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For two decades, Google Search was the invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online content. Now, for the first time, its cultural relevance is in question.

The first thing ever searched on Google was the name Gerhard Casper, a former Stanford president. As the story goes, in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin demoed Google for computer scientist John Hennessy. They searched Casper’s name on both AltaVista and Google. The former pulled up results for Casper the Friendly Ghost; the latter pulled up information on Gerhard Casper the person.

What made Google’s results different from AltaVista’s was its algorithm, PageRank, which organized results based on the amount of links between pages. In fact, the site’s original name, BackRub, was a reference to the backlinks it was using to rank results. If your site was linked to by other authoritative sites, it would place higher in the list than some random blog that no one was citing.

Google officially went online later in 1998. It quickly became so inseparable from both the way we use the internet and, eventually, culture itself, that we almost lack the language to describe what Google’s impact over the last 25 years has actually been. It’s like asking a fish to explain what the ocean is. And yet, all around us are signs that the era of “peak Google” is ending or, possibly, already over.

There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was. The rise of massive closed algorithmic social networks like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram began eating the web in the 2010s. More recently, there’s been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok — which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users.

For two decades, Google Search was the largely invisible force that determined the ebb and flow of online content. Now, for the first time since Google’s launch, a world without it at the center actually seems possible. We’re clearly at the end of one era and at the threshold of another. But to understand where we’re headed, we have to look back at how it all started.

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If you’re looking for the moment Google truly crossed over into the zeitgeist, it was likely around 2001. In February 2000, Jennifer Lopez wore her iconic green Versace dress to the Grammys, which former Google CEO Eric Schmidt would later say searches for inspired how Google Image Search functioned when it launched in summer 2001. That year was also the moment when users began to realize that Google was important enough to hijack.

The term “Google bombing” was first coined by Adam Mathes, now a product manager at Google, who first described the concept in April 2001 while writing for the site Uber.nu. Mathes successfully used the backlinks that fueled PageRank to make the search term “talentless hack” bring up his friend’s website. Mathes did not respond to a request for comment.

A humor site called Hugedisk.com, however, successfully pulled it off first in January 2001. A writer for the site, interviewed under the pseudonym Michael Hugedisk, told Wired in 2007 that their three-person team linked to a webpage selling pro-George W. Bush merchandise and was able to make it the top result on Google if you searched “dumb motherfucker.”

“One of the other guys who ran the site got a cease and desist letter from the bombed George Bush site’s lawyers. We chickened out and pulled down the link, but we got a lot of press,” Hugedisk recounted.

“It’s difficult to see which factors contribute to this result, though. It has to do with Google’s ranking algorithm,” a Google spokesperson said of the stunt at the time, calling the search results “an anomaly.”

But it wasn’t an anomaly. In fact, there’s a way of viewing the company’s 25-year history as an ongoing battle against users who want to manipulate what PageRank surfaces.

“[Google bombing] was a popular thing — get your political enemy and some curse words and then merge them in the top Google Image resolve and sometimes it works,” blogger Philipp Lenssen told The Verge. “Mostly for the laughs or giggles.”

Lenssen still remembers the first time he started to get a surge of page views from Google. He had been running a gaming site called Games for the Brain for around three years without much fanfare. “It was just not doing anything,” he told The Verge. “And then, suddenly, it was a super popular website.”

It can be hard to remember how mysterious these early run-ins with Google traffic were. It came as a genuine surprise to Lenssen when he figured out that “brain games” had become a huge search term on Google. (Even now, in 2023, Lenssen’s site is still the first non-sponsored Google result for “brain games.”)

“Google kept sending me people all day long from organic search results,” he said. “It became my main source of income.”

Rather than brain games, however, Lenssen is probably best known for a blog he ran from 2003 to 2011 called Google Blogoscoped. He was, for a long time, one of the main chroniclers of everything Google. And he remembers the switch from other search engines to Google in the late 1990s. It was passed around by word of mouth as a better alternative to AltaVista, which wasn’t the biggest search engine of the era but was considered the best one yet.

In 2023, search optimization is a matter of sheer self-interest, a necessity of life in a Google-dominated world. The URLs of new articles are loaded with keywords. YouTube video titles, too — not too many, of course, because an overly long title gets cut off. Shop listings by vendors sprawl into wordy repetition, like side sign spinners reimagined as content sludge. And it goes beyond just Google’s domain. Solid blocks of blue hashtags and account tags trail at the end of influencer Instagram posts. Even teenagers tag their TikToks with #fyp — a hashtag thought to make it more likely for videos to be gently bumped into the algorithmic feeds of strangers.

The word SEO “kind of sounds like spam when you say it today,” said Lenssen, in a slightly affected voice. “But that was not how it started.”

To use the language of today, Lenssen and his cohort of bloggers were the earliest content creators. Their tastes and sensibilities would inflect much of digital media today, from Wordle to food Instagram. It might seem unfathomable now, but unlike the creators of 2023, the bloggers of the early 2000s weren’t in a low-grade war with algorithms. By optimizing for PageRank, they were helping Google by making it better. And that was good for everyone because making Google better was good for the internet.

This attitude is easier to comprehend when you look back at Google’s product launches in these early years — Google Groups, Google Calendar, Google News, Google Answers. The company also acquired Blogger in 2003.

“Everything was done really intelligently, very clean, very easy to use, and extremely sophisticated,” said technologist Andy Baio, who still blogs at Waxy.org. “And I think that Google Reader was probably the best, like one of the best, shining examples of that.”

“Everybody I knew was living off Google Reader,” recalled Scott Beale of Laughing Squid.

Google Reader was created by engineer Chris Wetherell in 2005. It allowed users to take the RSS feeds — an open protocol for organizing a website’s content and updates — and add those feeds into a singular reader. If Google Search was the spinal cord of 2000s internet culture, Google Reader was the central nervous system.

“They were encouraging people to write on the web,” said Baio. Bloggers like Lenssen, Baio, and Beale felt like everything Google was doing was in service of making the internet better. The tools it kept launching felt tied to a mission of collecting the world’s information and helping people add more content to the web.

