Back then, there was a more palpable
Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2025 11:14 am
sense that we were all netizens—even the “noobs,” the irritating new kids like me logging on every evening from their parents’ computers. We were citizens of something collective. I might’ve been a nobody queer kid living on farmland in coal country. But when I got online, I was participating in building some corner of this wild thing we called the web. The web was never truly democratic, of course, but those early days did have a sense of openness and humanness that was apparent in its incompleteness. Whenever we advertised that the current reality was soon to change, we were drawing attention to the fact that we were all working on figuring out what this could become.
As with a lot of things on the web, GIFs were everywhere until the moment they weren’t.
In 1999, patent and royalty controversies around the algorithm that made GIFs color correction spilled over into a real-world campaign to burn floppy disks that contained GIF files outside the headquarters of a tech company in California. 1999’s Burn All GIFs Day may have focused on obscure intellectual property law: The Atlantic magazine reported that year that “Burn All GIFs Day may be the first time in human history that anyone has ever thought it worthwhile to stage an organized political protest, even a small one, over a mathematical algorithm.” But it was a proverbial canary in this digital coal mine.
As connection speeds increased and web 2.0 shifted toward a glossier and more sanitized user experience, early web GIFs faded into obscurity—looking as dated as the candy-like iMacs and the much clunkier but still colorful HP tower computer my family had.
Even so, GIFs would not die. While the file format itself may have faded into obscurity, video file formats that mimic the repeating nature of the original GIFs became somewhat incorrectly dubbed “GIFs” and embedded firmly in the meme stylings of Tumblr, Facebook, and soon every messaging app on the planet.
As with a lot of things on the web, GIFs were everywhere until the moment they weren’t.
In 1999, patent and royalty controversies around the algorithm that made GIFs color correction spilled over into a real-world campaign to burn floppy disks that contained GIF files outside the headquarters of a tech company in California. 1999’s Burn All GIFs Day may have focused on obscure intellectual property law: The Atlantic magazine reported that year that “Burn All GIFs Day may be the first time in human history that anyone has ever thought it worthwhile to stage an organized political protest, even a small one, over a mathematical algorithm.” But it was a proverbial canary in this digital coal mine.
As connection speeds increased and web 2.0 shifted toward a glossier and more sanitized user experience, early web GIFs faded into obscurity—looking as dated as the candy-like iMacs and the much clunkier but still colorful HP tower computer my family had.
Even so, GIFs would not die. While the file format itself may have faded into obscurity, video file formats that mimic the repeating nature of the original GIFs became somewhat incorrectly dubbed “GIFs” and embedded firmly in the meme stylings of Tumblr, Facebook, and soon every messaging app on the planet.