When we started this, the Web was the subculture. The people you met here were the weird ones, and the people you knew in real life didn't understand what you would do here, or why. Remember that? "Why would you want to put anything about yourself online, where everyone can see?" But everyone was a handful of people bonded by this one new and therefore weird thing they did in a place most people didn't go.

When I started this, I thought to myself, Here it is—the future! In the future, everyone will have a Web page. Like their address, but located here, in this positionless place.

Convinced it was inevitable, this future, I built a Web site. I was one of a few neon signs on that vast black strip. Passersby stopped in, left their e-mail or returned home and put up a link to me. Because we thought we could organize this place—you think such things when you can still grasp the size that the numbers might represent—directories categorized and listed my site. It helped more visitors find me.

There's one gas station every few hundred miles, all travelers stop.

But it's funny how things have flipped. It's exactly the opposite! I can't say I imagined this, exactly. I didn't think about it that hard.

There's no longer a demarcation between what occurs on the side of the screen where these letters are now appearing and on this side, where these fingers are typing. The same people find me from both sides.

But the skills that helped me make my site visible can now be used to obscure it.

And I'm starting to notice, in our necessary abandonment of structured relationships as the mass of presence on the Web becomes incalculable, that we've, perhaps helplessly, turned to that familiar heuristic for making order out of chaos: popularity.

Certain people are adept at being popular, no matter the realm, and I am not one of them. And, neither are those weird vanguards of the early and mid '90s who found a community here. Which means that, after this interval of encroachment and invasion by the mainstream, we have our community back. Because, if you don't know about it to look for it, it's less and less likely it'll be found.

Thus, I'm happy to ponder the return of the potential for subculture, and the idea of a manifold Web, incomprehensibly vast, where the unknown can find refuge.