Many of these bloggers feel differently now. Lenssen said he now sees SEO as more or less part of the same nefarious tradition as Google bombing. “You want a certain opinion to be in the number one spot, not as a meme but to influence people,” he said. Most of the other bloggers expressed a similar change of heart in interviews for this piece.

“When Google came along, they were ad-free with actually relevant results in a minimalistic kind of design,” Lenssen said. “If we fast-forward to now, it’s kind of inverted now. The results are kind of spammy and keyword-built and SEO stuff. And so it might be hard to understand for people looking at Google now how useful it was back then.”

But there is one notable holdout among these early web pioneers: Danny Sullivan, who, during this period, became the world’s de facto expert on all things search. (Which, after the dawn of the millennium, increasingly just became Google Search.) Sullivan’s expertise gives his opinion some weight, though there is one teeny little wrinkle — since 2017, he’s been an employee of Google, working as the company’s official search liaison. Which means even if he doesn’t think they are, his opinions about search now have to be in line with Google’s opinions about search.

According to Sullivan, the pattern of optimizing for search predates Google — it wasn’t the first search engine, after all. As early as 1997, people were creating “doorway pages” — pages full of keywords meant to trick web crawlers into overindexing a site.

More crucially, Sullivan sees Google Search not as a driver of virality but as a mere echo.

“I just can’t think of something that I did as a Google search that caused everybody else to do the same Google search,” Sullivan said. “I can see that something’s become a meme in some way. And sometimes, it could even be a meme on Google Search, like, you know, the Doodles we do. People will say, ‘Now you got to go search for this; you’ve got to go see it or whatever.’ But search itself doesn’t tend to cause the virality.”

Those hundreds of millions of websites jockeying for placement on the first page of results don’t influence how culture works, as Sullivan sees it. For him, Google Search activity does not create more search activity. Decades may have passed, but people are essentially still searching for “Jennifer Lopez dress.” Culture motivates what goes into the search box, and it’s a one-way street.

But causality is both hard to prove and disprove. The same set of facts that leads Sullivan to discount the effect of Google on culture can just as readily point to the opposite conclusion.

In February 2001, right after Hugedisk’s Google bomb, Google launched Google Groups, a discussion platform that integrated with the internet’s first real social network, Usenet. And that same month, what is largely considered to be the first real internet meme, “All Your Base Are Belong To Us,” was launched into the mainstream after years of bouncing around as a message board inside joke. It became one of the largest search trends on Google, and an archived Google Zeitgeist report even lists the infamous mistranslated video game cutscene as one of the top searches in February 2001.

Per Sullivan’s logic, Google Groups added better discovery to both Usenet and the myriad other message boards and online communities creating proto-meme culture at the time. And that discoverability created word-of-mouth interest, which led to search interest. The uptick in searches merely reflected what was happening outside of Google.

But you can just as easily conclude that Google — in the form of Search and Groups — drove the virality of “All Your Base Are Belong To Us.”

“All Your Base Are Belong To Us” had been floating around message boards as an animated GIF as early as 1998. But after Google went live, it began mutating the way modern memes do. A fan project launched to redub the game, the meme got a page on Newgrounds, and most importantly, the first Photoshops of the meme showed up in a Something Awful thread. (Consider how much harder it would have been, pre-Google, to find the assets for “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” in order to remix them.)

That back and forth between social and search would create pathways for, and then supercharge, an online network of independent publishers that we now call the blogosphere. Google’s backlink algorithm gave a new level of influence to online curation. The spread of “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” — from message boards, to search, to aggregators and blogs — set the stage for, well, how everything has worked ever since.

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SEO experts like Sullivan might rankle at the idea that Google’s PageRank is a social algorithm, but it’s not not a social mechanism.

We tend to think of “search” and “social” as competing ideas. The history of the internet between the 2000s and the 2010s is often painted as a shift from search engines to social networks. But PageRank does measure online discussion, in a sense — and it also influences how discussion flows. And just like the algorithms that would eventually dominate platforms like Facebook years later, PageRank has a profound effect on how people create content.

Alex Turvy, a sociologist specializing in digital culture, said it’s hard to map our current understanding of virality and platform optimization to the earliest days of Google, but there are definitely similarities.

“I think that the celebrity gossip world is a good example,” he said. “Folks that understood backlinks and keywords earlier than others and were able to get low-quality content pretty high on search results pages.”

He cited examples such as Perez Hilton and the blogs Crazy Days and Nights and Oh No They Didn’t! Over the next few years, the web began to fill with aggregators like eBaum’s World, Digg, and CollegeHumor.

But even the creators of original high-quality content were not immune to the pressures of Google Search.

Deb Perelman is considered one of the earliest food bloggers and is certainly one of the few who’s still at it. She started blogging about food in 2003. Her site, Smitten Kitchen, was launched in 2006 and has since spawned three books. In the beginning, she says, she didn’t really think much about search. But eventually, she, like the other eminent bloggers of the period, took notice.

“It was definitely something you were aware of — your page ranking — just because it affected whether people could find your stuff through Google,” she said.

It’s hard to find another sector more thoroughly molded by the pressures of SEO than recipe sites, which, these days, take a near-uniform shape as an extremely long anecdote (often interspersed with ads), culminating in a recipe card that is remarkably terse in comparison. The formatting and style of food bloggers has generated endless discourse for years.

The reason why food blogs look like that, according to Perelman, is pretty straightforward: the bloggers want to be read on Google.

That said, she’s adamant that most of the backlash against food bloggers attaching long personal essays to the top of their posts is obnoxious and sexist. People can just not read it if they don’t want to. But she also acknowledged writers are caving to formatting pressures. (There are countless guides instructing that writers use a specific amount of sentences per paragraph and a specific amount of paragraphs per post to rank better on Google.)

“Rather than writing because there was maybe a story to tell, there was this idea that it was good for SEO,” she said. “And I think that that’s a less quality experience. And yeah, you could directly say I guess that Google has sort of created that in a way.”

Sullivan says PageRank’s algorithm is a lot simpler than most people assume it is. At the beginning, most of the tips and tricks people were sharing were largely pointless for SEO. The subject of SEO is still rife with superstition. There are a lot of different ideas that people have about exactly how to get a prominent spot on Google’s results, Sullivan acknowledges. But most of the stuff you’ll find by, well, googling “SEO tricks” isn’t very accurate.

