About
Welcome to Cybercultural, my independent blog exploring the history of the internet and its cultural impact.
I'm Richard MacManus, and I started this site in 2019 as a continuation of my long-standing work documenting the evolution of the web. From 2003 to 2012, I founded and led ReadWriteWeb, one of the pioneering tech blogs of its era. It was ranked among the world's top 10 blogs by Technorati and syndicated by The New York Times.
Cybercultural is free to read, but you can support the project via a small donation on my Ko-fi page:
See the site colophon for details on how I built Cybercultural.
Testimonials
"This is another great write-up from Richard MacManus. Here he covers the dotcom era when I was part of the team building mtv.com and the story really nails the messy world of webdev in those early topsy-turvy days. And I highly recommend Richard's current Cybercultural newsletter as well as his recent book, Bubble Blog, both are excellent!"
— John Musser, Senior Director of Engineering at Ford | Founder ProgrammableWeb, June 2025
"One of my favorite places on the web is Cybercultural by @ricmac. His recent "exposé" about Alice Mary Hilton's impact on media theory is a new favorite. Her techno-optimism and humanism resonate with me, particularly as AI blurs the delineation between people and machines. I highly recommend reading it!"
— Hannah Aubry, Mastodon contributor, March 2025
"Richard MacManus’ memoir of his experiences running his tech blog, ReadWriteWeb, during the first decade of the 2000s, is a great read. Richard was smart and engaged back then – and still is – so this memoir offers both wonderful retellings about key moments and key people, and an honest look back and appraisal."
— Susan Mernit, former executive at Netscape, AOL, Yahoo, and other internet and media companies, February 2024
"I’m greatly enjoying Richard’s look back on those strangely heady days of the post-mortgage-crisis tech bubble that began to take full advantage of gradients, APIs, and that still somewhat new Cloud infrastructure thing."
— Rick Turoczy, Silicon Florist, April 2024
Note: I also authored WebDevelopmentHistory.com (2020-21), a blog about the early years of the web from a developer perspective. All of its content has since been migrated to Cybercultural.
