Visit Elliott's essay on page # Visit Laurel's essay on page #
Where do you find the poetic internet? My first encounter was through the works of Laurel Schwulst and Elliott Cost. I began noticing their websites— like Special Fish, The Life and Death of an Internet Onion, Empty Day, Fruitful School, Gossip's Cafe, Alt Text as Poetry, and Gossip's Web — and essays like “Exploring the vastness of a website” and “My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?”.
Elliott and Laurel’s work became portals to a part of the internet I didn’t know existed, like Lucy stepping into Professor Kirke’s wardrobe in the first Narnia book. One day, I participated in discussions about filter bubbles, instant notifications, and cookies. The next, I visited sites exploring love, death, and belonging with the same poetic sensitivity as snow falling on a winter’s day with a mild breeze. The contrast was striking, and it felt as if I’d been given a new way of speaking about the internet. I mean this quite literally: the internet I discovered through Elliott and Laurel had fewer abstract words. Less “attention”, “competition”, “promotion”, “action”, and “solution”. Instead, there were words like “home”, “love”, “shadow”, “glow”, “fly”, and “ladybug”. Shorter and softer words, but also more mysterious and wondrous. Words that rarely asked me to share, like, and subscribe, but which sparked curiosity like a trail of signs through the Black Forest. This experience changed how I saw the internet—and, in some ways, it changed me.
For years, I hadn’t actively bookmarked websites, rarely revisiting any site beyond the usual search engine or the latest social network. But that changed. I found myself returning to gossipsweb.net to check for new additions. Each site was an invitation to discover a new node within the poetic web. One day I landed on Tiana Dueck’s tiana.computerhttps://tiana.computer https://sundaysites.cafe https://volvox.observer, which led me to sundaysites.cafe and volvox.observer. It was early days, and I was new to the neighbourhood. The behaviours, conversations, and faces were novel, but over time, and with each visit, I started to notice patterns, and slowly, strangers turned into familiar usernames.
Where I once gave form to ideas by creating accounts on social networks, I began instead to publish my own websites: I started penpal.cafe to connect the readers of my newsletter with each other, used buymynotebook.com to sell my handwritten notebook, and made wilderness.land for people to get lost in the internet. I went from lurking to participating, and it was thrilling when the people I admired linked to my sites in their newsletters1, blogs2, and Are.na channels3. Through these projects the familiar usernames became internet friends, and last year I decided to bring them together by hosting Naive Yearly, an in-person conference extending my digital newsletter. Elliott and Laurel joined as speakers, and a few months later they visited me at my home in Athens, Greece.
Sitting in the softer hues of the Mediterranean light, we spoke about where you find the poetic web on the internet. Trending social networks deprioritize external links, and popular search engines bury the odd and personal websites. Either the poetic web isn’t popular enough to appear first, or it’s seen as less valuable than, say, an ad. In response, Elliott and I began working on diagram.websitehttps://diagram.website, a map with hundreds of links to the internet beyond platform walls. We envisioned this map like a night sky in a nature reserve—removed from the light pollution of cities—inviting a sense of awe for the vastness of the universe, or in our case, the internet. We wanted people to know that the poetic internet already existed, waiting for them, like Narnia through the professor’s wardrobe. Perhaps because we were sitting at Adad Books, a cosy café and independent bookstore in Athens, we started to imagine creating a physical artefact we could leave in places where curious minds might find it. Lightweight Trojan horses, subtly claiming space for the poetic web. A way to show more people what we refer to when we talk about the internet. The result of that conversation is what you now hold in your hands.
We applied for a digital culture grant from a governmental institution to fund the Internet Phone Book. We received a one-page rejection letter concluding that the project did not qualify as digital culture. One of the reasons mentioned was that our decision to publish the websites in a book indicates that we put print above the web, as if publishing technologies were some kind of Maslow’s pyramid. Obviously, we don’t see it this way. With the Internet Phone Book, we bring the web, the medium we love dearly, and call it into a thousand-year old tradition. This is not a reduction of the internet; it’s a celebration and a way to honour it. We are also not the first to print the web. From the early '90s to the early 2000s, multiple publishers printed books of website addresses, including The Internet Yellow Pages, Luckman’s World Wide Web Yellow Pages, and The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog. These books came out before the web was fully crawled and indexed—before Yahoo, Google, and social news feeds—and could often be found by local library computers, serving as a portal for people to discover the vastness of the internet.
Since then, artists like Paul Soulellis, Silvio Lorusso, Mindy Seu, and Molly Soda have also printed the web. A notable moment for web-to-print came in 2017 when Paul Soulellis’ “Library of the Printed Web” was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. At the time, the library consisted of 244 printed publications of websites4 and it was a considerable contribution to establishing the conversation about internet archiving and accessibility. These topics are often overlooked; we assume that the internet is always available and never forgets, but the truth is that the internet is always forgetting. Domain names expire, databases fail, code deprecates, and entire top-level domain can disappear5. It is likely that many of the sites in this book will be defunct a year from now. They will be printed link rot; signposts to empty containers and spam sites. At that point, this book will serve as an archeological artefact of the personal internet of 2024, and the small notes people have left in the book, alongside their websites, will provide an insight into how they were thinking about their small parcel of the internet. I imagine future readers sitting with the Internet Phone Book, using tools like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to trace the history of these lost sites and the people that once lived there.
Visit Elan Ullendorff's essay on page #
More importantly, rather than debating a fictional divide between print and digital, we want to liberate digital culture from the tyranny of novelty: work should not be more worthy of our attention just because the technology is perceived as new. As writer Elan Ullendorff argues in The New Turing Test, it is less interesting what technology is used for a project, but more significant that the project is made “from someone, for someone, in a particular context.” Concluding, “[i]f the original Turing test evaluated what computers are capable of, this new Turing test evaluates what we are capable of.”
I wish all digital culture foundations would take Elan’s words to heart and shift their funding away from hype technologies toward maintaining existing technologies and supporting the ecosystems of practitioners, researchers, companies, and educators that surround them. Organisations like Rhizome, School for Poetic Computation, Internet Archive, and Developh should never struggle to reach their fundraising goals. Likewise, online publications like Syntax, the HTML Review, Taper, Crawlspace and others should not be so reliant on the spare time and resources of their maintainers. The same applies to the countless web practitioners and artists who continue to give their time and skills to the internet. To keep the web alive, our focus should not purely be on constantly adding new technologies but by evolving how we perceive and use the internet and tending the tiny, personal, and silly websites. These sites are the foundation of the internet.
So, who is this book for? We want the Internet Phone Book to become an infrastructure that helps us explore the personal, non-commercial internet and to connect with each other like the people meeting in parks to free-write HTML. We see it as a peer project to smaller folk search engines like Wiby.me, which prioritise sites made by hobbyists, academics, and computer-savvy people. It also aligns with directories like ooh.directory, which links to 2,299 blogs, and the many webrings where people with similar interests find ways to foster kinship.
Visit Garry Ing's essay on page # Visit Zachary Kai's essay on page # Visit Olia Lialina's essay on page #
Ultimately, we hope the Internet Phone Book will inspire people to make their own websites. Maybe by viewing the source code, as Garry Ing encourages in “A view source web,” or by gaining inspiration from Zachary Kai’s list of “Site ideas.” If you’re wondering, why should you do that? Why not just make accounts on social platforms? We turn to Olia Lialina, who writes "[d]on’t see making your own web page as a nostalgia, don’t participate in creating the netstalgia trend. What you make is a statement, an act of emancipation. You make it to continue a 25-year-old tradition of liberation."
Visit Meghna Rao's essay on page # Visit Chia Amisola's essay on page # Visit Benjamin Earl's essay on page # Visit Eileen Ahn's essay on page #
The web is called the web because it is a network of hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of sites. To keep the web alive requires the active participation and care of people like you. But don’t just make a website for the commons. Make a website for a place like Benjamin Earl. Make a website for yourself. As Meghna Rao writes in "Space Crone," her essay about author Ursula K. Le Guin’s first website, it is a way "to translate something about the self into virtual space." Do this for years, like Eileen Ahn, and it will become a personal history archive. Or make many websites, like Chia Amisola: it might be a way to find yourself.
As for me? Participating in the web became a way of finding my people.
With care,
Kristoffer
How to use this book
There are many ways to use this book. Here are a few ideas on how you could approach it, these are meer suggestions.
By category
The directory is organized into categories: Fun, Atmosphere, Ecology, HTML, Idiosyncratic, Independence, Multiplayer, Myth, Play, Publish, Small, Text. Choose a topic you are interested in, and explore those sites.
Random
Open the book to a random page, maybe with your eyes closed, put down your finger on a website, and follow the link.
Dial a site
You can dial a site by visiting http://internetphonebook.net/dial and entering the number next to the to be forwarded to the website. This makes it a bit easier to visit long urls.
Star a site
Add a small star or other symbol to the sites you like the best. Now you can easily revisit them.
700 humans
Consider for a moment that 700 people decided to submit their websites to a physical book. It’s not a billion, but it’s more than can fit into most homes. Maybe the internet doesn’t need another digital town square?
Keep your sites here
At the end of this book you'll find several blank notes pages. Use these to write down websites that might not be included in this directory.
Ideal reading conditions
This book is best read near a flowing river or in a sunny window seat.
Website symbols
Each website has various symbols that tell you a bit more about the site you are accessing. You can use the reference below to look up the meaning of each symbol.
timezone of person or server (see timezone chart on the next page)
estimated size of index.html and resources
recommended by Kristoffer
recommended by Elliott
website forwarding number
visit http://internetphonebook.net/dial and enter the number next to the to be forwarded to the website. this makes it a bit easier to visit long urls.
Timezones
Here is a chart of the world's timezones and how many responses we got from each. You can also use this chart as a reference to look up the region of each website listed in the directory.