And here is where you get into the circular nature of his argument against Google’s influence. Thousands of food bloggers are searching for advice on how to optimize their blogs for Google. The advice that sits at the top of Google is bad, but they’re using it anyway, and now, their blogs all look the same. Isn’t that, in a sense, Google shaping how content is made?

“All Your Base Are Belong To Us” existed pre-Google but suddenly rose in prominence as the search engine flickered on. Other forms of content began following the same virality curve, rocketing to the top of Google and then into greater pop culture.

Perelman said that one of the first viral recipes she remembers from that era was a 2006 New York Times tutorial on how to make no-knead bread by Sullivan Street Bakery’s Jim Lahey. “That was a really big moment,” she said.

True to form, Sullivan doubts that it was search, itself, that made it go viral. “It almost certainly wasn’t hot because search made it hot. Something else made it hot and then everybody went to search for it,” he said.

(Which may be true. But the video tutorial was also published on YouTube one month after the site was purchased by Google.)

The viral no-knead bread recipe is a perfect example of how hard it can be to separate the discoverability Google brought to the internet from the influence of that discoverability. And it was even harder 20 years ago, long before we had concepts like “viral” or “influencer.”

Alice Marwick, a communications professor and author of The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media, told The Verge that it wasn’t until Myspace launched in 2003 that we started to even develop the idea of internet fame.

“There wasn’t like a pipeline for virality in the way that it is,” she said. “Now, there is a template of, like, weird people doing weird stuff on the internet.”

Marwick said that within the internet landscape of the 2000s, Google was the thing that sat on top of everything else. There was a sense that as anarchic and chaotic as the early social web was out in the digital wilderness, what Google surfaced denoted a certain level of quality.

But if that last 25 years of Google’s history could be boiled down to a battle against the Google bomb, it is now starting to feel that the search engine is finally losing pace with the hijackers. Or as Marwick put it, “Google has gotten shittier and shittier.”

“To me, it just continues the transformation of the internet into this shitty mall,” Marwick said. “A dead mall that’s just filled with the shady sort of stores you don’t want to go to.”

The question, of course, is when did it all go wrong? How did a site that captured the imagination of the internet and fundamentally changed the way we communicate turn into a burned-out Walmart at the edge of town?

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Well, if you ask Anil Dash, it was all the way back in 2003 — when the company turned on its AdSense program.

“Prior to 2003–2004, you could have an open comment box on the internet. And nobody would pretty much type in it unless they wanted to leave a comment. No authentication. Nothing. And the reason why was because who the fuck cares what you comment on there. And then instantly, overnight, what happened?” Dash said. “Every single comment thread on the internet was instantly spammed. And it happened overnight.”

Dash is one of the web’s earliest bloggers. In 2004, he won a competition Google held to google-bomb itself with the made-up term “nigritude ultramarine.” Since then, Dash has written extensively over the years on the impact platform optimization has had on the way the internet works. As he sees it, Google’s advertising tools gave links a monetary value, killing anything organic on the platform. From that moment forward, Google cared more about the health of its own network than the health of the wider internet.

“At that point it was really clear where the next 20 years were going to go,” he said.

Google Answers closed in 2006. Google Reader shut down in 2013, taking with it the last vestiges of the blogosphere. Search inside of Google Groups has repeatedly broken over the years. Blogger still works, but without Google Reader as a hub for aggregating it, most publishers started making native content on platforms like Facebook and Instagram and, more recently, TikTok.

Discoverability of the open web has suffered. Pinterest has been accused of eating Google Image Search results. And the recent protests over third-party API access at Reddit revealed how popular Google has become as a search engine not for Google’s results but for Reddit content. Google’s place in the hierarchy of Big Tech is slipping enough that some are even admitting that Apple Maps is worth giving another chance, something unthinkable even a few years ago.

On top of it all, OpenAI’s massively successful ChatGPT has dragged Google into a race against Microsoft to build a completely different kind of search, one that uses a chatbot interface supported by generative AI.

Twenty-five years ago, at the dawn of a different internet age, another search engine began to struggle with similar issues. It was considered the top of the heap, praised for its sophisticated technology, and then suddenly faced an existential threat. A young company created a new way of finding content.

Instead of trying to make its core product better, fixing the issues its users had, the company, instead, became more of a portal, weighted down by bloated services that worked less and less well. The company’s CEO admitted in 2002 that it “tried to become a portal too late in the game, and lost focus” and told Wired at the time that it was going to try and double back and focus on search again. But it never regained the lead.

That company was AltaVista.

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The conversion is tedious but not difficult if you have the right tools. Just expect the unexpected.

For about seven years in my 20s, in the midst of a crisis of self, I abandoned my nerdy predilections and picked up a new hobby, cycling, which ultimately turned into a lifestyle.

During what I now think of as my time in the wilderness, I sold my giant game console collection (I have regrets), stopped buying computers, got rid of my car, and quit my data aggregation job to become a pedicab driver — a gig job before gig jobs were cool — and eventually a guide at a small bike tour and rental company.

One of my duties between tours was bike maintenance, and our mechanic taught me some neat tricks like wheel truing and how to build a bike up. I would never call myself a bike mechanic, but it did make me comfortable wrenching on the basics.

One day, a retiree who liked showing off his toys brought in a Copenhagen Wheel — a self-contained e-bike kit that puts the batteries and motor all in the rear hub of the wheel. When he let me ride it, the little bit of extra acceleration in each pedal stroke flipped a switch in my skeptical brain.

A few years went by, and I ended up with my own e-bike. They’re just so fun and convenient and may even fully or partially replace a car for some. They’re certainly easier to park, making e-bikes perfect for quick jaunts. And if the battery runs out, well, you’re still riding a (heavy) bicycle.

An electric cargo bike is an even better car replacement, but the good ones are so pricey that I never considered it. Never, that is, until an uncommon opportunity fell in my lap.

The build

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine who works for a nonprofit bike company in Chicago called Working Bikes offered me a 1,000W Bafang motor in exchange for my partner’s rarely used e-bike. I’d be able to convert the cargo bike she prefers to ride, and the shop would get something it could sell much easier. In my hubris, I thought this would be a two-hour job — boy, was that a deeply flawed assumption.

