I share some of the nostalgia, if not necessarily the wistfulness, of the passing of Flash as my friend Mike Davidson. Just seeing some of those hallmark names from the late-90’s and mid-00’s — Praystation, Natzke, WDDG, Hillman Curtis — is a trip to another epoch of internet culture.

Mike is right about Flash being a tremendous piece of transitional technology:

Flash, from the very beginning, was a transitional technology. It was a language that compiled into a binary executable. This made it consistent and performant, but was in conflict with how most of the web works. It was designed for a desktop world which wasn’t compatible with the emerging mobile web. Perhaps most importantly, it was developed by a single company. This allowed it to evolve more quickly for awhile, but goes against the very spirit of the entire internet. Long-term, we never want single companies — no matter who they may be — controlling the very building blocks of the web. The internet is a marketplace of technologies loosely tied together, each living and dying in rhythm with the utility it provides.

A lot of what I miss about Flash today is the zaniness, the goofy games and personal sites, the nonsense animations. So much of that got captured by platforms and turned into memes or influencer chum, which was probably inevitable as the internet continued to grow exponentially.