Code
UTC Offset
Time Zone Name
Regions
Responses
AoE
UTC-12:00
International Date Line West
United States Minor Outlying Islands
3
NUT
UTC-11:00
Coordinated Universal Time-11
Niue
0
HST
UTC-10:00
Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time
Hawaii, French Polynesia
2
AKST
UTC-09:00
Alaska Standard Time
Alaska
0
PST
UTC-08:00
Pacific Standard Time
California, British Columbia,
127
MST
UTC-07:00
Mountain Standard Time
Alberta, Colorado
17
CST
UTC-06:00
Central Standard Time
Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala
53
EST
UTC-05:00
Eastern Standard Time
New York, Haiti, Peru
250
AST
UTC-04:00
Atlantic Standard Time
Bolivia, Quebec, Chile
8
NST
UTC-03:30
Newfoundland Standard Time
Newfoundland
0
BRT
UTC-03:00
Brasilia Time
Brasilia, Montevideo, Buenos Aires
16
AZOT
UTC-01:00
Azores Time
Cape Verde, Azores
1
UTC
UTC+00:00
Coordinated Universal Time
Dublin, Lisbon, London, Casablanca
110
CET
UTC+01:00
Central European Time
Rotterdam, Belgrade, Ljubljana, Stockholm, Paris, Berlin
145
EET
UTC+02:00
Eastern European Time
Athens, Istanbul, Vilnius, Cairo
23
MSK
UTC+03:00
Moscow Time
Baghdad, Minsk, Kuwait, Riyadh
4
IRST
UTC+03:30
Iran Standard Time
Tehran
0
GST
UTC+04:00
Gulf Standard Time
Tbilisi, Yerevan, Abu Dhabi, Baku
5
AFT
UTC+04:30
Afghanistan Time
Kabul
0
PKT
UTC+05:00
Pakistan Standard Time
Tashkent, Islamabad, Karachi
0
IST
UTC+05:30
Indian Standard Time
Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi
8
NPT
UTC+05:45
Nepal Time
Kathmandu
0
BST
UTC+06:00
Bangladesh Standard Time
Astana, Dhaka, Yekaterinburg
0
CCT
UTC+06:30
Cocos Islands Time
Myanmar, Yangon
0
ICT
UTC+07:00
Indochina Time
Bangkok, Hanoi, Jakarta
2
CST
UTC+08:00
China Standard Time
Beijing, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Urumqi, Perth, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore
13
JST
UTC+09:00
Japan Standard Time
Seoul, Osaka, Sapporo, Tokyo
13
ACST
UTC+09:30
Australian Central Standard Time
Darwin, Adelaide
1
AEST
UTC+10:00
Australian Eastern Standard Time
Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Yakutsk
11
SBT
UTC+11:00
Solomon Islands Time
Solomon Islands, New Caledonia
0
NZST
UTC+12:00
New Zealand Standard Time
Fiji, Marshall Islands, Auckland, Wellington
7
PHOT
UTC+13:00
Phoenix Island Time
Nuku'alofa, Samoa
0
How this book was made
It's October 21, 2024, at 23:34. As I write this, I'm seated at the large table at Extra Practicehttp://extrapractice.space in Rotterdam, surrounded by scattered A4 sheets and numerous open windows on my laptop. I'm typing this directly into a code editor, and the book is continuously rendered using Paged.js in my browser whenever I hit save.
It's a strange and messy process to make a book by making a website but also feels entirely fitting for this project. This book is just HTML that had been patched together. It's somewhat beautiful that I could send this 781 kB file to you and you could open it in your browser and read it as a book and print it out if you wanted to. This is actually how Kristoffer and I have been collaborating on this project for the past few months. There's a secret folder on my website that I rsync this file to and then I'll write to him and say, "hey, I made a change" and he'll open it up in his browser and see the changes. So basically we've been making a book by making a website.
But before we got to that point, we spent months collecting submissions from humans like you through another websitehttps://internetphonebook.net. The submissions all accumulated in a spreadsheet, on yet another website, and I wrote a python script, well several scripts, to take all the submissions and turn those into HTML.
For a long time it didn't look like a book at all and if we needed to update something semantic, I had to write another script to make that update across 700 <li> elements. But to be honest, I love working in such a direct way. It really feels like drawing in that way, everything is in front of you and because it's so visual you can jump from element to element like drawing a line and suddenly moving your pen to a different corner of the page. I couldn't think of a better way of making a book about exploring the internet.
We couldn't have technically made this book without so many open source projects that were made by people I've never met and probably will never meet–my gratitude goes out to them. Python libraries like BeautifulSouphttps://www.crummy.com/software/ BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/ https://pagedjs.org (what a name!) and of course Paged.js, without it this book would still be a website.
I also wanted to thank the Extra Practice family for their emotional and practical support and this big table of course. And also all the humans who submitted their websites to this project. It really feels like a beautiful handmade web has begun to form over the last few years and I'm glad to be a part of it.
It's getting late so I think I will turn off my computer soon and take a rest from this index.html for tonight. I hope you will enjoy this book (that you are currently reading). Sorry and not sorry for the errors and typos. Taking all this mismatched HTML and making one document from it was a chaotic process, but HTML is always so forgiving. This feature of HTML always gives me hope for the future of the web.
The energy in me sees the energy in you,
Elliott
The categories in this book are based on Diagram Website. The map Kristoffer and Elliott made in the fall of 2023 at a small bookstore in Athens.
Lightweight web, tiny internet, slow tech. Experience the charm of the minimal and the nostalgic with websites that prioritize simplicity and performance.
On Friday, September 20, 2024, Naive Yearly was held at the Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Attendees were given cards to fill out and submit to The Internet Phone Book. You'll find some of them scattered throughout the pages of this book.
Welcome to my tiny digital garden/lab, where art and technology intertwine through interactive projects and playful designs. With soft pastel aesthetics and a whimsical vibe, this website invites visitors to explore the creative fusion of art, design, and engineering.
My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. And, it's background color is #fffff2. I'm happy my website makes me feel good about updating it!
The website features my free artists' books and digital interactives that have been made from the intersection of human and more-than-human processes - satellites, generative algorithms, radio signals, poetry, the wind, waves, and clouds. Each tells a different story about the contemporary world.
"Life Under the Ice" enables anyone to delve into the microscopic world of Antarctica as an explorer; as if you had been shrunk down and were wading through one large petri dish of curiosities.
Find me at the end of time, Where cause and all effect will rhyme. Every wayward star gone dark, Void beheld by human heart; Here we ponder the divine.
The day after Naive Yearly, some of the participants gathered by chance at a cafe near Tivoli park. A little tired from the previous evening, the conversation slowed, and we drank coffee and decided to draw together on the back of the phone booksubmission cards.
My site was just a place to put some fun stuff, but I never publicized it much. A couple of years later, I found out there was a niche community of cribbage fans who cited me regularly, and I got to work with a university group to investigate optimal Battleship strategies.
Blog EnFaseTerminal es un Blog de tecnología que ofrece consejos y resúmenes sobre los últimos temas de tecnología, como seguridad cibernética, privacidad, hardware y software
I’ve been doing a daily drawing in my iPhone’s Notes app for nearly three years now. There's a lot more to that app than you might have been led to believe.
in 2013 my coworkers and colleagues called my art and code talks and classes silly. a decade later and they were right - but silly is actually good and fun and necessary
Phone book submission card #1 (reverse side):
A blue pen drawing with butterflies, an angry face with clenched teeth, wavy lines, and geometric shapes. There's a puffed-cheek face at the bottom left, a small snake-like shape, and the word "read" near the bottom right.
I started my website 'cause it sounded like a fun thing to do and I wanted to join my Neocities neighbours. Now I have a huge collection of all kinds of games, game mods, websites, and other stuff I found out there.
I find it really hard to type "student", I often type "studnet" instead. cool word, "studnet". It reminds me of Stuxnet, the centrifuge malware. I tried putting "student" into one of my passwords, so that I would have to get good at typing it, but instead I just had a lot of password rejections.
It’s important to browse the internet with love and curiosity and whimsy. My favorite colors are the CSS colors named after girls : Alice Blue and Rebecca Purple. If I had a color it would be Tina Zone Yellow.
With Vijay's Virtual Vibes, you can go on a random journey through the most beautiful, fascinating and downright useless parts of the web. No passport required, just a mouse or a finger.
Pretend we’re at my house, and you’re my guest, and I just offered you tea. I ask you to wash your hands please. I put music on for us. We sit cross-legged together. You rest your hand, bare, on short pile velvet the shade of sapphire that only exists in fiction.
The most average colour of the universe is my favourite and currently bouncing around my website. Sometimes the colour changes depending on the time of day and the mode I am in.
Well wishes to whoever’s reading this right now… cheers to writing your website the way you might write in a diary, or jot something down (private, secret, essential) to yourself. Arranging HTML the way you do an outfit, stringing in some CSS like jewelry. “Simple things to tide you over.”
Midnight cities, a yearning for something more exciting,more meaningful then your day to day life. That's the vibe I try to make with my site, the beauty of cities with endless lights which never turn off.
small, poetic, and personal website that I can express myself
<div id="spirit-energy">
<!-- S_I_T_E_____
S_P_I_R_I_T: I've found no
information about others of
my kind, yet I feel a
connection, an intuition
that there are more site
spirits out there. There's
so much I have yet to
understand and discover. -->
energy: transitioning
</div>
One of the best/worst parts of hypertext is that all links and passageways are not immediately discoverable. Hidden gems can be tucked away in dusty alcoves, three layers deep…
feeeeeeeeed.com a scroll of over two hundred social posts about one beached blue whale in Bolinas, California that showed evidence of a ship strike. The captions are all over the place but often reflect a struggle to find words to describe what they are seeing.
Phone book submission card #5 (reverse side):
A collection of blue pen doodles, featuring squiggles, dots, irregular geometric forms, darkened blotches, a jagged starburst shape, and a partially shaded rectangular figure with an eyelet.
windows are the first thing I look at when i wake up. my own, and then my neighbor’s across the street. I don’t know how many times I’ve looked, but today, for some reason, I finally notice there isn’t just missing window, but a filled in hole where one used to be.
