Hyperdrifting — Drifting Aimlessly Through the Edges of the Internet

Disclaimer: This is an English translation of Hyperdrifting — インターネットの辺境を目的なく漂流する.

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One of the main sections of this website is a collection of pages I’ve researched and organized about a band called BOaT. I no longer remember how I first came across them, but after listening obsessively to their recordings — including “RORO” — I found myself digging into information about the band, who were active from the late 1990s through around 2001.

Search for BOaT on Google and you’ll turn up album reviews and overview articles about the band. Dig through note or X, and you might occasionally find fragments of memory from people who were there at the time.¹ But the more I researched, the more I found myself wanting not the past as narrated from today’s vantage point, but the actual voices of people who were going to live venues in Shimokitazawa in real time, back then.

Following a footnote in the Wikipedia article on BOAT led me to an old Fuji TV page², and opening a dead link³ in the Internet Archive revealed an archived version of BOaT’s official website.

Following links from what I assume was a site maintained by the band members, I found myself landing on pages belonging to people whose names I didn’t even know. I had completely drifted from my original purpose — yet there I was, wandering from page to page in a kind of trance.

Drifting through archived pages of the old web — not by searching, but by following links. I’m going to take the liberty of calling this act Hyperdrifting.

Finding a Way In

Finding a starting point for exploration is harder than it sounds. The Internet Archive is the main stage for this⁴, but it doesn’t support full-text search. Searching something like “boat natsumen” will barely surface the official site, but browsing across pages the way Google does is simply not possible.

You could try hunting down URLs from old books and magazines⁵, but as an entry point for indie music from around 2000, I’d like to suggest a few live venue websites:

• two-five-one
• Club Que
• F.A.D HOMEPAGE
• LIVE SPOT LOOK

You might also start from a link directory like this one, which includes links to venues not listed above:

• スマイリーズリンク (Smileys Link)

A Place with a Veranda

So — did you find a page that caught your interest? You might wander between bulletin boards and link directories until you stumble somewhere unexpected, or you might try shifting the capture date on the same site and watch how it changes over time. Either way is fine.

I’d encourage you to go looking for the personal sites of that era. Sites that blended diaries, reviews, and link collections into one — even if the person who made them thought of it as a “music site,” from the reader’s perspective they feel like private spaces where fragments of someone’s life peek through.

In the diaries, traces remain between the lines of update logs: got a job, moved house, the band broke up. Peek into the BBS and you’ll find the site owner and what seem to be regulars exchanging words about nothing in particular — someone promoting another site, small talk with no real topic. There’s a feeling of stepping into someone else’s home. Shift the date forward and the design changes, the menu grows, and then one day the updates stop. Tracing a site’s history is tracing the time of the people who were part of it.

The web as seen through the Wayback Machine is fragmentary and incomplete. Sites preserved in their entirety, images included, are the exception rather than the rule. Dead links are the norm, the “next page” button on bulletin boards doesn’t work, and what’s been saved represents only a sliver of the whole. Keeping up with frequently updated live venue pages was never going to be possible, and it’s not uncommon to click a link from a 2002 page and land in 2001.

By any modern standard this is nothing but inconvenience — and yet, perhaps because of that primitiveness, I find myself strangely absorbed. Reading only the pages that happen to open, among the dead links and fragments. There’s a density here that’s unlike today’s web, where information is so abundant that nothing sticks.

I’ve chosen not to share the specific personal sites I came across. I’m not entirely sure it would be the right thing to do — to lift something that existed quietly and bring it to the surface.⁶

Interest in the Old Web

It seems this feeling isn’t mine alone.

There’s an account on X called “古いインターネット探訪” (Exploring the Old Internet) (@memoriesofhp), which introduces memorable websites from the early and early-growth periods of the Japanese internet, complete with screenshots. The account also publishes an archive of Flash sites from the era and a repository of 88×31 pixel link banners. Saving, organizing, exhibiting — the role of a curator.

Similar movements exist abroad. In 2013, Kyle Drake founded Neocities as “a place where you can make the handmade web”. An essay by Parimal Satyal written in 2020, “Rediscovering the Small Web”, makes the case for the virtues of handcrafted HTML pages and explores the contrast with today’s algorithm-driven web. The IndieWeb movement shares the same concerns. People exhausted by algorithmic feeds, data harvesting, and the performative nature of social media are trying to build a more human web for themselves.

“Nostalgia” feels like a slightly insufficient word for it. The New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka has proposed the concept of “digital nostalgia”, defining the longing for places like GeoCities as a desire for a simpler, more human digital life — and identifying the greatest loss of the old internet as “the sense of being connected to a community you actually knew.”

That said, Hyperdrifting is a little different from these movements. The preservers, the rebuilders, the essayists — they’re all trying to assign meaning to the old web. Hyperdrifting is a bit more impure, more purposeless. No map, no record, just drifting. And that impurity feels closer, somehow, to the actual atmosphere of the web back then.