Last year, my partner bought a 2015 Xtracycle Edge Runner 24D cargo bike, the only brand anyone cared about in my hipster circle in the late aughts and early teens. It’s nice but not geared to be very fast, and the basic components that came with the bike needed replacing. Since it required work anyway, why not add a motor and electrify things?

Generally, there are two kinds of e-bike motors: mid-drive and rear-drive. Front-drive exists, with VanMoof (RIP) being one of the most high-profile proponents, but the vast majority of e-bikes use the former options. The Bafang motor I traded for is a mid-drive motor.

Despite some surprises along the way, the conversion went about as well as can be hoped for, given my level of experience. I mean, at the end, we have a functional electric cargo bike, so who’s complaining?

The biggest part of the conversion for most will be mounting the motor, and that’s pretty straightforward. I just needed to pull off the crank arms that hold the pedals, remove the front chainring, and pull out the bottom bracket (the hollow part where the crank arms attach). I used a couple of specialized tools to make this easy — a crank puller and a bottom bracket tool — along with an assortment of hexagonal wrenches.

Crank pullers are kind of neat, actually. They have two sections — an outer bit that threads into the outside of the crank where it attaches to the bike and an inner shaft, or spindle, that pushes in toward the bike as you spin the handle, pushing against the bike and pulling the crank off. Mechanical advantage!

After pulling the bottom bracket, I cleaned the old grease out of the shell, which is the part of the frame the bracket slots into. Once I’d done that, I could grease up and slide the motor’s bottom bracket shaft into the shell from the drive side of the bike, where the chain would be.

Securing the Bafang motor involves a small bracket, a locknut that requires a special wrench to tighten (the wrench usually comes with the conversion kit, but mine did not), and slipping an outer locknut over that. I didn’t tighten the inner locknut enough, which made the motor all floppy when I first test-rode the bike, so I had to go back and crank that down further.

Next, I needed to install the speed sensor, which uses a magnet attached to a spoke and a sensor fixed to the frame to give the motor’s controller the information it needs to determine speed (and the motor won’t stay engaged without it). This part was tricky since the elongated cargo framing is farther from the wheel than the seatstay of a normal bike, but I was able to find a spot that worked. Barely.

After getting the speed sensor in place, I ran into my first hitch of this project. The cable connecting the sensor to the handlebar-mounted display wasn’t long enough! I had to order an extension cable — this 60cm one did the trick, but that meant I had to wait for delivery to finish that part of the job.

But hey, that’s fine; I could still do some of the other work, such as swapping out the grips for the new ones (which included a twisting throttle) and putting on the display. This was easy enough — removing the old grips just required using a teeny tiny hexagonal wrench to loosen the minuscule bolts, keeping them snug, then slipping the new grips on, and the display simply clamps onto the handlebars and is secured with small bolts.

Then I hit another snag: the cargo bike’s existing shifter and brake were integrated. That meant I couldn’t reuse the shifter with the new brake lever included with my Bafang motor. Big deal, you say, why does it matter if you can’t replace the brake levers? Well, my e-bike motor uses the brake lever as a kill switch that stops the motor from driving the bike forward. Swapping the brake lever then meant I had to replace the shifter, too, and that’s a lot easier if I match it with a new rear derailleur and cassette, which needed to be changed anyway (more on that later).

Having not planned for this, I decided to simply move on to the next step and get the drivetrain back together so I could at least test-ride it. That’ll be easy! Or it would’ve been if the large tripod bike repair stand hadn’t tipped over, comically knocking everything near it to the floor, including the table on which I’d put the master link for my chain, sending the two-piece part flying.

Master links are cheap but small, and after something close to an hour and a half of trying to find the second piece, I gave up and went to my local bike shop to buy a replacement. (In retrospect, for this job, I didn’t need to break the chain at all.) By then, frustrated and exhausted, I decided to come back to the project the next morning.

The second day was easier. I replaced some cables and cable housing, put the chain back on, installed the cranks and a small chainring that came with the motor (more on that later) and took the bike for a spin. Everything seemed great! The motor was smooth and quiet, and the bike was fast. But there was a new problem — every time I goosed the bike hard, it made a worryingly loud popping sound.

I couldn’t figure out what was causing it. Maybe the kickstand, which was a little loose and drooping, was flopping against the ground? Was the motor still not tight enough and smacking the frame? When I made someone else ride it, I discovered that the derailleur’s idler pulley — the tiny set of cogs that hangs down from the rest of the assembly — was being yanked forward and popping back.

There are a few things that could cause this, but since I needed to replace the shifter anyway, I decided rather than chase that down, the best thing to do was replace the rest of the drivetrain, which I later paid a mechanic friend to do.

The battery ended up being another problem. See, I have no idea who makes it because the sticker on the side doesn’t list a manufacturer, the battery pack capacity, or if it’s been certified by a reputable safety lab. It’s a smallish black box that’s about three-quarters the width of a Nintendo GameCube and roughly the same height and depth. The bag it came with has velcro straps for attaching it to the frame, but they aren’t long enough to work on the Xtracycle, which has wider-set, beefier seat stays than a normal bike.

I managed to get the battery bag to stay in place, but look at those straps straining to do their job. This isn’t a permanent solution. Having a potential flamethrower from an unknown company (or e-bike-obsessed hobbyist) sitting under my butt isn’t great, either, so I’ll be replacing the battery soon.

The final item is the 30-tooth chainring I received with the motor; it’s a bit too small, and I want to swap it for something bigger soon. See, the rear cassette I had installed ranges from 11 teeth to 34 teeth — a nice spread, but combining it with the small chainring makes it feel very similar to the heavy-hauling gearing I had on my pedicab so long ago. That makes it less than ideal for transporting light loads quickly, usually a tiny human or some groceries. Adding a larger chainring to the bike will make pedaling at a higher top speed more comfortable, which is important now that it has the motor’s pedal assist pushing it along.

So the project is far from over, but I now have a techno cargo bike, and it works! The 1,000W motor has no trouble getting up to its roughly 30mph max in a hurry on throttle alone, and it’s quiet getting there. That’s a bit much for biking a kid around, though (not to mention technically illegal where I live), so I dropped the top speed down to 20mph in the controller’s settings.