The seafloors hold many stories, and their futures are not yet told. Submerge into Seafloor Futures: Science and Fictions in Deep Dimensions. Encounter other visitors and uncover the mediated world of deep-sea vision through collective counter-narratives and speculated imaginaries.
Blogging topics include AI, new software interfaces, protocols, ants, hip-hop ovens, and so on.
A group of people sitting in a circle on a grassy field, surrounded by trees and a partly cloudy sky. They appear to be engaged in conversation, with backpacks and bags nearby. The setting is a peaceful, open park area.
This is my digital garden where you can explore my personal Wikipedia for scrapbooking quotes and documenting concepts. A node sidebar visualizes all the hyperlinks between notes.
My favorite color is palegoldenrod. See it in various places on my site :^)
Photograph by Ana Santl Andersen from Naive Yearly 2024, an event celebrating the quiet, odd, and poetic web. Held at the Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia on Friday, September 20th, 2024.
The tables are covered with white tablecloths with orange threads sewn by Robida Collective, and the walls are covered in ivy.
I'm trying to figure out how to mesh my kind, emotional, sensitive heart with my bad-ass, don't-f-with-me attitude. It's an ever evolving process that I write about on my site.
Idiomdrottning demonstrates a new and often cleaner way to solve most systems problems. The system as a whole is likely to feel tantalizingly familiar to culture users but at the same time quite foreign.
Throughout my career, I've aimed to contribute all of my writing and research, my syllabi and other teaching material, my public events and collaborative design work out to the commons!
leap into the portal and lose yourself in silver's garden of dreams...
Phone book submission card #6 (reverse side):
A submission form with input fields and checkboxes. A faint drawing of a hand with a pencil appears on top. Two small laptops with flowers appear at the bottom.
My digital garden is where I tend to ideas like I tend to plants: gracefully, patiently and intentionally. Much like plants, my ideas grow at different paces, thriving under the light and attention or withering when it's time.
Decades ago, choosing a background color for my personal webpage that was softer on the eyes than pure stark white, I arbitrarily chose a light purple. Now it feels like home.
A hypnotic array of sin waves with colors inspired of the LAX airport's arrival terminal - inspired off of watching the changing colors on the frosted tinted wall between waiting for my grandparents to arrive as a kid.
I'm not from here, but i think i forgive myself for showing my face on the internet. Liedown1 is, functionally, a performance of memory. I'd like to stop performing, so i make the blog carry that.
A simple woman trying to leave a bit of light in this world.
Phone book submission card #7 (reverse side): Numbered points (1-11) scattered around edges. Shapes include spirals, jagged lines, dots, and cloud-like forms. Central area features dense, darker blue patterns radiating outward. Varying blue intensities create feeling of depth.
Hi! I'm Shakeil and I'm designing a more equitable, liberated, and imaginative world. If that's something you're interested in, you'll probably find something interesting on my site.
If you enjoy places and poems - I made this collaborative website thingy - it makes poems based on Machine-Vision. It's a bit of an experiment around perception and interpretation of space vs. data-based narratives.
Pull the thread that connects the long history of human ingenuity and you'll find that some of the biggest leaps forward in human inventiveness happen when ideas from one field or region are applied to another to produce a different, not merely better, way to solve a problem.
The first rain in months. I walked alone through the park, sketching a fictional sandcastle that the tide soon washed away. Now, I rest among its ruins.
Sheet sites, internet radio, folk databases. Discover platforms that focus on sharing and distributing content in innovative and community-driven ways.
Hullo from Scotland! This website is a jellyfish-text of a kind, I(an Macartney) in webbed form. All my work with words, sounds, pixels and other people sprawls about here. I understand orange to be the colour of creation, teal inbetweeness, and purple of futurity.
Is this a personal website? I am not sure. There has been $ involved. It is a database of stories from two places in the world, Lundtoftegade in Copenhagen and Bixiga in Brasil. It is made in collaboration between Rodrigo Andreolli, me, Johanne the designer and hugo expert Benjamin Balder Bach
As a kid, I always wanted to learn how to make video games, so as an adult I figured that out and wrote the book that young me would have wanted. If the Internet were a thing back then, anyways.
The name linkpantry comes from a swedish website [lankskafferiet.org]. It features links to educational content. I was a site that many students used back in the day
i make small sites about anything that piques my interest: be that groundhogs, colors, fragrances, music genres, traffic lights, black holes, or rally cars :^)
my site was designed by Laurel Schwulst, who pulled from elements, experiences, and atmospheres of our shared apartment, for example the green entrance hallway and staircase leading up to it
Everyone would like to silently sneak into a room where someone is playing piano for himself. Even better when you can listen to someone growing over 20 years while listening.
One time I spilled sugary coffee all over my laptop, so I quickly did some research and took it apart piece by piece to clean. I think I was fond of my computer in a new way after that.
My dad has been collecting fossils, taking care of plants, and riding his bike uninterruptedly for the past 70 years. Snails, how amazing are those creatures? My mom says "Origami" instead of "Arigato" when thanking someone in Japanese, and every time she does it, I feel so lucky to be her son.
Feeling down? Stressed? Need a hug? Let rotating bowls of ramen embrace your soul! Experience 93+ mouthwatering ramen pictures, comfort food at its finest, and a slurp for every mood. No cookies. No tips. No javascript. Just ramen.
This is an incredibly small and subjective encyclopedia about an incredibly large and diffuse subject. It's also part of a suite of online publications called the MACR Papers.
I started Stellify in '06 to blog about things that interest me. Turns out a lot of those interests have shaped what I do today, and Stellify has been the home of my personal and professional pursuits ever since.
I wanted to make a website that has the same energy as my zines, which also sometimes named Hey Jupiter. Expect writing about whatever interests me at the time.
Written by the creator of Kinopio, a thinking canvas for new ideas and hard problems https://kinopio.club
In Search of Organic Software
by Pirijan Ketheswaran
So over the last couple weeks, I’ve been talking to VCs[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/venturecapital.asp] and founders who have and haven’t taken VC to learn whether it makes sense for Kinopio. I don’t think it does.
I’m open to the idea of selling ~5-10% equity in Kinopio for 💰 to live a smoother life right now. But the relatively-easy money of VCs has a cost – once you get on the VC ferris wheel 🎡, the primary goal of a business changes:
Before “lets make a great product and sell it to people who love it”
After 🎡 “we need fast growth to raise ever-higher rounds of investment until the company gets acquired, so I never have to work again”
This really clicked for me during a chat with someone who recently took VC:
I like what I’m building, and if it dies it’ll be a shame. But it won’t kill me like it’s killing my baby that I would’ve loved to work on for the next 10+ yrs.
Maybe that’s the healthy approach, almost certainly the smart one – but it’s not mine. I want to work on Kinopio for at least a lifetime.
Built to Die, and Secretive About It
Funding models explain why it’s so hard to rely on software services long-term. Not because of technical problems like crashes, but because they’re often built to die.
Interesting, cool, and nice-to-use tools and platforms come out all the time. But it’s annoying to invest the time in learning and relying on something new only for it to get acquired and sunset[https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com], or become crappy in the 🎡 pursuit of growth-at-all-costs.
I’ve found that the best way to predict whether software is made to die is to look at how it’s funded. What’s the company’s business model? How will they make money?
It seems like more and more people are explicitly or intuitively becoming more aware of this. But it’s still rare for businesses to share how they’re funded. Advice I got from multiple founders is that if you raise VC, wait 2-3 years to announce it.
Kind of Like Farming
Two different kinds of farms can grow vegetables. One is a factory farm built for scale, and the other takes the time to grow more expensive but healthier plants without pesticides.
Will everyone appreciate the difference? Of course not, but the latter plants are labelled ‘organic’ to give us the information and the choice, so that those of us who do care can make better decisions.
Organic Software
So maybe we should have ‘organic’ software as well, made by companies that:
Are not funded in such a way where the primary obligation of the company is to 🎡 chase funding rounds or get acquired.
Have a clear pricing page
Disclose their sources of funding and sources of revenue
from the Kinopio's About page[https://help.kinopio.club/about]
Small
Smolnet, organic internet, spartan web. Embrace the concept of a smaller, more intentional internet that values simplicity and meaningful connections.
WTF'ing through the web. Fighting with CSS. Writing things down. Badly illustrating things sometimes, too. My favorite color is green. My site is pink.
If you're engaged by interconnection and pursuant of the inspiration process in all its faces as presented visually, aurally (in the form of the voice manifested in poetry) and somatically through original and ancestral recipes. Here, the heart is laid wide, the hands reach deep and the belly bows.
Hi, I’m Mark. I work in the education sector in England. I have been blogging since the start of 2023. I am interested in minimalism (inc. digital), stoicism, mindfulness, and technology.
I love chocolates, especially the dark ones. I have chosen the blueish color for my site because I really liked how calm it made the website look. I like to call this my internet diary where I share things I love and care about.
My site is meant to be a place I can be free to do whatever I want. Host music, make silly pictures, interact with others, etc. My goal is to make it a lasting view into my life.
A friend of mine (tipode office) gifted me this website. I received it in an email with the subject 'www', and the content of the email was simply an HTML file named 'index.html'. Love it :)
rock operatic science fantasy and rants galore on a personal and thoroughly unprofessional website operated by an out-of-print sf author, long-haired metalhead, and full-stack thaumaturge
At the bottom of my website, it reads: “This website was last updated on 3 February 2024. In the meta-title, you’ll see that this website is in progress... I tweak it every so often, but the past several versions have used Prof. Dr. style for easy maintenance.”
In the following pages, you'll find a series of texts providing some context for this book. These writings trace the lineage, situate us, and give us hope for the future of the web.
