In 2017, Google announced they were going to start phasing out Flash Player support from Chrome, with the eventual goal of fully disabling the feature at the end of 2020. This move was somewhat controversial at the time, and once 2020 rolled around many mourned the loss of what they once viewed as a staple feature of the internet, but the truth is that flash was on its deathbed for years prior. Old friend, I know your time had come, but I still miss you so.

Macromedia Flash, eventually bought by and renamed to Adobe Flash, was a multimedia program primarily used for animation purposes. It had easy to use tools and a simple UI, which when combined with the “wild wild west” era of internet culture, made it the perfect tool for any amateur to push whatever they desired onto the internet. You didn’t need artistic talent, you didn’t need to be the world’s greatest programmer, all you needed is about two hours and a decently funny idea. Not only that, it also had its own programming language to create interactive media with it, so if you got bored of making 5 frame animations of two butts fighting, you could take an afternoon to make a 1v1 couch-multiplayer game of those same two butts going at it. Was it good? No, the game probably ran like ass and took an age to download. But did it exist? Fuck dude it sure did!

People made anything with flash: Insane animations of a dad wrecking his office beyond recognition, weird mixes of political commentary and absurdist humor, long-running web shows, a game where you play as George Bush to shoot down assailants, actual fucking theatrical films… If you could imagine it, flash could make it, and sites like Newgrounds could get your face out there.

Of course, much of this behavior and accessibility is in part (if not mostly) a result of the wild wild west era: the era where we barely had algorithms and no one really had made an online presence to themselves quite yet, so anything you made had a reasonable chance to be seen. Importantly, however, we didn’t have this mentality around “making good content”, not necessarily at least; while nowadays you are expected to act as a “content producer” for others to “consume”, the assumption back then was “you deal with the shit I post.” Sure, some more professional sites still tried to do their best at maintaining a consistent upload schedule and advertising, but they were the anomaly, as opposed to the default. If you made something stupid and it flopped, it was still worth it for the sake of having done it.

Flash was amazing, but it was also too amazing for its own good. Give creatives a tool to make amazing things, and less reputable people will have the exact same tools to wreak havoc on your computer. Flash allowed you to play music? Oh, then I could put music in my advertisement, forcing people to notice me! I could force the user to notice me by doing popups, saving files, and all the other tools made for the sake of creativity! I could harvest data on my users! I could- You get the point. This tool was good, but you can’t trust everyone with something this powerful and not run into malicious actors. Even before the discovery of serious vulnerabilities and virus injections, flash was slowly being phased out of browsers as other technologies grew more popular. First it was an option to disable flash from a menu, then it was a default disable with a popup to enable flash, and eventually… a total disable across the board.

Flash, nowadays, is a very antiquated tool. You can do better and safer things with HTML5, or with art tools like Cacani, so to someone who never experienced flash it can feel like we haven’t lost anything in the years that had past. But it’s not the same. It’s not as easy to make something in HTML5 as it was in Macromedia’s tool, it’s not as easy to get it out there with the Youtube and Tiktok algorithms butchering any user choice and just shoving what they think will increase retention time in their face, and most importantly, the mentality that just allowed you to make anything has been reduced to nothing but ashes. This liberating mindset that you created for yourself, and for yourself alone. While others may have enjoyed what you created, that wasn’t the only goal.

You weren’t a machine, churning out digestible pellets of Content to be Consumed by An Audience. You were a person making stuff, and others might even like that stuff. You were not a tool. You were a creator.

With an increasingly centralized and advertiser-friendly internet, where everything has to be optimized and sanitized, it’s hard to know if something like Flash may ever come again. Even with stuff like Roblox, which gives its users easy-to-use tools to create games and share them with others, the constant monetization and abuse of its userbase shows that it’s not really what we’re looking for. I don’t know how we can bring this back for the next generations to enjoy this kind of freedom, but I hope we find a way.

Old friend, I know your time had come,

but I still miss you so.