Meanwhile, in Japan, a younger – yet no less active – General Union was taking some of its first steps out onto the World Wide Web. It may not have been the most beautiful nor the most elegant of websites, but – given the standards of online beauty in 2002; a time when there was no debate about the pronunciation of “gif”, and when “viral images” were considered a real danger to your PC instead of click-bait – it certainly wasn’t the runt of the litter, either.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031129191723/http://www.generalunion.org/

While it’s easy to look back at what once was, and smirk at what was considered to be the height of website design in the years that have been (begrudgingly) named “The Early Aughts”, one thing that hasn’t become a thing of the past is the information stored upon those delicately preserved pages of HTML, which are still as useful and relevant today as they were then.

The General Union’s mission hasn’t changed much, either: the ideals, ambitions, and sense of justice that we held in 2002 are just as strong in 2015.

Looking back, the General Union has accomplished a lot since that very, very green website first lodged itself into that great series of tubes that spans the world, and we can only imagine while we might accomplish in the next decade, too, when we finally come to a point in the future where we can look back and ask, “Hey, do you remember that time we used to use FACEBOOK? Wow, right?”

The website might change, laws will be revised, politicians and companies will come and go, but the General Union will still be fighting on and into the future.