The Beetle was born on Feb­ruary 10^th 1996. There were two reasons for this. The first one was that, on the 10^th, my brother (who is, to my dismay, a rightwing sports fan) expounded on his political views, to which I didn’t reply only because it was his birthday. I said to myself that I had to answer this some way or other. The second reason was that, on that same morning, there was more hair on my comb than on my head. I said to myself that I was a creep. That’s how, pushed by the dual will of dying rich and famous (and as late as pos­sible), I started working on the Beetle.

Since that day, the Beetle has become a 8 Mo, 200 pages site (data of the time) with over 110 000 hits. It became, in August of that year, a news­letter as useless as it is irregular, that jams the mail­boxes of 350 readers. My goal for 1997: becoming the web’s ref­erence on spelling mis­takes, obsolete links, unchecked info and banalities.

More ser­i­ously, the con­clusion reached for this year 1996 is a great per­sonal enrichment… So great that I don’t see why more people do not start their own site! So, if I’m talking about my achieve­ments here, it’s mainly to give you the will to start (if you haven’t done it yet) your own homepage. First, it’s nice to have to write on a regular basis. You can’t never learn more about yourself than by writing. Thoughts start getting a structure, thinking becomes (hope­fully) sharper and you find your edge… You meet your own self.

Then, you get to meet readers. Those who dis­cover the site, people who read me pretty often, those who read everything… Their emails show a sort of trust, a kinship feeling, real warmth, which strike me every time. Also, mes­sages can be of a great per­tinence, just like that of the guy who wrote me, just after my first article, to say that I had created a whole site just for those art­icles. There are hateful people and nasty emails, but they’re scarce. There are instead many warm mes­sages, little notes to say that people agree, to add more inform­ation, or to explain, as in an apology, that they don’t agree. That’s the real good news on the Net: kindness and warmth, honesty… Men are good, and I have proofs!

Back to me: the rel­ative success of the Beetle allowed me to dis­cover new scenes: some journ­alists sur­prised me through their nice soul and people from the movie critic scene stunned me through the base ugliness of their world (a scene as insig­ni­ficant as that of fashion!). The web gave me a taste for revolt, anger and some emo­tions that I had somewhat lost after puberty. Mes­sages from readers make me believe that, indeed, there is a hope. We can fight and beat the ugliness of the system, the mediocrity of politics, the passivity in front of the return to a moral order and fascism. Good and beau­tiful people are more numerous than hateful, ego­istic and feckless beasts (to be sung on the air of "We shall overcome").

Inde­pendent web­masters belong to a great world too! Whatever the size of their page, they all feel like they’re taking part in "some­thing", in this new medium, this link between people. They all have some­thing in common, the same enthu­siasm, and see the Net as a chal­lenge… not an eco­nomical one, not a tech­no­lo­gical one, but a cul­tural one.

So, what about 1997? One thing is for certain, we’ll have to defend ourselves, resist. How? By hardening the tone, even if we risk to be only preaching to con­verts, by using the enemy’s weapons, even if we risk drowning in crap? I don’t know, but what I do know is that the web is changing, and it’s not always for the better. We have to react. News­papers that talked about users and cul­tural goals are dis­ap­pearing one by one and only the ones fas­cinated by the tech­no­lo­gical aspects stay. Devel­opment tools are becoming more and more expensive and purely com­mercial sites are mono­pol­izing the news. Is it the beginning of the end?

That would be sad. So I hope you’ve grasped the aim of this article: the real boon of this web is its users, active and humans, who invest their lives, with their mes­sages, both warm, light and funny, and bring a bit of human touch. That’s the total opposite of pro­fes­sional sites, web-​​business spe­cialists, who are only motivated by gain and whose mes­sages are nor­malized, cal­ib­rated, and mind-​​numbing: simple contact between con­sumers and sales­persons. Looking at the latest evol­u­tions of the Internet, I fear it could be becoming as unex­citing as an inflatable doll.