In Memoriam: The Webmaster
A brief history of control, collapse, and the quietly sacred labor of early internet custodians.
There was a time when every site had one. Not a product manager, not a UX consultant, not a growth lead, but a webmaster. A single, possibly ponytailed, individual with FTP access and god-like control over the content and code of an entire domain. The title itself was a nerdy flex, a promise of technical mastery tinged with a whisper of mysticism. They mastered the web—its servers, scripts, and stylesheets. But now the webmaster is gone, relegated to job boards of the late '90s, a ghost in the machine. The digital world, like any social world, sheds its skins. And the webmaster has become its totemic fossil—trapped in amber, smiley-face favicon intact.
The webmaster was a figure of mythic centrality. Every village, every institution with a “.org,” had one. Like the shaman, the webmaster controlled invisible forces no one else fully understood. They guarded the secrets of PHP includes and cursed broken CSS. They spoke in the tongues of Perl and Dreamweaver. They had the power to summon “Under Construction” gifs, and banish the dreaded Comic Sans. Their email was often webmaster@[yourdomainhere]. A role of both anonymity and total power. No one quite knew what they did, but everyone needed them.
The end began quietly, as ends often do. First came the templates, the blogging platforms, the WYSIWYGs. Then WordPress, Drupal, Joomla—names that sound like Ikea products but function like techno-political coups. Slowly, the web was democratized, or at least consumerized. The code that once demanded obedience could now be dragged, dropped, and discarded. No need for a master when the interface holds your hand. The CMS replaced the webmaster not with a person, but with a process, one that could be split, modularized, and outsourced into near-invisibility.
Today, the responsibilities once consolidated into the webmaster have fragmented into a bureaucratic hodgepodge of niche roles: front-end developer, content strategist, SEO specialist, accessibility consultant. Each one a cog in a machine that the webmaster once ran solo, like an artisan replaced by an assembly line. The disappearance of the webmaster isn’t just a job transition; it’s the flattening of digital culture itself. From craftsmanship to compliance. From curiosity to product-market fit.
Even their demise has been bureaucratized. Google’s own Search Central formally retired the term in 2020, renaming its “Webmaster Tools” to “Search Console,” a move that felt less like an update and more like a quiet funeral. Nobody noticed. The webmaster did not trend on Twitter. No thinkpieces were written. Their passing was clean, algorithmically optimized, and politely forgotten.
There’s something almost sacred about this erasure. We treat technological obsolescence as naturalized evolution, as if the new always deserves to kill the old. But the shift away from the webmaster wasn’t inevitable. It was ideological. It marked the corporate seizure of the web’s creative infrastructure. The webmaster, for all their flaws and quirks, stood for a certain kind of sovereignty—one person, one server, one vision. In their place we now have tools that are easier, safer, and far more boring. A Wix site loads faster, yes, but it has no soul. And no one ever calls tech support “master.”
Of course, nostalgia is dangerous. The early web was exclusionary, elitist, often ugly. But it was also weird. Weird in the way cultures are weird before they’re branded. The webmaster was a gatekeeper, yes—but also an explorer. Now the digital landscape has been fully charted, domesticated, and turned into a SaaS suburbia. We live in a world of managed hosting, third-party integrations, and endless logins. No FTP, no shell access, just APIs and “request access” buttons.
In the end, the webmaster was a figure of transition, a liminal entity caught between old media hierarchies and new digital regimes. Not quite journalist, not quite engineer, not quite artist—but all of them at once. A mythic hybrid. An accidental priest of the early internet, lost in the churn of agile sprints and quarterly OKRs. If the webmaster felt ancient even in their prime, it’s because the web was always speeding toward something colder, slicker, and infinitely more polite.
So let’s raise a broken link in their honor. Not because they were perfect, but because they were human. Because they knew the whole site could go down with one bad upload. Because they were there, behind the scenes, patching security holes at 3 a.m., posting cryptic changelogs, quietly holding the infrastructure together. You never saw them, but the internet used to be full of their fingerprints.
Now the pages load faster. But who’s watching?
I took this photo earlier this week. It’s ironic, but also sincere—not the photo itself, but what’s in it. If you know what it is and where it is, then you know what it is and where it is. That’s why I won’t say more. I don’t want to ruin the mystery. Think of it as a tribute, in the quietly esoteric spirit of a 1997 webmaster—just enough secrecy to make it sacred, but not enough to be smug. It’s a room, in a CUNY building, that once did exactly what the sign says. The same sign, or one very much like it. Now it’s museum-grade, glass-encased internet archaeology. A shrine to webmasters and other ghosts.
Thanks to Alex and Ari for the technical guidance (of course I had no idea what WYSIWYG meant, and Joomla sounded like something Malinowski might have studied a century ago). Any mistakes are entirely mine.