Outside the Algorithm

Let me think about why Hyperdrifting is interesting from a structural perspective.

YouTube suggests the next video; Spotify queues up the next song. Ads are targeted from browsing history; AI returns answers based on conversation history. Almost every experience of the modern web operates on a structure where an algorithm trained on your own behavior decides what comes “next.”

The efficiency of an algorithm that keeps surfacing things that match your tastes only ever works in the direction of reinforcing your own profile — solidifying an image of “this is the kind of person you are.” There’s a word for unexpected discovery: serendipity. But even that is being absorbed by algorithms now. Even the surprising find is designed. Hyperdrifting is the opposite. Your path is not recorded, and you are forced to rely entirely on your own judgment when you follow a link into the unknown.

The Disappearing Memory of the Web

Personal sites vanish quietly, and are barely mourned. They linger for a while after updates stop, but their fate is tied to the hosting service that carries them. GeoCities, which defined an era, ended its service in 2019 — not so long ago, really. More recently, in June 2025, eleven free homepage services including FC2WEB shut down simultaneously.⁷

The thoughts a site owner wrote in a footer, the community map formed by a link directory, the record of the day updates stopped — context that was never formalized goes unnoticed. What remains are only the sites that ran on their own domains, or the pages that happened to be crawled by the Internet Archive.

An Internet Growing Thinner

Connecting with people online has become incomparably easier than it once was. And yet I sometimes find myself doubting whether the person on the other side of the screen actually exists.

The “surface internet” I see is being diluted by AI. Perhaps because the attention of many people has shifted to platforms like YouTube and Instagram, personal pages were already being pushed aside by ad-saturated commercial content — but the rise of AI seems to be accelerating this further.

Search certain terms on Google and you’ll get a flood of blog posts that appear to have been auto-generated by AI. Many are written to mimic the style of personal blogs, but the speed at which those pages are produced is not human.

What percentage of X’s timeline is something a human actually wrote? Viral posts trail endless replies from impression zombies — words generated purely to capture attention, disguised as human writing.

The description of an archived video of a 1985 new age/electronic album I happened to find on YouTube reads: “NOT MADE WITH AI. STOP ASKING.”⁸

I don’t know the full context, but in a world where AI supplies a torrent of content by sheer force of numbers⁹, perhaps many people have grown suspicious about whether the “atmosphere of the time” is genuine or an AI reconstruction.¹⁰ Human activity is being submerged beneath auto-generated content.

Turning back to the bulletin boards of old personal sites: no names, no faces, no avatars. Just text. And yet there’s a presence there — the feeling of a person. The internet back then had little concept of “going viral.” Creating a personal site was, with a few exceptions, entirely disconnected from monetization.

In Search of Information Below the Surface

Information has layers of visibility. At the very top are the articles that rank highest in Google search results: Wikipedia, music media reviews, fragments of memory written on note or X. Type in a keyword and organized information arrives instantly.

Just below that lies the territory of Hyperdrifting. Pages that once existed on the web but never surfaced in search results, and have since disappeared. For artists who are still actively working, devoted fans sometimes keep fan sites alive — but for bands that have broken up or artists who have gone quiet, new information dries up and sites dwindle. The old websites of that era still hold the energy of their time.

Shifting perspective outside the internet, there are still layers to dig through. Hunting down back issues of music magazines through the National Diet Library or Mercari is its own kind of adventure. There’s no full-text search, so you have to make an educated guess, flip through the table of contents, and find things with your own hands and eyes. My own trip to the National Diet Library to research BOaT was exactly this kind of excavation. The band interviews I found there were genuinely worth reading. It was only then that I could feel, with real weight, how the music was received at the time of release.

One layer deeper lies ephemera. Live flyers, free papers, handouts distributed at the venue, the physical setlist from a show. None of these have been digitized; they don’t exist in the Internet Archive; the National Diet Library almost certainly doesn’t hold them either. They’re in someone’s cardboard box somewhere, or long since thrown away. I want to come across a flyer for a BOaT show — the kind that Google will never find for me.

From Physical Shelves to the Digital Edges

Music itself has layers of access. At the surface is everything streaming on Spotify or YouTube — searchable, instantly playable. Songs that went viral on TikTok, whatever the algorithm recommends: it all lives here.

Below that is music that isn’t streaming. Works released only on CD, vinyl, or cassette. Or recordings that were once available but have since been deleted, out of print. In an age when streaming dominates, music that can only be heard on physical media has sunk one layer deeper by that fact alone.