Pedal assist feels good, too, at least at the lowest setting — any higher, and it takes over a little too much for my liking. As with my other e-bike, I don’t find myself using the throttle when I ride unless I want to get across a street quickly. The weak point in the system is definitely the battery, though — besides being unbranded and potentially unsafe, it’s small and drains relatively quickly.

It could still use some wired lights, a new saddle, and wider handlebars with space for extra gizmos and storage galore so that we’ll be that much closer to never, or almost never, needing to drive. Given that we’ve spent thousands of dollars keeping our two aging cars viable, that will be a dream fulfilled, indeed.

Lessons learned

Converting and upgrading a regular cargo bike into an e-bike left me with newfound respect for all the other DIYers upgrading their own bikes. I’m certainly no expert, and that’s the point of sharing — any regular Verge reader can do this and benefit from my successes and failures.

Would I do it again? Yeah, I would. It was fun. But if you do your own conversion, it has to be because you really want to and you know what you’re getting into. It might save you money, it might not — but the experience alone will be valuable.

In my case, the unexpected need for a new drivetrain and the labor to install it (my partner really wanted her bike back, and I didn’t have the opportunity, knowledge, or tools to do it in a timely manner) added more to the cost of conversion than I had hoped. And I still have to replace the battery and chain ring.

Still, slapping a motor onto a popular, long-running bike brand means I didn’t have to worry quite as much about the need for proprietary and costly parts (though cargo bikes certainly have their share of those). I recommend doing the same if you undertake your own conversion.

You can buy a kit with the same Bafang motor I used for under $500 — but throw in a battery, and you’re already looking at potentially doubling your cost. And if you find that you’re uncomfortable with doing the work yourself or, worse — screw something up — then you have to pay your local bike shop a steep (and well-earned) hourly rate to install it or fix your mistakes. By the time you tally up all the conversion costs, you’re inching into the same price territory as a good pre-built e-bike option from the likes of Yuba or Rad Power.

There’s also the E-BIKE Act to consider. If it passes, it would offer a 30 percent tax credit (up to $1,500) for e-bike purchases, making this kind of build for the dedicated few who just love a DIY project. Otherwise, a conversion might not be worth the effort if saving money is your primary motivator.

For me, the roughly 10 hours and about $350 (plus the value of the old e-bike we traded for the motor) I’ve committed so far to the conversion and component upgrades have been a worthwhile investment in the cargo bike and, importantly, myself. Now, when stuff breaks — and, inevitably, it will — I’ll likely be able to identify the failure and fix it, and there’s immense satisfaction in that.

All photography by Wes Davis / The Verge

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‘Dark money’ and the never-ending election cycle kept a qualified consumer advocate out of the Federal Communications Commission.

The Monday before Gigi Sohn withdrew her nomination to the Federal Communications Commission, she sat down in her Washington, DC, home with her wife and teenage daughter to finish drafting the statement announcing the decision.

Nearly 500 days had passed since President Joe Biden first picked her to become the third Democrat to the nation’s top telecommunications regulator, and she was nowhere closer to confirmation than when her name was first announced in October 2021. While other Biden nominees, like now Chair Jessica Rosenworcel, soared through the confirmation process, Sohn was met with a fierce opposition campaign traditionally saved for a president’s Supreme Court or cabinet nominees.

“I had written the withdrawal statement a year before,” Sohn told me over the phone in early June. Whenever a new rumor or attack against her came out in the pages of The Wall Street Journal or headlined a scathing Fox News segment, she’d dig that statement back up wondering whether it was enough to spook Senate Democrats against her.

Her nomination was supposed to be the crowning achievement of her 30-year career — and more importantly, a key piece of Biden’s plans for the internet. The covid pandemic had shown just how necessary improving internet access was across the US. Parents drove up to fast food restaurants for Wi-Fi so their kids could finish their remote schooling homework, and libraries became hubs for rental hotspots. The Biden administration’s goal was to finally bridge the digital divide, expanding access to high-speed broadband everywhere.

But by March 7th, Sohn knew it was over. After three nominations and three confirmation hearings that got nastier with each new iteration, the votes just weren’t there. Her opposition had read all of her tweets, found faults in nearly every position she ever held, and made up new problems when everything else wasn’t enough. Sohn herself felt like she’d been held at arm’s length, unable to respond to the smear campaign consuming her life and nomination.

Pulling out of the running no longer felt so difficult. Instead, the announcement would be an opportunity to speak up for herself, she thought. At least this withdrawal would be on her own terms.

Then, a day before that planned announcement, Sen. Joe Manchin sucked the air out of her plans. The centrist Democrat from West Virginia publicly opposed Sohn’s confirmation. “The FCC must remain above the toxic partisanship that Americans are sick and tired of, and Ms. Sohn has clearly shown she is not the person to do that,” Manchin said in a statement. “I urge the Biden administration to put forward a nominee who can bring us together, not drive us apart.” It was odd timing, Sohn thought — she had only notified the White House, the Senate Commerce Committee, and her family of her plans. If every other Democrat supported Sohn’s nomination, Manchin’s vote wouldn’t matter. But that didn’t stop him from hijacking her announcement.

The rug had been pulled from under her yet again.

Sohn began her career in tech policy decades earlier — with a battle for access not online but on TV.

When Sohn graduated law school in 1986, the United States was undergoing a television programming revolution. The Reagan administration had unwound many of the regulations limiting cable adoption, disrupting the grasp that dominant roof-top antenna broadcasters like ABC, CBS, and NBC held over what people could watch in their own homes. Cable television’s promise of limitless, even conflicting programming offered a new lane for opening media ownership up to more groups. And with cable companies quickly taking over broadcast as the dominant programming providers, she saw an opportunity to seize the moment.

“I spent a good part of my early part of my career from the late ’80s to the mid-to-late ’90s trying to make broadcasting and cable more democratic,” Sohn said. “A lot of work in my early career was trying to diversify ownership of media, try and get cable to actually give meaningful access to differing voices.”

In 1988, she joined the Media Access Project (MAP), a public interest law firm devoted to diversifying media ownership. Founded in the 1970s, MAP’s early work focused on opening networks to ownership by civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activists. Starting in the 1980s, it pushed for a return to the Fairness Doctrine, a set of Reagan-abolished FCC rules that required broadcasters to present opposing perspectives on controversial issues. But as attempts to reinstate those rules failed, Sohn and her colleagues turned to pressuring the emerging telecom behemoths into hosting a variety of ideologically independent networks.

