inside. They try the garage door, but even as it starts to give way, they lose their nerve. Later that night, while watching Hoarders in her motel room, Mester reflects on the “disconnect between mess and maker:”
“The TV show wanted me to see people obsessed and compelled, but far more than that, I saw people who, somewhere along the normal cycle of consumption, had been paralyzed into a deep ambivalence. Our living naturally creates piles of disorder, and it requires tremendous effort to work against that entropy.”
The same could easily be said of creators, influencers, and the rest of us who build lives (and homes) on the internet. Most of us aren’t preternaturally obsessed or inexplicably compelled to make #AllTheContent. Somewhere along the normal cycle of digital consumption and production, we succumb to the futility of trying to keep up. Doing anything other than continuing to supply the firehose of content, trends, memes, and headlines is too much. Entropy ensues.
Her grandmother emailed ahead of the visit, “I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO SENTIMENTS FOR THE PLACE, BUT EMPTYING IT IS PROBLEMATIC."
I could say the same about my websites, with thousands of outdated posts and hundreds of abandoned pages. I have no sentiments for most of my old writing (and thinking). But emptying those sites is problematic. Getting rid of any one post isn't a problem; it's jettisoning the archive. The parts don't matter to me, but I suppose the whole does. The whole feels like a link to who I was, what I accomplished. Breaking that link is problematic in a way that redirecting a post or two just isn't.
5. Rebuilding
Hoarding and homelessness are both solvable problems. A universal basic income, subsidized housing, and rezoning more neighborhoods for high occupancy buildings could quickly stem the tide of homelessness. Hoarding is perhaps a bit trickier—but since many consider it an impulse away from scarcity and instability and toward a feeling of having enough, I can think of more than a few economic policy changes that could ease those fears. Digital hoarding and homelessness are also solvable problems. But what does that solution look like?
I finally had a breakthrough while I was researching this essay. Looking for resources on archival studies, I happened upon a book called Creating Digital Exhibits for Cultural Institutions by Emily Marsh. It's exactly as advertised—a manual for guiding curators, librarians, and archivists through the process of designing a digital exhibit (i.e., a website or web page). I initially passed over it because I wanted something more like “intro to museum studies." But curiosity got the best of me, and I eventually cracked it open.
Marsh lays out several prerequisites for the person curating a digital exhibition. First and foremost, they need a “willingness to engage with [their] content on a level deep enough to perceive its meaning and significance." Understanding the audience, including “what they would find interesting, valuable, or compelling," is also critical. Further, they need the ability “to envision [the] content in a creative way." Marsh also makes clear that her intent is for the reader to see the act of producing an exhibition as a creative endeavor, not purely utilitarian or practical.
At that point, I stopped what I thought I was doing, plunked myself down on the couch, and started devouring the book. While I'm neither a curator nor a cultural institution, I realized that the content of my existing websites was an archive (duh), messy and disorganized though it might be.
What if I viewed my project not as building a new website but as preparing a digital exhibition of my work?
Further, what if I made this new site a creative endeavor rather than a utilitarian or practical one? And what if this website was useful and compelling to me in addition to the people who might visit?
How might that change the very way I write, podcast, and produce content?
Mester argues correctly, I believe, that the American Dream is one of abundance and excess. But she writes that it’s also “an equally American dream to be able to abandon, drop everything, to jettison, without guilt, anything that weighs you down.” The internet promises both, too. We have an overabundance of information, hot takes, and images vying for our attention. The more we scroll, the more we accumulate #knowledge. The more we create, the more we amass status and influence. But the internet also provides us with the ability to unplug, delete accounts, revise our personal histories. We can jettison what weighs us down with the click of a button. We can break our links without a second thought.
Indeed, those can feel the only options—either all in amongst the digital hoard or all out on the digital street. Plugged in or unplugged. Linked or unlinked. I want something different. I want a third way.
I want to break the links I want to break and fortify those I want to keep connected. I want to work towards something bigger than my next essay or newsletter. I want to reintegrate my online identity, bring a little homebody energy back to my corner of the web.
I don’t know if the result will be anything like a digital exhibit, as Marsh describes it. But I’m inspired by the idea. I’ve already begun to think about the work I do this year as adding to or refining my archive rather than feeding the content machine. I’ve started to think of my archive in collections—series I’ve produced, topics I often write on, and formats I like to use. I’m thinking about creating exhibits that go beyond the written or audio essay format to make creative use of page layouts or interactive features. Instead of fighting inconsistency and idiosyncrasy, I want my digital home to link disparate interests and ideas.
Scarcity or abundance, permanence or impermanence, broken or connected—these are, as ever, false binaries. The promise of a website is a liminal space in which we decide what’s on display and what’s not. A website is whatever we decide it’s going to be—a creative endeavor that links what’s meaningful and significant to us with what might be meaningful and significant to others. At least, that’s what a website is to me.