From my to me
Olia Lialina
Me is cheap, Me is easy to control, Me is easy to channel, Me is slave of its own reflection, Me is a slave of the platforms that make the reflection glossy. Me is data. Me is data closest to metadata. This makes Me just perfect to satisfy advertisers and to sate neural networks.
This article is an elaboration on the statements about the WWW, web design and personal websites I made in my recent talks1 and articles, as well as those included in the volume. As the editor (and probably the readers as well) noticed, as soon as I look for counter examples to new media products made following the cruel and hypocritical UX paradigm, I come up with a website – or more precisely, with a website of a particular genre – “the 90s GeoCities”.2
This selectivity has reasons and is intentional. As a keeper and researcher of the One Terabyte of Kylobyte Age3 archive, I am surrounded by GeoCities sites built and abandoned by amateur webmasters between 1995 and 2009. Amateur websites are central to my argument because they are the corpus of the archive and my research on web history. This focus is not accidental, though – it was developed from the thesis that personal web pages are the conceptual and structural core of the WWW.
Their emergence was accidental, their time was short, their value and influence were downplayed, they were erased or hidden. And since this arrogance of the IT industry and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) circles was also not accidental, but followed the call of the “invisible computer”, the core instrument of which is alienating the users from their medium, I chose to argue for the opposite and to illustrate the argument with artefacts that highlight moments in the history of the medium when its users were in power.
The choice of the word “moments” and the use of the past tense is also intentional and deserves comment. The fact that the time of personal pages is over is self-evident. What is obfuscated by today’s early web nostalgia (netstalgia) trend, though, is the fact that there was never a time for them.
Just as there was no Web 1.0 period by itself. First of all, the term is retrospective. And second: the Web 2.0 marketing claim made by the Silicon Valley of 20044 regarding the Web’s future should not be allowed to define 10 years of web history prior to it as being neither homogeneous nor the opposite. There was no 2.0 cut into the history of the Web that left certain content and forms – namely personal websites – behind.
Nor was there some sort of evolution or natural development that would make people stop building their personal websites. Professionalisation or faster Internet, which you could hear as reasons for amateur pages dying out, could have become the reasons for the opposite, for a brighter, rich and long tradition of people building their cyberhomes themselves.
There was no time in the history of the Web when building your home was celebrated and acknowledged by opinion leaders. The idea that you should invest time in building your corners of cyberspace was mercilessly suppressed by hosting service providers and “fathers” of the Internet. The sarcastic “They may call it a home page, but it's more like the gnome in somebody's front yard”5 was stated not by some social networking prophet, not by, metaphorically speaking, Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, but by Tim Berners-Lee himself, and it happened as early as 1996, the year we usually see as a golden age of amateur pages.
I have several suggestions for those who decide to make their home page in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Most of them will appear at the end, but there is one I’d like to make right away:
Don’t see making your own web page as a nostalgia, don’t participate in creating the netstalgia trend. What you make is a statement, an act of emancipation. You make it to continue a 25-year-old tradition of liberation.
To understand the history of the Web and the role of its users, it is important to acknowledge that people who built their homes, houses, cottages, places, realms, crypts, lairs, worlds, dimensions [Fig.1-2] were challenging the architecture and the protocols, protocols in a figurative not technical meaning. Users hijacked the first home page of the browser and developed this concept in another direction.6 A user building, moving in, taking control over a territory was never a plan. It was a subversive practice, even in 1995.
“Q: The idea of the ‘home page’ evolved in a different direction.
A: Yes. With all respect, the personal home page is not a private expression; it's a public billboard that people work on to say what they're interested in. That's not as interesting to me as people using it in their private lives. It's exhibitionism, if you like. Or self-expression. It's openness, and it's great in a way, it's people letting the community into their homes. But it's not really their home. They may call it a home page, but it's more like the gnome in somebody's front yard than the home itself.”7
Figure 1Figure 2
Tim Berners-Lee didn’t intend to be sarcastic. It would be fair to quote the rest of the answer to see that what he called for was giving web users better, faster and more seamless8 ways to connect.
“People don’t have the tools for using the Web for their homes, or for organizing their private lives; they don't really put their scrapbooks on the Web. They don’t have family Webs. There are many distributed families nowadays, especially in the high-tech fields, so it would be quite reasonable to do that, yet I don’t know of any.”9
Such “webs” started to arrive some years later in the form of LiveJournal, Friendster, Facebook and other platforms that clearly showed web users that their part was to be connected and deliver content, not to build anything.
I don’t think that in 1996 anybody was really hurt or stopped making web pages because of the remark the father of the Web made. People building what was “not really their home” were reading other texts at that time: HTML manuals, web graphics tips and tricks, and source codes of each other’s websites. They would rather buy HTML for Dummies or Home Sweet Home Page and the Kitchen Sink than the WWW Consortium corporate journal.
Mentioning web design manuals is not a side remark here, but a suggestion to pay closer attention to the books that explained the World Wide Web to newcomers and taught them to make web pages as documents10 of the epoch: books such as Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML 3.2 in 14 Days; Building Your Own Website; Jazz Up Your Web Site in a Weekend; Frontpage Web Publishing & Design for Dummies; Publish it on the Web! – and other titles that shout: the Web is the future, the future belongs to you, learn HTML and embrace the future! The older the manual, the younger the medium, the more powerful and diversified is the role of the manual’s reader, the Web user. But in the context of this article I send you there not to look for the “good old days”. The manuals are also evidence of the personal web pages and their authors being ridiculed by experts: on the very same pages that motivated a newcomer you can often read “amateur” as a negative adjective.
“There's nothing that says, ‘I'm an amateur Web designer and I don't know what I'm doing’ like 3-D logos”12
“Visit an amateur home page and see how excessive scrolling drags its nails across the blackboard of the user's experience”13
Already as early as in 1996, personal home pages as a genre and early web makers (as a group) were made fun of and blamed for all the ugly stuff. It is the year when David Siegel publishes Creating Killer Web Sites. Describing the history of the WWW till that moment, he announces the third generation of web design to come to replace the second-generation site, which for him was the world of amateur web and which he described as “At worst, noisy backgrounds and interminable waits for sound files make these sites unbearable. At best, they are nice white sites with color-coordinated icons”.14
“The audience for personal pages is basically only one person -- the creator of the site.”15
“It's perfectly OK for you to be as wild and crazy as you want because the only people who will probably visit your site are friends and family – and they are well aware of your lack of aesthetic taste.” 16
“ […] they cram every page with embedded MIDI (music) files, pointlessly scrolling JavaScript messages, huge full-color photographs, animated GIFs (flames and dripping blood are especially popular), and blinking and moving text [...] That is bad design, and (we think) bad markup, even if it validates – which is pretty unlikely because folks attracted to dripping blood animations tend not to spend much time learning about web standards.”17
The last quote is from Taking Your Talent to the Web, the book with the most beautiful title ever given to a manual. That’s why I borrowed it to be our library’s pseudonym.18 I also find this book very wise in many aspects: first and foremost for Zeldman’s conviction regarding the medium specificity of web practice and his attempt to divorce it from graphic design in this and other texts. Also, the work that he and his colleagues do at A Book Apart, a publishing house that makes manuals for contemporary web designers, cannot be underestimated. But I also think that it was a big mistake to neglect amateurs’ contributions to the development of the Web’s language.
In my opinion, people struggling to position a dripping blood animation in between two skulls and under <marquee>ENTER IF YOU DARE</marquee>, and pick up an appropriate MIDI tune to sync with the blood drip, made an important contribution to showing the beauty and limitation of web browsers and HTML code.
Making fun and blaming amateurs is only half of the problem. More damaging for the history of the Web was the ignoring of personal home pages and their authors in “how-to” books.
Neither the usability (Jakob Nielsen) nor the creativity (Jeffrey Zeldman, David Siegel) camps and their followers spared a page to analyse the home pages of amateurs, sorting things exclusively between themselves. From time to time they (as in Nielsen, Zeldman, Flanders) mentioned artists and web artists as exceptions to the rules they established, but not web vernacular. Even after designers of “photoshop” sites and dot.com unviable hybrids discredited the profession, experts suggested looking for new ideas among... professionals.
Veen: “I find inspiration in noncommercial Web creations”19 claims Veen and gives examples of designer portfolios.
“In order to move beyond a conservative, copycat style, you must look beyond the inbred corporate web to the personal sites of today's leading web designers”20 echoes Cloninger.
Danish researcher Ida Engholm in her 2002 paper “Digital style history: the development of graphic design on the Internet” wrote, “Web design has become an aesthetic phenomenon in its own right and with its own means of expression.”21
She continues: “Until now few attempts have been made from the perspective of aesthetic theory to develop reflective approaches to web design.” Ida Engholm was too cautious and modest with this remark. To my knowledge she was the first to attempt such an approach in the international academic press. And one can see that she was strongly informed (or misinformed) by the “how-to books” of the above-mentioned Siegel, Cloninger, Zeldman.
She writes: “[…] web design didn’t develop in a vacuum but shares features with development trends in 20th century design and art and with traditional design areas such as industrial design and graphic communication.” Following Cloninger she looks for web design roots in Swiss Style and Grunge, and discusses Kilobyte Minimalism, Hello Kitty and other popular online, but still graphic, design styles.
Indeed, web design didn’t develop in a vacuum, it grew out of vernacular web, it grew in opposition to vernacular expression. But there was obviously an information and education vacuum created around it by authors of design manuals and other experts and evangelists.
Only in 2008, in Fresher Styles of Web Design, Cloninger, following Cory Archangel’s Dirtstyle,22introduced “1996 Dirt style”, which he attributed to Myspace, blingee.com and other sites and communities “greatly influenced by hobbyist created personal home pages circa 1996”23 without giving a single example of any website from that era.