In the early 2000s, cable companies were getting an appetite for a new medium: broadband internet. Broadband had the potential to do everything cable TV had done and more.

“The internet comes along and changes everything,” Sohn said. “We go from top-down command-and-control media to this medium where anybody who could afford a connection has a voice.”

For one thing, access was wildly uneven. At the beginning of 2005, 32 percent of white Americans had access to broadband in the home, compared to 13 percent of Black Americans, according to Pew Research Center data. Around 58 percent of families making $75,000 a year had internet access at home at the time. Only 15 percent of households making less than $30,000 a year had comparable access.

For another, there was little stopping cable companies from shaping what content went online or how fast it was delivered. Broadband was classified as a Title I “information service” under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Unlike a Title II common carrier, regulators had little clear authority to stop service providers from discriminating against the online equivalent of upstart cable channels. That meant internet providers could restrict what customers had access to see and interact with online. In 2003, legal scholar Tim Wu coined the term “net neutrality” in an academic paper, calling the idea “no different than the challenge of promoting fair evolutionary competition in any privately owned environment.”

Sohn saw internet access as a landmark struggle for free expression. In 2001, she co-founded Public Knowledge, a policy group that promoted open internet rules and expanded broadband access. The group took hard stances on protecting consumer privacy, opposing carriers being able to snoop on what users are accessing online. It opposed the increasing consolidation of media companies, like Comcast’s merger with NBCUniversal.

Because of Public Knowledge’s goal to enhance competition in cable, its work didn’t always fit neatly along partisan lines. One of the group’s strange bedfellows was Herring Networks, founded by Robert Herring Sr. and his sons, Charles and Robert Jr. The Herrings entered the cable world in 2004 with WealthTV, a channel dedicated to the audacious lifestyles of the rich and famous. But cable companies wouldn’t carry the channel, even when the Herrings offered it for free. By 2007, the family escalated this battle, petitioning the FCC for help. In FCC filings, the company accused large cable providers of discriminating against independent networks in order to protect the audiences of their own outlets.

Despite the support of Sohn and groups like the Media Access Project in filings and amicus briefs, the Herrings’ WealthTV pleas failed in court. But they continued to cross paths, opposing giant mergers between companies like Sinclair and Tribune Media as the Herrings’ latest venture, One America News, started to take off in the late 2010s. “There’s a competitive news network that wants to come on the scene. Why is it, given that cable isn’t channel constrained, that they can’t carry OAN? And it’s because other stations don’t want the competition from a new news channel,” said Greg Guice, government affairs director for Public Knowledge, describing Sohn’s support for the Herrings.

Charles Herring came out in support of Sohn’s nomination shortly after it was announced in 2021. “I’ve fought in the trenches side-by-side with Gigi Sohn for a number of years on multiple issues,” Herring said. “I’m fully aware of Gigi’s personal views, yet I’m even more knowledgeable on her strong belief and advocacy for diversity in the programming lineup, especially in news, regardless of conflicts with her personal views.”

Through the 2000s and early 2010s, broadband access and net neutrality became a cornerstone of progressive internet policy. Republicans — and large cable companies — opposed expanding the FCC’s power by giving it more authority over internet service providers. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) went as far as calling net neutrality “Obamacare for the internet.”

Meanwhile, throughout his presidential campaign, Barack Obama pledged to support the introduction of net neutrality rules. After he was elected, his first-term FCC passed rules banning internet providers from blocking or throttling content by 2010. But not even a year later, Verizon sued the FCC over these rules and ultimately won when a federal appeals court struck down the 2010 rule at the beginning of 2014.

Obama’s pick for a second term was Tom Wheeler, a former telecom lobbyist. Many progressive activists were skeptical of Wheeler. But while preparing to become chair, he approached Sohn with a proposal. “He calls me one day in August and says, ‘I have this crazy idea.’ And I thought to myself, ‘He’s gonna ask me if I want to come work for him,’” Sohn said. “And his crazy idea, which was not so crazy in execution, was for me to basically be his main stakeholder outreach person.”

With Sohn as one of his many advisors, Wheeler led the agency in a number of landmark consumer protections. The Wheeler FCC increased competition for set-top cable boxes and tried to overthrow state laws forbidding municipal broadband networks. But Wheeler’s major achievement was implementing net neutrality nationwide. The net neutrality rules barred internet service providers like AT&T and Verizon from blocking or favoring online content. But most importantly, it gave the agency power to regulate broadband.

Net neutrality was a complex, downright wonky regulatory framework, but in the mid-2010s, it was a culture-wide battlefield. In 2014, the comedian John Oliver devoted a segment of his show, Last Week Tonight, to the issue, calling on viewers to flood the FCC’s comment sections in support of the rules. A host of major web companies like Netflix, Reddit, and Tumblr splashed their homepages with warnings about online “slow lanes” — “cable companies want to set up toll booths on the internet,” blared Kickstarter’s homepage.

“I supported Tom Wheeler becoming the FCC chair among a lot of skepticism from public interest advocates because he had worked for the cable and wireless industries. But that was a long time ago, and it’s when they were the new guys on the block,” Sohn said. “I was the only person in his office who said ‘you need to do Title II’ and didn’t change their mind.”

The sense of triumph didn’t last long. After taking office, President Donald Trump oversaw the confirmation of conservative FCC Chair Ajit Pai in October 2017. Pai almost immediately led a vote to overturn Title II net neutrality in December. For four years, it and other progressive goals — like expanded broadband access — languished. But in 2020, Trump lost the election to Democratic challenger Joe Biden. Biden promised to bring back net neutrality and get all Americans access to high-speed broadband. And he wanted Sohn to help him do it.

In October 2021, Biden nominated Sohn to fill out the FCC’s Democratic majority. A White House press release applauded her for making “broadband internet access more ubiquitous, competitive, affordable, open, and protective of user privacy.” If confirmed, she would also be the first openly gay commissioner in FCC history.

