In the beginning man created the internet. The white space was without form, and blankness was upon the face of the screen. And man said, “Let there be text,” and there was text. On the second day he divided the internet into pages. He connected them with blue hyperlinks, and he saw that they were good. On the third day he created GIFs—looping videos of laughing babies and dancing Jesuses that shimmied across the page. He wasn’t sure if they were good, but he kept them anyway. On the following days he created embedded video, comment sections and parallax scrolling. Then man handed over the tools of creation so any human could make their own website, and a great diversity of artistic endeavor did proliferate across the web. Or rather, it proliferated until around 10 years ago, wh...