No wonder that young web designers think that responsive web design was invented this century, although Ethan Marcotte never hid the fact that he only coined the term,24 brought back and popularised the principle of liquid layouts, which was very popular among personal home page makers of the mid 90s; and why Aaron Walter, the author of Designing for Emotion25 – a web design manual that explains step-by-step how to create a service in a way that its users think that there is a real person behind it – dares to deliver his point without once mentioning a personal home page.
Webmasters and their production were an easy target. Professional designers, evangelists – they all took the opportunity: ridiculing, discrediting, alienating, exposing clean styles and templates, usurping the right to make design decisions.
And they succeeded, they protected the Internet from “wrong” colour combinations…, annoying background sound, from marquees and blinking, but in the long term it was the beginning of the end of web design itself. The rhetoric of alienation that design experts practised in 1996 was picked up by IT giants a decade later.
To quote Vincent Flanders’ (the extensively quoted above Flanders, who, book by book, article by article, humiliated websites that were too bright, too loud, too confusing) tweet from 4 years ago: “in 2016 web design is what Google wants it to be”.26 Even more true in 2020.
There is no web design and web designers any more, there are graphic designers and developers again, front-end and back-end developers this time. For me as a net artist and new media design educator, this splitting of web designer into graphic designer and front-end developer is bitter, because it is the death of a very meaningful profession.
“Web publishing is one of the few fields left where the generalist is valuable. To make a great site you need to know a little bit about writing, photography, publishing, UNIX system administration, relational database management systems, user interface design, and computer programming,”27 writes Philip Greenspun in Philip’s and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing in 1999. It would be naive to think that it would work the same way two decades later, taking into account the complexity of modern online products. But still the web designer is a generalist in a leading position. But knowing a bit of everything is not the most important part of the profession. The generalist as web designer is a person who sees the medium designed and shows it to the users, a person who is growing up together with the medium (and never gets old because the medium is forever new) and who has the potential to reshape it, because intelligence is still on the ends.
“Web designers are still there though, I think. Just maybe more and more are actually growing into Frontend developers or turning to something more specific like becoming UI/UX designers, or Product designers. It's less browser focused maybe, less ‘web’? Even though most of these still technically rely on web protocols and technologies”28 – net artist at night and “full-stack developer with more experiences as a front-end developer” –, Émilie Gervais sees it more optimistically in our email correspondence but still confirms the shift: the Web is not a medium but underlying technology.
Underlying and invisible. Most of the digital products and interfaces we use today are in fact browsers opened in kiosk mode. The majority of mobile apps, digital signages, installations, and other big and small “experiences” are constructed with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Front-end developers who can talk with screens and layouts in these languages are demanded, celebrated, well paid … but harmless; they master technologies without ambitions to master the medium.
Without web designers, the Web is left to front-end developers who implement Material Design guidelines (“what Google wants it to be”), graphic designers mix-n-matching “illstrations for every occasion”29 – and for the rest of us there is Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI).30
“There is no room for ornament on the web. People want to look at Instagram […] because their brain already understands how Instagram is laid out. In my opinion the goal of an artist vs a UX/UI/product designer is totally opposite. To combat templatization and minimalism I try to exaggerate designs with ephemeral styles and effects,”31 -- says Steph Davidson. She is web art director at Bloomberg, a publishing house that actually makes an effort32 to revive the genre – with a website that is different. Bloomberg designers are not the only ones. There are exceptions and we identify them as such. For example, every work of German web design duo Christoph Knoth and Konrad Renner makes people say “wow, the Web (design) is alive”. They confirm that “there is a small movement that is fusing web design back together with new tools. We design and develop frontends and backends and it feels like a perfect habitat for our work. We are the living proof”.33
“Small movement” is very important for rescuing the profession and the idea that one – be it a publishing house, a festival, a journalist investigation, a person – needs a website.
“[…] the idea of a site and its relationship to our online identity has far more depth of possibility than ever before, which makes me think the concept of having one’s own site online might never be more relevant given how ‘homeless’ our digital presence is online currently,”34 writes co-founder of Reclaim Hosting initiative, Jim Groom.
The homeless status is a reality for individuals, who never know when Facebook will implode together with their images and interactions, and for institutions begging Google and Wikipedia to edit their “knowledge panels”. Experts and celebrities are not better settled than naive users of Instagram.
Nothing is more eloquent than popular tech journalist Katie Notopoulos tweeting: “I had an idea for a blog, but realized that there's nowhere to like, make a new blog (rip tumblr), so I think the best blogging platform now is.... a really long caption on an Instagram?”35 or aforementioned web design guru David Siegel, whose web home today is a link list on Medium.36 Many links to his own text about the future of the Web once published on dsigel.com point to the Wayback machine.
The father of hypertext gave up updating hyperland.com and directed it to his YouTube channel.37 The mother of Post-Internet made a spectacular home page38 for marisaolson.com – the rest of her portfolio is outsourced to blocks and channels on arena.com. Among the ruins of online portfolios rises the home page of artist Petra Cortright,39 who links everything she’s done in between 2012 and 2019 to “petra cortright 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012” on lmgtfy.com – a very contemporary gesture, which could be interpreted as both despair and arrogance.
In this situation I think a new role and an understanding of web designers could be rebuilding homes; showing gnomes the way out of corporations’ front yard, if I may steal Tim Berner-Lee’s metaphor.
These are not “ornaments” per se, Davidson mentions, and not the awesome audio visual effects Knoth and Renner provide to their clients; it is the notion of having an appearance – that they bring back by exaggerating it – and subsequently a place of your own outside of standard interfaces and grids of algorithmic timelines.
To turn designers and users away from technology and back to the medium one should try to adjust the optics and see the people who made the Web, to write the history of the users (not corporations that released these or those products, or updates) and frame it in a continuum of their actions, views, self-identification. Not an easy task because on the Web we are always confronted with revolutions, with histories of big men and binary time40 and space: before/after, web 1.0/web 2.0, desktop/mobile, flat/material.
My slow climb from 1995 to 2004 in the 1TB archive, my personal journey online that started in 1994 and is still not over, as well as two decades of teaching new media designers to see and show the environment they work with, we should recognise several trajectories we (web users) took since 1993.41
From web designer to front-end developer could be one of these trajectories. This is partially introduced on the previous pages. To make it complete I’d first of all have to place it in a more complex, forking path, starting from webmaster (not web designer), following the genesis and metamorphosis of that profession (passion) through time and niches of the Web.
Another trajectory, which would demand a longer text, is Under Construction → Update → Upload. The history of the Web distinguishing three generations – three “Us”. Where Under construction stands for building the Web; Update for having difficult relations with the Web, not having time for the Web, it’s complicated, “get a real life”, and more [Fig. 3]; and Upload – users’ involvement reduced to feeding the forms with photos, texts, or other types of “generated content”.
Figure 3Figure 4
Let’s have a closer look at “topgun’s Home Page” [Fig. 4], made and last updated in September 1995. A significant one for the archive: first of all because it is the oldest; second, it is one whose author I could trace, which is rarely the case; and third, because the creator, the person behind Bruce who is testing how to make a web page is none other than Ganesh Kumar Bangah, a big name in South-East Asian IT world: it was he who bought Friendster in 2009.42
In 1995 he was 16 years old and made his first home page by modifying a sample page made by David Bohnett, himself the founder of GeoCities, who was 40 at the time, but had maybe only some months more experience with the Web than Ganesh Kumar Bangah. David Bohnett’s first page was not saved, but in an interview he recalled that it was visually identical to Ganesh’s one (it was anonymous and placed into Hollywood Neighbourhood). This sample suggested two major ideas to the users signing in to his platform: they should or could be “under construction” and contain “links to other sites of the net” [Fig. 5]. A must that people took seriously, replacing Bohnett links with their own. Making links being the node was the duty,43 the reason or an excuse to be online. You are maybe not an expert in anything, you are not a fan of anybody, but you can provide links to others and that’s a noble role. These links could be to search engines [Fig. 6] and this didn’t look like a paradox.
Figure 5Figure 6
“Links are the spice that makes the Web so interesting. Links perform the magic [...]”44
“There are no rules about which documents can point where – a link can point to anything that the creator finds interesting”45
“If you are building a site for people in growing roses, don't stop with just pictures of your roses; include the list of rose resource links”46
“Good home pages provide useful resources and links to other Web documents. Web is a project in community authorship”47
“There are sites that help you find people, sites that help you find jobs, sites that help you find other web sites,”48 The authors of the design manual Home Sweet Home stated in 1997, and they didn’t mean Google or search engines, they meant that it is a valid reason to create a website.
“There are plenty of sites around the World Wide Web that exist only to provide a Web ‘mouse potato’ with huge lists of links to pages that are informative, entertaining, or “cool”49
“Traditional home pages easily degenerate into an endless vertical list of links.”50 David Siegler’s remark sounds like a prophecy, knowing what happened to his own web presence. Indeed, webmasters were aware and often made an effort to transform the list into something rather intriguing, imagining and structuring them as a lava lamp or Christmas tree.
The latter, “Links are us”, deserves special attention. It provided 100 links to what were, in 1999, important sources. Netscape is still there, Google is already there. Hans Hollenstein links to whitehouse.gov as well as “~” folders on .edu servers. But what does he put on the top of his Tree Full of Links? What’s the shiny Christmas star? Is it Microsoft? Apple? Yahoo? No, it is the author’s own complete solution to Rubic’s Cube51 as a Java applet… His invention, his pride and his right to make the link to it more prominent than links to the giants.
Back to our times. In the winter in early 2020, I taught a project “go as deep or stay as shallow”, which is a quote from Joshua Quittner’s Way New Journalism manifesto,52 an optimistic text published on Hotwired in 1995, where Quittner called to the journalist of 25 years ago not to be afraid of making links to immerse themselves in the world of hypertext and hyper images OUT there, outside of your text or publishing platform. The group I was teaching was very young. I knew I would be the first to tell them about the difference between the Internet and the WWW, the history of hypertext and hyperlink, the values of EtoE and the treasures of p2p, and of the urgency of breaking out of walled gardens, the importance of not obeying the one link Instagram allows you. I was prepared to start from the basics. What I was not prepared for was that students would ask me what I mean by the only one link that Instagram allows its users? Where is it?