“The first few weeks after I got nominated were all sunshine and roses,” Sohn recalls of her nomination. But from the beginning, Biden was playing catch-up. Focused on the ongoing covid pandemic, he had waited nine months to nominate Sohn and proposed chair Jessica Rosenworcel — by contrast, Trump had put forward nominees by June of his first year in office.

The Senate would traditionally have held Rosenworcel and Sohn’s hearings together, then moved both to a floor vote. But within weeks, the process veered off course — and a conservative campaign against Sohn began to spin up.

Sohn’s first inkling of trouble came in the form of an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. The Journal’s editorial board decried Sohn as a would-be “media censor” and opposed her nomination to the FCC. The case wasn’t built on her activism — which had, in fact, earned her support from conservatives like Herring. Instead, it leaned on a handful of tweets critical of conservative media behemoths Fox News and Sinclair Broadcast Group. But the criticism caught on. The next day, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) amplified these arguments on Twitter, linking to the piece. “Gigi Sohn is a complete political ideologue who has disdain for conservatives,” Graham tweeted. “She would be a complete nightmare for the country when it comes to regulating the public airwaves.”

Sohn, it turned out, had drawn the attention of the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) — a conservative-aligned dark money group tied to the Trump-backed Conservative Partnership Institute. The AAF was known for instigating controversies around Democratic lawmakers — it filed an ethics complaint against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), for instance, for attending the 2021 Met Gala. But it focused its strongest fire on lower-level Biden nominees.

In an interview with Fox News, AAF founder and executive director Tom Jones said the organization’s main goal is to “take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the Biden administration.” Their obstructionist playbook aims to make the work of governance more difficult for Democrats, especially by targeting lower-level cabinet nominations — who, Jones explained, “are really the folks who are going to do the day-to-day work implementing the agenda.” They may also not be worth the culture war headache that high-profile nominees like Supreme Court pick Ketanji Brown Jackson bring.

The playbook often worked. At agencies spanning the ATF to the Federal Aviation Administration, the AAF successfully stalled multiple Biden nominations. And at one point, Sohn was its biggest target. Over the course of its campaign, it would release an onslaught of billboard, newspaper, and digital ads to sink her confirmation.

While conservatives may have opposed Sohn on social media, they remained a consistent minority — albeit by a slim margin — in the Senate. In the wake of her failed nomination, the big question isn’t why Republicans opposed a Democratic commissioner. It’s why Democrats, from Congress to the White House, failed to support her.

Sohn received her first confirmation hearing on December 1st, alone and more than two weeks later than her original scheduled date. “With each delay, these lobbyists and staffers had more time to dig up dirt, twist dirt, and get editorials planted. If I had been done quickly, I would have been done. But they just kept giving delay, delay, delay.”

The White House and Democrat electeds issued tepid statements in support of Sohn, if they issued any statements at all. Worse, Sohn says she wasn’t allowed to respond to the attacks herself, claiming that the White House forbade her from speaking up.

“It got to a point in January when I was getting those homophobic attacks. ‘Can I talk to the press?’ ’No, you cannot,’’’ Sohn said of her conversations with the White House. “And I was sending everything to the White House. Did they say anything? No. Did [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer say anything? No.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Sohn’s hearings were far more hostile than were Rosenworcel’s as Republicans pounced on the dark money-fueled fears over censorship. But after two hearings, Sohn’s nomination advanced out of committee by a tie 14–14 vote in March 2022. Then, that confirmation languished for more than nine months because Schumer never brought it up for a vote on the floor.

Outside observers noted the marked lack of support. “They didn’t [the White House] put the requisite firepower a government would need to have done to counteract a multimillion-dollar dark money campaign,” Ernesto Falcon, senior legislative counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in a March interview. “They were completely underestimating the level of opposition and the level of persuasive push the president’s bully pulpit has and held back too much.”

Brandon Tucker, Color of Change’s senior director of policy and government affairs, made a similar point to me back in April. “I do commend the White House for nominating and renominating a true champion and a tireless advocate, but it does feel as if once the writing’s on the wall, smear campaigns and the dark money entered the fray, there was not a counterpunch by her supporters.”

Other Biden nominees have struggled to cross the confirmation finish line over the last few years. Some were even targets of AAF. Saule Omarova, Lisa Cook, and Sarah Bloom Raskin did not respond to my requests for an interview or declined to speak with me. Even now, Biden’s pick to replace Marty Walsh as labor secretary, Julie Su, is facing tough headwinds from Republicans and Democrats alike. Herbie Ziskend, deputy White House communications director, tweeted a PunchBowl News screenshot Wednesday detailing an administration-led campaign to finish Su’s confirmation, seemingly learning a lesson from past failed nominations.

What Su and Sohn’s nominations have in common is the money and power the industries they regulate have over the political process. Throughout the 2022 midterms, Comcast alone made nearly $9 million in political contributions and spent close to $14.5 million on lobbying, according to Federal Election Commission records. The company hired lobbyist Kirk Adams of Consilium Consulting in Phoenix, Arizona, to work on “FCC nominations” specifically before that disclosure was deleted and replaced with “telecommunications policy”’ 11 hours later, Ars Technica reported last year. AT&T and Verizon contributed similar amounts to both Democrats and Republicans during the last midterms cycle.

Telecom companies, like the ones that lobbied against Sohn’s nomination, are the only group that benefits from a dysfunctional FCC. Without a full slate of commissioners, these companies don’t need to fear tougher regulations or strict enforcement actions over failures to meet the regulations that are already in place.

In Sohn’s last confirmation hearing this past February, Nevada Democrat Sen. Jacky Rosen was her biggest holdout. Support from Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) was shaky. “The third hearing was a disaster. And it was pretty clear at that juncture that the 2024s were not going to support me and a lot of Democrats didn’t even show up,” Sohn said.

Even if Sohn’s nomination made it out of committee, it’s unclear whether other Democrats like Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) would have voted for her. Pro-police groups like the Fraternal Order of Police had ramped up attacks on her confirmation. To vulnerable Democrats, not angering groups like these was more important than pushing through her nomination, Sohn said.

“The level of attention and the untruths and the smear campaigns that Gigi was on the receiving end of shines a light on corporate greed and the importance of a fully functioning FCC for communities of color and for accountability,” Tucker said.

