On August 16, 2026, Calgary-based writer and developer Brennan Kenneth Brown published a roughly 22-minute essay on his site brennan.day, arguing that the near-extinct job title 'webmaster' deserves resurrection, this time as a philosophy open to anyone with a computer and a text editor.

Brown traces the word to RFC 2142, published by Dave Crocker in May 1997, which fixed webmaster@domain as the standard mailbox address for a website, mirroring postmaster@domain for email. He credits Stanford librarian Louise Addis as the first person effectively holding the role, and notes that lexicographic sources such as the OED and Etymonline date the term's first recorded use to 1993. The essay walks through the golden age of GeoCities (originally Beverly Hills Internet) and rivals like Tripod, Angelfire and Homestead, and recalls that Yahoo deleted more than 38 million GeoCities pages when it shut the service down in 2009. Brown marks Google's November 2020 rebrand from 'Google Webmasters' to 'Google Search Central' as the term's unofficial funeral.

The manifesto's second half turns prescriptive: anyone can be a webmaster today with nothing more than a computer, a text editor and free hosting such as Neocities, Nekoweb or FreeDNS. Brown draws a sharp line between this hands-on craft and what he calls the 'agentic web,' where people offload design and writing to large language models while calling themselves orchestrators; he insists real webmastery means writing the HTML, CSS and prose yourself. He credits IndieWebCamp founders Tantek Çelik, Amber Case, Aaron Parecki, Crystal Beasley and Kevin Marks, who launched the movement in Portland in 2011, along with figures from the web revival scene such as Daniel Murray, Sadness of Yesterweb, James G. and the 32-bit Café community.

The piece closes with an extensive list of hosting services, tutorials, webrings and archives for readers who want to start building immediately, a bibliography-as-manifesto for anyone nostalgic for blinking text and 88x31 buttons.