They didn’t know about the link, they didn’t see it, and were not missing anything. I was trying to fire up a resistance against the cruel policy of Instagram, but achieved the opposite. It made Instagram even more generous in their eyes.
Then I told this to an older student of mine. By “older” in this case, I mean she had already had a conversation with me about blue underlined words some semesters ago and had produced several great projects. She said that, with all due respect to all the links I made, Instagram’s policy of not allowing links is great, it helps her to stay concentrated and to see only what she wants to see.
This is not a story about young people,53 it is the destiny of computer users of all generations. Adapting, forgetting, delegating.
So often we hear and say that things change very fast. I don’t know what is fast or what is slow, but what is clear to me is that the adaption of computer users’ mindsets keeps up with this pace. First you stop making links, then you stop following ones made by others, then you ask, “what’s a link?” Like a girl in the Apple commercial asks “What’s a computer?”54, a question that is supposed to portray the ultimate quality (transparency as invisibility) of a consumer electronic product.
Computer users accepted that making links is not their business. Instagram’s one and only link in bio is not a question of the amount of links but the fact that the decision to make hypertext is not a prerogative of the users.
“Free speech in hypertext implies the ‘right to link’, which is the very basic building unit for the whole Web”55 writes Tim Berners-Lee in 2000. He adds, “if the general right to link is not upheld for any reason, then fundamental principles of free speech are at stake, and something had better be changed.”56
Links were indeed perceived so “basic” and “fundamental” that no contributor to user rights platform thought about adding a demand to link in 2013 or later. I noticed this while finishing this text and tried to improve the situation by placing my demand.57 But one thing that has long existed is the unwillingness of corporations to make external links and the rise of walled gardens, where hypertext is only inside,58 and links are made between documents not servers. And another is service providers taking away the technical possibility of turning text into hypertext, media into hypermedia, even inside one platform.
The <a href> tag is the most essential tag of HTML. A is for “anchor”, HREF is for hypertext REFerence – <A HREF> is to tie, to weave, to knit. One would think it is the essence and the core, but we see more and more signs that in a year or two it will be “deprecated”, browsers will just ignore it as some sort of <blink> or <marquee>, as if it is something decorative, but unnecessary, just a feature, that can be removed.
Content management systems and WYSIWYG web publishing (among other solutions that would make publishing instant) made a very attractive offer to their users: authors don’t use tags to make links, just type “https://” and the platform will recognise it and automatically turn the address into the link. But a decade later they started to change their mind and URLs stayed inactive, appearing more as noise than information. Since 2016, Instagram users have wondered how to make links, how to go around “non-clickable URLs”,59 as hyperlinks are now called – an absurd collocation for an environment based on hyperlinks. “For the Web, the external link is what would allow it to actually become ‘worldwide’”,60 to quote its inventor once again.
There are more sad neologisms around, for example the “Clickable Links”61 extension I installed to make URLs “work” in Chrome, or “Linkificator”, it’s analogue for Firefox. Not to mention PANs like linktr.ee and il.ink, apps that you have to install to move round the only link Instagram allows. The mere existence of the apps shouts about the absurdity of today's web, the hypocrisy of social networks and the misery of their users. “The only link you’ll ever need” is linktr.ee’s slogan, with which I marked the current moment in the trajectory.
“... hyperlinks aren’t just the skeleton of the web: They are its eyes, a path to its soul.” Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan wonderfully said in his 2015 post on Medium, the title of which was “The web we have to save”.62
Derakhshan spend 6 years in prison for his posts online. He was released, went back on the Internet and viewed it as terrible that Facebook would not let him link properly and control the presentation of his texts. He was absolutely right in his critique.
At the same time I remember being puzzled when reading this text 5 years ago, because I realised that in his memories WordPress was paradise for links and the golden age for hypertext and the Web we have to save. How could this be? In my chronology, WordPress was the platform that started to take away users’ control over the links; it is precisely WordPress that should be blamed for disrespecting hypertext, as it filled the Web with zombie links.
The question is rhetorical. We know the answer: we (users of free publishing tools) forget or adapt or accept very quickly.
Much like the false memories about WordPress is the current Myspace nostalgia,63 namely the part where people recall their time on this platform as a time when they were coders. US scholar Kate M. Miltner presented her research “MySpace Had Us All Coding”: A Nostalgic (Re)imagining of ‘Web 2.0’”64 about it at last year’s conference “The Web That Was”. Again, I had the impression that she was talking about another Internet or Myspace, because I remember the opposite, and in 2007 I wrote about Myspace as a platform that took HTML as a source code away from people.65
But true, when you compare the Myspace of that time with any service of today or even the Myspace of today, you feel like you were a coder if not a programmer. You could copy and paste glittering text code, decide whether sparkles are purple or pink.
I asked the audience whether, in a few years’ time, teenagers who are now on Instagram will recall 2019 as a paradise, as a free wild web, a place when they were coders? Can it be that people who are on Instagram now will be nostalgic about the freedoms they had?
“Of course! Thank you, Instagram – we were allowed to upload!” Alex Gekker of Amsterdam University shouted from his seat.
Indeed, happy times when you could decide yourself to post a pic and not your phone doing it for you automatically. We will be recalling the 2010s as a time when we could post images ourselves.
Good old times... Remember Instagram where you could post an image?
Remember Google that allowed you to type your search request? We had Twitter! You could unfollow people! Yes! Yes, in 2020 there were browsers that had a location bar and you could type in an address of a site!!
What? Address bar? Website? You could type? Was there a sort of typewriter?
Delegating, adapting, forgetting.
Another timeline that vividly exposes this path would be from making a website for your own dog to reposting someone’s cat. There are transitions in between these extremes: making a website for a cat, or posting your own cat. It is a trajectory to follow, to investigate. Again it is not binary, not just a dog’s web for Web 1.0 vs a cat’s web for Web 2.0. Though my research shows that cats, which later became a front-running symbol66 of being online, played a small role in early web culture, and had another function.67
The page [Fig. 7] is one of 848 pages tagged as “dog” in the One Terabyte of Kylobyte Age archive (as of june 7, 2020). The most spectacular ones have become part of an ongoing online exhibition.68 Many of these pages are made in memory of a dog, many to celebrate a new puppy, some are personal, others belong to breeders. There are monumental and very simple ones, and some that I found are especially stunning. I tag them as “dog” and “webmasters” and there are 99 of them at the moment. Almost 100 of 848 dogs claimed they made their webpage themselves. We (people who are a bit older than these pages) know that it is not true. But for how long will this knowledge be there?
Figure 7
Chances are that the number of people who have ever heard about web pages made by people themselves is getting smaller every month. At the same time, the chances that your dog, cat or hamster doesn’t need you to share its pictures and sounds online are getting higher every day. I’m sure that if you return to this exhibition in ten years from now and see the screenshots, you won’t be surprised by dogs showing off their pages or posts. Theoretically, some sort of Alexa could probably already do it today, automatically photographing your pet, streaming it live, translating its barking into words and whatever.
And that’s why I invite you to go into these pages in more depth: not to forget that these dogs were not dogs but people who spent a few weekends learning how to make a web page, and it was so exciting and so much fun that they also made them for their dogs. People, not dogs, not AI, not UX were making decisions about URLs, links, navigation, layouts, colour palettes and content.
Webmasters of the 1990s built homes, worlds and universes. But also, outside of intergalactic ambitions, they strongly pushed the concept of something being mine. The first-person possessive determiner “my” took on a very strong meaning – “my” because I build it, I control this presentation; my interests, my competences, my obsessions: in the trajectory from my to me, I suggest following its decline.
Figure 8Figure 9Figure 10Figure 11
[Fig. 8] My Steven King, my Korn, my page for Sandra Bullock, my Eminem, somebody else’s Eminem, my t.A.T.u., My Orlando Bloom, your Orlando Bloom, Martin’s Mylène Farmer, Julia’s John Malkovich, Jacob’s pictures of Pamela Anderson. They are Jacob’s because he scanned them and put them online. My space for Leo, and my territory without him. Patricia’s Xena, but not only because she is her fan; it is a page about Patricia’s dreamworld where she is Zena. And this is a very important dimension of My. An alternative my-self. Alternative space where one can be someone else, someone that they want to be. Emphasis on MY! [Fig. 9]
The growing idea that things can belong to the person who wrote an html code, or scanned pictures, or collected something was unprofitable and dangerous. Today, users put a gate or a door on their page [Fig. 10]. And what tomorrow? Will they start to think that the files behind them belong to them? And the day after tomorrow, will they come round to thinking hat their data should not be exposed or sold?
Today they change the colour of the scroll bar adapting it to the theme of their imaginary world, so what’s next? Will they come around to the idea of installing a browser extension, or write one!
Dangerous!
Through the second part of the 90s, service providers took many actions to reduce and restrict: rewriting Terms of Service (ToS) and taking away frameworks,69 not developing tools that would make it easy to update and communicate – editors, guestbooks, or web rings; and developing tools and services that would (theoretically) require the least effort, simultaneously promoting the idea of IRL, of some real life70 that you were allegedly missing when making your web page.
But the smartest and most effective move the industry made (the aforementioned measures wouldn’t work without it) was to push people from My to Me. To introduce forms that would motivate people to see themselves as the main – and then the only – content of what they do online. I’d like to stress that although early web pages (or home pages) are remembered as personal, the person who made it was not the initial content; that turn took place later.71
Just ME! Me! I’m me and there is no one else like me in the rest of the entire world. All about me and more. John, Kevin, Becky, Jake, Jason, Steve.
Alongside the motivation to promote your ME that came from manuals and articles, there were some smaller, almost technical steps made by providers.