On March 22nd, I met Sohn at Georgetown University to take portraits for this profile. She was filled with energy, having already picked out some locations with the help of Laura Moy, director of Georgetown Law’s Communications & Technology Law Clinic.

“It’s been two weeks, right?” Sohn tells me, smiling at the camera. “Basically, my therapist says I’m in a period of mourning now. So I’m just taking it slow.”

Characteristically, that slow period didn’t last very long. By May 3rd, Sohn had accepted a new role as the executive director for the American Association for Public Broadband, an organization that advocates for the deployment and adoption of community-owned broadband networks. Less than a month later, she was in Kansas City, Missouri, working for the Benton Institute on similar issues and meeting with local broadband leaders.

“I would have loved to take six months to decide what I want to do next, but I don’t have that luxury,” Sohn said. “I needed at least two months to recover, which I took. I probably needed more time, but you know, mama’s got to bring home a paycheck, right?”

Meanwhile, Biden and Congress have moved on. In May, Biden nominated veteran telecom lawyer Anna Gomez to replace Sohn. Gomez has spent the majority of her career working in government, so it’s more difficult to parse where exactly she stands on the controversial issues that likely played a role in sinking Sohn’s confirmation. Instead of the FCC spearheading the administration’s major broadband expansion project, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration is doling out many of the resources to states.

But the state of US broadband and net neutrality remains uncertain. Gomez received a far warmer welcome than Sohn in her first confirmation hearing in June, but anything can happen between now and a vote to swing Congress’ opinion against her. Congress has already proved its adeptness at delaying confirmations. Without an FCC majority, other federal agencies have started to take on the agency’s role in broadband expansion. But without five commissioners, it’s impossible to ensure carriers are keeping their promises.

“I and many others really saw the internet as the future and the future of democratic communications,” Sohn said. “For all its warts, it has become that.”

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It’s time to talk about my good buddy RJ. RJ45, that is. Well, technically, we’re going to talk about how ethernet cables, which tend to use an RJ45 connector, are glue that once bound so many of us together in multiplayer gaming bliss (before then, too, but my part of this story began at the turn of the century). It was a joyous copper pipeline for so many who might have looked askance at the four-player couch multiplayer that was the only context in which most ordinary people could relate to gaming with friends. That’s right; we’re talking LAN parties.

You know the ones. You heft, in multiple trips, your whole gaming rig — a beefy CRT monitor, honkin’ water-cooled desktop machine, keyboard, headphones (or outboard speakers if you’re brandishing), and all the requisite cables into the extended cab of your dinky Nissan pickup truck. Then load up on soda and haul ass to your friend’s mom’s house to take it all, in multiple trips, up to their tiny, poorly ventilated room for a good time, all thanks to a few ethernet cables and a network switch — no internet required.

In the mid-to-late ’90s, LAN parties grew beyond the confines of basements and bedrooms everywhere, exploding into the biggest esports and gaming conventions we have today. For example, the first QuakeCon took place in Dallas in 1996, and in the years that followed, hundreds — and, eventually, thousands — of people lugged their PCs to the yearly event in North Texas (in fact, the first in-person QuakeCon since the beginning of the pandemic is happening this August), and esports tournaments like Repeat.gg are so popular that big companies like Sony invest heavily in them.

The traditional LAN party, though, wasn’t really my thing. Sure, I participated in them, sitting in a hot room with other nerds, but my favorite peer-to-peer all-nighters took place in a 700-square-foot apartment in the suburbs with game consoles and hulking standard-definition tube TVs.

For a brief and glorious few months in my 20s, about every Friday night, we convened in my apartment, with TVs and Xboxes strewn all over, to stuff rockets in each other’s faces in Halo.

The setup was chaotic but simpler than a gathering of PCs: each console was paired with a beefy tube TV (which I made those poor suckers carry upstairs to my second-floor domicile), then connected to each other using ethernet cables snaking to a simple network switch. Grab your controllers and go. PC LAN parties were principally the same — they just needed more. More setup, more equipment, more time, more furniture, and more space. A 16-player Team Fortress Classic match takes 16 computers. At my apartment, even just two consoles was a great night.

For the most part, at these console-only parties, we played split screen, though the number of players and systems varied, and there was one guy who always insisted on playing alone on his comparatively massive 27-inch TV (he carried that thing up the stairs, so he earned it). But I liked split-screen play. It meant my teammates were right next to me, and we could coordinate movement with nudges and sly gestures or gleefully shake each other in moments of great victory.

The final moments of a game might go like this: from high in the walls of Blood Gulch, I train my sniper rifle on someone who’s running a flag through the bunny hills between the bunkers, hoping to pick them off. I’m a terrible sniper, so I usually just miss a few times before being gutted from behind by my own girlfriend with an energy sword. Or maybe a grenade, perfectly placed, blows me off my perch and into the valley below. But dead is dead, right?

Once, we managed to get an eight-player Mario Kart: Double Dash!! game going, and friends, that night, we were on top of the world. Halo was great, but it didn’t the frenetic joy of sweeping around the two hairpin turns of the oval-shaped Baby Park track with seven friends, constantly threatened by ricocheting turtle anatomy, exploding bob-bombs, and the ever-catastrophic banana peel lying in wait to wreck you in the waning seconds of your final lap. Ha ha, you were in first place, now you’re extremely not, and everyone is laughing at you (including you).

It was a hell of a night, and I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since.

Don’t get me wrong, online gaming has its perks, especially now. You get a massive, colorful, high-resolution display all to your lonesome. It also opens the door to bolstering distant friendships that, in days past, might have quietly sublimated away, drifting into the eternal. These days, even Nintendo has figured out how to (mostly) make it easy to hop onto Wi-Fi and spin up a game. You don’t even have to leave your house! Sure, playing online means weathering some anonymous butthead’s insults from time to time, but it’s mostly worth it because it’s easy.

Yet for all its worth, online gaming can leave you feeling... disconnected. The triumph of LAN parties came not from expansive screens and immersive audio but from being there. Win or lose, you could see your friends’ elation when their blue shell connected or their feigned misery when their Warthog was blown sky high, and you could share in those feelings, and they could see it on you, too. Did it suck to pull together all the pieces of a LAN party? Yeah, kinda. Would I do it again? In a heartbeat, yes.

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