What we lost was the sense that the internet was a place people made, rather than a service people used. Personal homepages, with their broken HTML and looping MIDI files, were the work of individuals. The portals replaced them with templated profiles. Social media finished the job. Search became one box on one site, and the box's results were ranked by an algorithm that no one outside Google fully understood.

It is worth remembering that this was not always how it worked. For about a decade, finding things online meant choosing between half a dozen different engines, knowing the quirks of each one, browsing a directory like it was a library, signing a guestbook to leave a trace. The whole landscape vanished into one search box.

Tell us about yourself. Where did you grow up and how did you find yourself interested in design? Was there a pivotal moment that you can remember?  I grew up in France in the late 80s, and got interested in...

The show also understood something that the internet age has made almost impossible to replicate: the value of the unknown. In Wellsville, there was always something unexplained around the corner. The mysterious ice cream man. The neighbor whose yard might contain land mines. The metal plate that picks up radio stations from halfway across the world. In a pre-Google era, mystery had a home. You couldn't look things up. You had to sit with not knowing, and in that space, imagination thrived...