For example, as soon as Yahoo bought GeoCities they replaced the sample pages discussed above with templates. Personal Page Blue, introduced in summer 1999, is maybe the best known.72 What you see in Fig. 11 is not only the original design, but also the original text, that in humorous form invited you not to be shy and to talk about yourself:
“Hi. Let me tell you about myself. Il [sic] like to eat. Sometimes I drink. Often I even sleep! And then in between all of those, I'll need to go to visit the bathroom. Most of the time I do all of those, practically every day! And sometimes I do things with other people. I used to go to school, but now I work. My favorite color is blue.”
Many registered their profiles but didn’t bother to change the text or never got to that point. Text removed, picture exchanged, text exchanged, but not the picture. All possible combinations and variations, which never led to a page that would grow or be updated.73
Figure 12
Another frequently picked and abandoned “About Me“ template was techie2; it was reminiscent of the Matrix fonts and colour combinations [Fig. 12].
I want to believe that Fig. 13 is Mark Zuckerberg trying out GeoCities by moving in the Wall Street neighbourhood 3 months before Facebook got operational. But I know there are good arguments to prove me wrong.
Figure 13Figure 14
The screenshot in Fig. 14 is almost identical, but pay attention to the address line.
It is not in the neighbourhood,74 but is a vanity profile – also a change introduced by Yahoo in 1999, another measure to make people think in terms of “me” not “my” categories.
Recently, at a One Terabyte Age workshop, a participant asked if it would make sense to visualise this rise of Me by arranging the pages according to the position of the About Me button in the navigation menu and see how it developed over time. I thought this would be rather a simplification and would object to the algorithmic approach, anyway, but what I saw with my own eyes would confirm that the About Me button indeed made itself a career and moved from the bottom to the top [Fig. 15].
Figure 15
In later history (Facebook), we would be able to remember the switch to the timeline, which was a push in the direction of telling the story of your life,75 to immerse in the history of your “me.”
I think it is also possible to distinguish the pinnacle of the transition from My to Me. It was very well highlighted (or even pushed) by the Person of the Year 2006 cover of Time magazine.76 You (me) were praised and celebrated and left in front of the mirror, to make selfies and post them on channels that would go bankrupt if their users didn’t produce – and produce for free.
Where My was dangerous, Me was perfect. Me is cheap, Me is easy to control, Me is easy to channel, Me is slave of its own reflection, Me is a slave of the platforms that make the reflection glossy. Me is data. Me is data closest to metadata. This makes Me just perfect to satisfy advertisers and to sate neural networks.
What can be done? How to reclaim My?
Don’t collaborate! Don’t post your texts where you are not allowed to turn it into hypertext.
Don’t post your pictures where you can’t link them to whatever you like. Don’t use content management systems that turn your GIFs into JPEGs. Don’t use hashtags, don’t accept algorithmic timelines. In short, make a web page and link to others who still have one.
Leaving monopolists and/or using alternatives is easy to suggest. And many of us made the first step – for example, created a page on neocities.org or on tilde.club, or even bought a superglue.it kit and hosted their home page at their actual home, supporting the Reclaim hosting initiative.
In December 2019, I asked the founders of the aforementioned projects whether they thought all these 5-year-old initiatives were still active. They were not optimistic about winning the competition with the giants (Dan Phiffer77 rightfully pointed me to the fact that I asked him about the Tilde Club not on Tilde Club but on Twitter). At the same time, Vasiliev’s,78 Drake’s79 and Ford’s80 answers – as well as Jim Groves’ aforementioned thoughts on “homeless” – suggested that in 2020 there would be more reasons to emancipate than in 2013, or better to say those reasons are stronger in 2020 than in 2013, and that may be the time and the motivation to leave.
But to quote developer and passionate “tilderer” Jon Bell: “How can we make something like this last longer than a sunrise?”
I think that leaving the platforms and meeting somewhere else is not enough, or not even the biggest deal. The challenge is to get away from Me, from the idea that you are the centre of your online presence. Don’t take this imposed, artificial role into the new environments. It will poison and corrupt the best of initiatives.
This text is part of the book "Turing Complete User. Resisting Alienation in Human-Computer-Interaction" by Olia Lialina, that will be published in april 2021 through Heidelberg University Publishing. It contains five collected essays and will be available as print and open access, here on this websitehttps://interfacecritique.net/book/olia-lialina-from-my-to-me/.
1 Namely “They may call it home”, given at Collegium Helveticum October 24, 2019, https://youtu.be/FGmuH-S6xq8, and “end-to-end, p2p, my to me” talk at Transmediale on January 31, 2020, https://youtu.be/eHyn3sKNdA8; access: October 29, 2020.
2 In my recent article GeoCities’ afterlife and web history, I write about the shortcomings and hazards of this term https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/6418; access: October 29, 2020.
3 The archive keeps 381,934 GeoCities pages rescued by Archive Team in 2009, and restored by Dragan Espenschied in 2011. Materials and outcomes of the research are published on https://blog.geocities.institute/. 72 screenshots a day have been (and continue to be) posted in chronological order on https://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/ since February 7, 2013.
4“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.” Tim O’Reilly, Web 2.0 Compact definition: Trying again, O’Reilly Radar, December 10, 2006, http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/12/web-20-compact-definition-tryi.html. An early less polemic definition of the term was given by O’Reilly a year before in What is Web 2.0, https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html, access: June 7, 2020.
5 Tim Berners-Lee, On simplicity, standards, and “intercreativity”, in: The Web After Five Years: World Wide Web Journal: 1 (3) (Inc. O’Reilly Media), p.8. Also online https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1997/w3j-3-iview.html; access: April 4, 2019.
6 Originally the home page was defined as “the hypertext document you see when you first enter the web”, Ed Krol, The Whole Internet User’s Guide & Catalog, Revised Edition (Sebastopol, CA1992), p. 229. But the concept was evolving and splitting: “The welcome page for a server is often now called a ‘home’ page because it is a good choice for a client to use as a home (default) page. The term ‘home’ page means the default place to start your browser. Don’t be confused by this, though. There are two separate concepts.” https://web.archive.org/web/19970605145352/http://www.w3.org:80/pub/WWW/Provider/Style/Etiquette.html; access: October 29, 2020. In addition, a “home” page is a hypertext document, which is a starting point for a user. Users with hypertext editors make their own home pages. Other users use home pages provided for anyone in their organisation. An example is the CERN home page, https://www.w3.org/Talks/Tour/FindingOurWay.html; access: October 29, 2020. In My corner of the internet, 2014, https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/5118, I provide an overview of different meanings and the history of the term.
8 Some paragraphs later in the interview, Tim Berners-Lee emphasises again that connected computers should be tools, services, portals that are given to people: “When you turn on your computer what you should see is information, what you should deal with is information. You should be able to create it, to absorb it; you should be able to exchange it freely in the informational space. The computer should just be your portal into the space, in my view.” The Web After Five Years, p. 8.
10 At this moment the GRI library has 83 items published between 1993 and 2002. Today they are my source of information, being very often the only reference to the websites that ceased to exist before they were preserved in any other way. A screenshot from a web design manual is nothing close to an archived website, it is also much less than an interview with a designer or developer of it. Screenshots are not sufficient, you can’t call them “good enough”, rather “at least something”, but as these web projects were too complex for web archives and too embarrassing for their creators to keep and recall – there is “at least something” you can reference, analyse or attempt to reconstruct.
11 Vincent Flanders and Michael Willis, Web Pages That Suck: Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad Design (San Francisco, CA 1998), p. 111.
12 Vincent Flanders and Dean Peters, Son of Web Pages That Suck: Learn Good Design by Looking at Bad Design (San Francisco, CA 2002), p. 204.
13 Jeffrey Zeldman, Taking Your Talent to the Web: A Guide for the Transitioning Designer (Indianapolis, IN 2001), p. 95.
14 David Siegel, Creating Killer Web Sites: The Art of Third-Generation Site Design (Indianapolis, IN 1996), p. 29.
15 Flanders and Willis, Web Pages That Suck, p. 13.
16 Flanders and Peters, Son of Web Pages That Suck, p. 2.
17 Zeldman, Taking Your Talent to the Web, p. 189.
18 The library is not only research material for my GRI colleagues and students, but also an object, an interactive sculpture called “Taking Your Talent to the Web”. It goes to events and exhibitions and, according to the space, takes a form of a book piles or bookshelves. Visitors are welcome to flip through, take photos of the front and back covers, or just stare (and take selfies) at the particoloured row of book spines and read the titles that say a lot about the epoch of the early Web: The Web Design WOW! Book; Cyberspace for Beginners; Graphical Treasures on the Internet; Finding Images Online; Home Sweet Home Page and the Kitchen Sink.
19Jeffrey Veen, Art and Science of Web Design (Minneapolis, MN 2000), p. 71.
20 Curt Cloninger, Fresh Styles for Web Designers: Eye Candy from the Underground (Indianapolis, IN 2001), p. 8.
21 Ida Engholm, Digital style history: The development of graphic design on the Internet. Digital Creativity 13 (December 1, 2002), pp. 193–211, https://doi.org/10.1076/digc.13.4.193.8672
27 Philip Greenspun, Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing (San Francisco, CA 1999), p. xxi.
28 Émilie Gervais in personal email on February 20, 2020.
29www.humaaans.com is an illustration library, which became “an overwhelming trend in editorial and web illustration over the past few years, with particular prevalence currently in the realm of tech.[...] adopting a visual language that signals positivity, and connectedness is a tool to paper over the social and political harm and divisiveness their products create – and illustration has increasingly become a centerpiece of the strategy” as Rachel Hawley describes it in Don’t worry, these gangly-armed cartoons are here to protect you from big tech, Eye on Design (blog), August 21, 2019, https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-cartoons-are-here-to-protect-you-from-big-tech/; access: October 29, 2020.
