Ancient Web: Become a Gnome Was a 2005 Makeover Without the Makeover

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Many early websites promised to change your life. One surviving page offered a more specific transformation: you could become a gnome.

Enter BecomeAGnome.com.

The homepage presents the proposition with a straight face. It claims to employ new technology capable of turning a visitor into the gnome of their dreams. Beneath the announcement are two pictured gnome choices and another option to become a random gnome. The artwork, rather than a long instruction manual, carries most of the site.

A copyright line reads 2005. That is evidence for the page's claimed vintage, although it does not independently verify its first publication date or any particular audience size. There is no need to inflate it into an undocumented viral sensation. The joke survives quite nicely at its actual scale.

The fake miracle of one click

This is an example of a wonderfully economical web toy. It needs no membership, shopping cart, social account, or profile. The user selects an image and is invited to accept the impossible premise as though it were merely another Internet service.

The words are part of the mechanism. By describing the transformation as a technological achievement, the webmaster borrows the exaggerated promises that surrounded real online tools and applies them to becoming a garden ornament.

Other novelty sites from the period would let you personalize a license plate, create a candy heart, or place your words on a virtual sign. This one is less interested in customizing a product than in making a visitor imagine an absurd change of identity.

The current page still displays its images and original selection prompts. That does not establish that every linked transformation works today, and the available material does not identify the individual creator or explain the original implementation. Those limits deserve to remain limits, rather than becoming invented history.

A site can be worth preserving simply because it represents a very small, peculiar corner of what an individual thought people might enjoy doing online.

Try the surviving gnome choices.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.