Not long ago, the rental CD section of TSUTAYA was the gateway into that layer. I remember browsing shelves at the rental shop near where I grew up — technically a different franchise from TSUTAYA, but the same idea — looking for the next thing to listen to. Before I knew it, the spread of streaming had completely dismantled rental CD culture: the Shibuya TSUTAYA, the Jinbocho Janis, the rental corner back home — all gone without a trace.

Platforms like Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and YouTube have lowered the barrier to discovering obscure new releases today, but digging up past recordings that have never been digitized requires physical movement. With that in mind, I’d like to take the liberty of introducing a few diggers who have opened up new frontiers in this space — people I have no personal connection to, but whose work I find compelling.

When it comes to excavating and curating obscure recordings, the work of Tsunao Kadowaki / Neko-machi Maron demands mention. Across both analog and digital formats, he undertakes the sweeping project of unearthing a vast body of recordings, organizing them into playlists, and building a system of context.

Then there is lightmellowbu. They dig little-known works from the late 1980s through the mid-2000s out of Book-Off — works with virtually no presence online — and publish reviews on their blog and in zines. Their work has also been compiled into a book as an obscure city pop discography guide. Reading member Hata’s “90s City Pop Record Book” made me painfully aware of how much I had been searching for music guided by name recognition alone.

I also want to mention Dera, who keeps digging through CDs sold for 100 yen at secondhand shops. In terms of sheer variety — both the gems and the misses — it surpasses even Book-Off. And yet he says miracles are in there.

Going even deeper is Kazunoko Music Mate. Town neighborhood karaoke cassettes, recordings of school choir competitions, demo tapes distributed only among close friends — he collects and researches what he calls “insider music”: recordings never intended to be records in the first place. He takes seriously the intuition that purity exists precisely in places that were never meant to be heard by anyone outside.

What these four share is an attitude of going out to find value that hasn’t yet been named — guided by their own instincts. Rate Your Music rankings and Spotify’s Discover Weekly deliver things that someone, somewhere, has already recognized as having value. That’s genuinely wonderful. But what these people are digging in is a place where no one has recognized value yet. Shining a light there is also what gives rise to new genres and new contexts.

When Drifting Becomes a Map

Hyperdrifting and digging are connected at the root. Tracing old websites sometimes surfaces connections between artists that are no longer visible from today’s web. And those connections become the compass for actually going out to look for the recordings.

While researching the “LISTENING NUMBER” assigned to BOaT’s tracks, the existence of artists who shared the same numbering system began to emerge. It was an organic network of connections — entirely unlike the related artists an algorithm surfaces as “recommendations for you.”

Several months after writing up what I’d found about LISTENING NUMBERs, I came across someone on Rate Your Music who had created a list called “LISTENING NUMBERS”. Someone in a corner of the internet, unknown to anyone, digging the same hole. There was something oddly moving about that coincidence.

Networks that were naturally formed within the context of that time get reconstructed from fragments of the web. Link directories on official sites, bulletin board posts, live venue flyers. Piece them together and a map of the scene begins to emerge. And then it’s time to go looking for the recordings on that map.

Search for CDs from that era on Mercari. Dig through back issues of music magazines at the National Diet Library. Listen to what the members released afterward on Spotify. The context uncovered through Hyperdrifting becomes the compass for the dig. Band names in a link directory, an album someone praised on a bulletin board, a co-headliner at a show — all of it becomes a candidate for the next thing to listen to.

Excavating context that hasn’t surfaced, then using it as a lead to search for recordings. Moving back and forth between the two, the scene of that era starts to take on a three-dimensional shape.

Finally: The Drift Continues

Websites disappear much faster than you’d expect. When a hosting service shuts down, they vanish overnight; forget to renew a domain and there’s nothing left. What remains in the Internet Archive is a miraculous cross-section of something that should, by rights, already be gone. Hyperdrifting makes you acutely aware of this. Every dead link prompts you to imagine what once existed there. And then ordinary browsing starts to look different — this page you’re reading right now will disappear someday too.

Hyperdrifting and digging share the same essential quality: walking without a map. You don’t know where you’ll end up, and there are plenty of dead ends. But the reason you can’t stop is that you’re chasing encounters that exist outside the algorithm. Bulletin board threads that break off mid-conversation, images that never load, links to the next page that are long dead. Incomplete, inefficient, governed by chance. But that very randomness is the heart of the thing. A line someone typed into a bulletin board at two in the morning twenty years ago, a forgotten link directory, a diary whose updates simply stopped — none of it was made for anyone in particular. It was just there. And that “made for no one in particular” quality is, paradoxically, what makes it open to everyone.

I don’t know where that person is now or what they’re doing. But in that moment, there was someone there — that much is certain. Perhaps it’s precisely because these things are so fleeting that the breath still present in what has survived carries such weight. Opening that brief circuit is what the act of Hyperdrifting is. To follow the traces of someone whose name I’ll never know, I’ll keep drifting through the Internet Archive. Before any more of it is gone.