I find this perceived timeline fascinating. As a computer nerd millennial, I have a passing familiarity with it while also living in a parallel universe. None of this manifesto resonates with me at all.

The web became more important to me in the early 2000s. Everything before that is kinda hazy. I never cared about social media apart from briefly having a myspace page. Before even that I had already set up a couple of websites for school clubs and whatnot. I must have been around 11 when I got started. I've always considered making a website to be fairly trivial, and the title of "webmaster" pretentious.

The topic and role kept expanding in the 2010s to include responsive design, apps, etc. It wasn't that hard to keep up with, so I shrugged my shoulders and started a career in it. I didn't see the big deal then or now, but clearly the counterculture and tech bros did and they made a ton of noise.

It's now 2026, and I still let those noisy people pay me pretty damn well. More recently, I've watched the soulless sand-encrusted robot hands of beached LLMs struggle and crawl at my feet. I continue to stand here at the otherwise calm shores with a pair of binoculars looking for what the big deal is.

EDIT - okay I reread it, and I guess there is this sentence I agree with: "The idea that one person cannot master all aspects of the web, as the webmaster was once known to, is demonstrably false."