Leekspin Is Down. The Internet Is Forgetting Itself.

You probably haven’t thought about Leekspin in years. Maybe ever. But if you were online in 2006, you almost certainly spent at least one bleary-eyed night watching a cartoon girl spin a leek to a Finnish polka on an endless loop, wondering why you couldn’t stop.

Leekspin.com was the internet at its most pure: pointless, joyful, and shared by millions for no reason other than it existed. No algorithm pushed it to you. No influencer monetized it. No brand tried to co-opt it. You found it because a friend sent you a link in an AOL Instant Message, and you forwarded it to three other friends, and they forwarded it to three more, and that was how culture worked back then.

Now Leekspin.com is down. The Flash plugin that powered it died in 2020, and the site — which had been running since 2004 — finally went dark with it.

The internet doesn’t have a memory. It has a graveyard. And we keep walking past the headstones without reading the names.

Here’s what makes this story different from the usual “things were better back then” nostalgia: someone actually did something about it. A developer named mdvorscak rebuilt Leekspin from scratch in HTML5 and hosted it at leekspin.surge.sh. The code is open-source on GitHub. One person, working for free, decided that a spinning leek was worth saving.

That should make you feel something. Not because Leekspin itself is important — it’s a girl spinning a vegetable. It’s because the impulse behind the rescue is the same one that drives people to restore faded paintings and preserve crumbling architecture. The medium is trivial. The instinct is not.

We have institutions dedicated to preserving physical culture. Museums. Libraries. Historical societies. But digital culture? The stuff that actually defined a generation? It’s treated as disposable by default. Flash died, and with it, tens of thousands of interactive experiences, games, and animations — an entire era of creative expression — vanished overnight. Adobe didn’t build a museum. They just pulled the plug.

We archive oil paintings from 400 years ago but can’t be bothered to save the cultural artifacts of the generation that built the modern internet.

Think about what’s already gone. Homestar Runner’s interactive menus. The original Numa Numa page. Thousands of Newgrounds animations. The early web’s weird, handmade, deeply personal corner — the stuff that existed before platforms swallowed everything — is rotting away in dead links and broken embeds.

And the replacement isn’t better. It’s just more efficient. TikTok serves you content designed by machine learning to maximize engagement. Instagram optimizes for what keeps you scrolling. The early internet was inefficient, stupid, and wonderful — it served you a leek-spinning girl because someone thought it was funny and put it on a website. That’s it. That was the entire value proposition.

The Leekspin rescue matters because it’s a small act of defiance against the idea that digital culture is throwaway culture. It says: this mattered. This specific, dumb, beautiful thing mattered enough for someone to learn a new framework and rewrite it from nothing.

But it also reveals how fragile the whole project is. The HTML5 version lives on a surge.sh subdomain. It’s maintained by one person. There’s no institution behind it, no funding, no guarantee it’ll be there in five years. If mdvorscak stops paying attention, it disappears too. And then the last trace of Leekspin — the thing that connected millions of people in the mid-2000s — is gone.

Every time a piece of the early internet dies, we don’t just lose a webpage. We lose proof that the internet was once a place where humans made things for each other, not for algorithms.

You might be thinking: it’s just a meme. Get over it. And you’d be right that Leekspin is just a meme. But memes are how we remember. They’re the folk art of the digital age — passed from person to person, evolving as they go, carrying meaning that the creators never intended. When we let them die without a trace, we’re not losing data. We’re losing memory.

The next time you stumble across an old website that still works — some GeoCities relic, some forgotten Flash game, some page that looks like it was coded in Notepad by a teenager in 2003 — take a moment. Because it won’t be there forever. And when it’s gone, there may not be someone like mdvorscak to bring it back.

The early internet is still alive. Barely. In subdomains and GitHub repos and the stubborn efforts of people who refuse to let it die. But it won’t survive on stubbornness alone.

Some things are worth saving not because they’re important, but because they’re ours.