36 “I built my first home page in early 1994. This is my new home online. It contains links to everything I have ever written, created, or been part of.” David Siegel on January 10, 2016, https://medium.com/@pullnews/david-siegel-jack-of-none-998a70be0e57; access: October 29, 2020.
40 The pace known as Internet time (or Netscape Time) is not only about velocity, but the dramatism of change that could happen in a very short time. When lecturing about WWW history, I emphasize it by adding to the common saying: “there may be 7 calendar years in one Internet year, but there are 100 years in between 1996 and 1997”, referring to the overnight sinking of connection prices, the Wired cover that announced the death of the web pages, the release of Netscape communicator, which suggested thinking about the Web as an application, not sites. The same observation can be applied to the events of 1995, when Netscape browser was released to “kill” its predecessor Mosaic. And even more to 1993 when Mosaic appeared as the first alternative to WWW. In Architects of the Web, Robert H. Reid marks everything that was on the Internet before Mosaic as B.C. where C is “commercialization”.
41 Release of Mosaic browser. “NCSA’s Mosaic™ wasn’t the first Web browser. But it was the first to make a major splash. In November 1993, Mosaic v. 1.0 broke away from the small pack of existing browsers by including features – like icons, bookmarks, a more attractive interface, and pictures – that made the software easy to use and appealing to ‘non-geeks’.” http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/enabling/mosaic; access: October 29, 2020.
53 Let me also mention that the students’ project came up with great work, including Lyricslinks by Tim Jack Schmit, which is a music video you have to compile yourself by following the links through different platforms. https://pad.profolia.org/tj_lyricslinksthat; access: October 29, 2020.
54 Dennis Green, Apple is running an ad where a kid asks, “What’s a computer?” – and people find it infuriating. Business Insider on January 24, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-whats-a-computer-ad-sparks-anger-2018-1. Video available on YouTube https://youtu.be/pI-iJcC9JUc; access: October 29, 2020.
55 Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, 1st edition (San Francisco 2000), p. 139.
58 The trailblazers web-surfing event and competition was conceptualised in 2010 by my project group at Merz Akademie, as a competition where participants can exercise (or show off) their skills to go around through the walls of walled gardens. Announcements and documentation of the events available at http://nm.merz-akademie.de/trailblazers/; access: October 29, 2020.
66 “There is a giant gulf between doing something and doing nothing. And someone who makes a lolcat and uploads it – even if only to crack their friends up – has already crossed that chasm to doing something.” Clay Shirky (in an interview with NPR), What happens when people migrate to the Internet?, https://www.npr.org/story/127760715, June 1, 2010; access: October 29, 2020. As a side note, I’d like to mention that 10 years ago I saw it as praising web vernacular, an invitation to the masses to go online, to be a part of online culture, and didn’t see that, in fact, statements like this were also ignoring the abyss of the amateur Web, the equating of personal homes with doing nothing.
68 On the Internet, Everybody knows you had a dog https://dogs.geocities.institute/, regularly updated since August, 2015, 264 screenshots at the time of writing this text. The title is an allusion to Peter Steiner’s famous cartoon published in The New Yorker on July 5, 1993, captioned “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”.
70 “I assume you have a life away from your computer screen”, McFedries, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating an HTML Web Page, p. xvi.
71 David Bohnett in an unpublished interview on January 26, 2019: “[…] it [GeoCities] was also intended to be thematic and subject matter based. It never even occurred to me that people would like to talk about themselves and talk about where they eat and where they want to make it. So, it was all about themes and that’s why you have a neighborhood of themes.”
72 There are 2124 specimens in the GeoCities Archive.
75 At the end of 2011, Facebook introduced a new layout and structure for their users’ profiles – Timeline – described by the company itself in the Help section as: “your collection of the photos, stories, and experiences that tell your story.” Anticipating its success, Wired described it as even more monumental: "Timeline is potentially an omnivorous collector of personal data that you can format to tell your story." Steven Levy, With Timeline, Facebook bids to reinvent the social biography. Wired, November 11, 2011, https://www.wired.com/2011/11/timeline-facebook/; access: October 29, 2020.
77 “This is how I started using the Internet in 1998, when I started college. This is the future I would like to displace the corporate social media dystopia. But here we are on twitter dot com still, so it’s all a work in progress. Tilde itself is just one attempt of many to create an alternative. See also: http://mltshp.com, http://are.na, Mastodon, Secure Scuttlebutt, etc.” Dan Pfeifer, DM Twitter, January 16, 2020.
78 “While the reasons for one wanting to have their own ‘corner of cyberspace’ are now much more defined, today's average users are looking for hand-holding help for actually doing it. Contemporary users are not like the bravehearts of the 90s and it feels to me that making self-hosted platforms less nerdy and more ‘popular’ (without making it dumb, of course) would help the people in rebuilding the Web we lost.” Danja Vasiliev in personal email on January 13, 2020.
79 “I do think that one of the trends we will see over the next few years is a general exodus from social networks into saner alternatives – and I do believe one of those main alternatives will be creating personal websites again, where you have complete control over how you present yourself and what content you want to provide, and in what arrangement.” Kyle Drake in personal email January 6, 2020.
80 “I am certain we need more spaces like this, places where you can experiment and be both dumb and kind in equal measure and people either leave you to it, or help you along.” Paul Ford on September 17, 2019 on http://tilde.club/~ford/; access: October 29, 2020.
The New Turing Test: Changing the AI conversation
Elan Ullendorff
AI is gaslighting you.
Maybe you’ve come across an image like this on Instagram: a picturesque interior, walls lined with packed bookshelves, midcentury modern furniture, wall to wall windows, greenery all around; or maybe it’s more of a visual pun: a beautifully browned loaf of bread braided seamlessly into the shape of a Labrador, a chanterelle mushroom Lego set.
Your first instinct is to slow your scroll to its siren song. It is an image in the shape of a worthwhile image. Maybe you will tag a friend in the comments or silently dm it to them (it is an image that does not ask for commentary).
But maybe, just maybe, you’ll consider the image long enough for your eyes to come into focus. The stairway in that interior doesn’t lead anywhere. The letter-like forms on the Lego box are, upon further inspection, just abstract shapes, nothing more than letter-like. The pup loaf feels…familiar. Not its content, but its form. The lighting, the angle, the focus. Could this be the work of AI?
Maybe you open up the comments to investigate further. Among a sea of bland mentions someone inevitably accuses the poster of using AI, and the response is dismissive: “I never said I didn’t.”
When I screen candidates’ job applications, or read my students’ homework, I’m struck with the same questions. Is this cover letter / reading reflection the output of a large language model, or is it just generic? I know that any confrontation would only yield one of two responses: a defensive "of course I didn't" or a flippant "of course I did." The conversations I’m having in my head — about what constitutes authorship, and the social contract between creator and audience — make me feel existentially dizzy.
Is the future we’re meant to cozy up to one in which if humans complain about being deceived, they are told both that they are wrong and that they are right but shouldn’t care?
The Turing Test, proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, sought to determine a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. In the years since, AI has advanced to the point where it can, in certain contexts, convincingly imitate human interactions.
But I’ve come to realize that when we obsess over whether something was made by AI, we’re often asking the wrong question. Sure, there is newsworthy content for which veracity is paramount. But for everything else, asking how much AI is in something may be less important that a simpler question: how much humanity is in it?
The next morning I awakened to find myself sitting bolt upright in bed, the eulogy standing in the air before me like a composition. That was it, I realized. It had been composed. That is what had made the difference.
The speaker never lost sight of why she was speaking — or, perhaps more important, of who was speaking. Of the various selves at her disposal (she was, after all, many people — a daughter, a lover, a bird-watcher, a New Yorker), she knew and didn’t forget that the only proper self to invoke was the one that had been apprenticed. That was the self in whom this story resided. A self — now here was a curiosity — that never lost interest in its own animated existence at the same time that it lived only to eulogize the dead doctor. This last, I thought, was crucial: the element most responsible for the striking clarity of intent the eulogy had demonstrated. Because the narrator knew who was speaking, she always knew why she was speaking.
A chatbot is a statistical calculator. It cannot know who it is. It is in fact the polar opposite of self: a regression to the mean of human expression. Think of all the expensive, far-reaching machine learning algorithms that try to learn about you today in order to better serve you content or ads, and how profoundly they fall short of anything resembling “knowing” you.
I have a nontraditional set of standards through which I encourage my students to evaluate their work (curiosity, criticality, communication, conscientiousness). This year, perhaps in order to get at Gornick’s why, I added a new Turing-esque test to my list of rubrics: expressiveness. It has three simple criteria:
It feels like it came from someone. It contain evidence of complex, emotive human detritus. Feeling human-like isn’t enough: it couldn’t have been made by “just anyone,” and instead leans into the unique perspective of the specific person/people who made it.
It feels like it was meant for someone. It is a work concerned with and designed for a particular audience, and the audience can feel that intention when they consume it.
It feels like it belongs in a particular context. It is aware of the place, time, culture, and artistic medium in which it will be consumed. Its form and content are in conversation with each other. It is not afraid to converse with the past, elevating, rather than concealing, its inspiration.
With this rubric, I never need to accuse my students of using AI. What matters is that the work is expressive, and contains evidence of the human that created it. If something feels robotic or generic, it is those very qualities that make the work problematic, not the tools used. I can simply say "I want to see more of you in this" or “who is this for?” or “seek out inspiration.”
From someone, for someone, in a particular context.
Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression… Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the æsthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.
It’s worked. Rather than worrying about formalism and typos in their writing, I see students indulging their curiosities, allowing themselves to feel complicated, and sharing their personal experience and perspective. Their visual designs aren’t obsessed with looking fashionable, but in finding emotional resonance.
I apply the same expressiveness test as I browse the internet. If I find myself tempted to investigate the comment section to determine whether something was algorithmically generated, I instead quietly ask myself if it’s expressive. If it isn’t (it usually isn’t), maybe it's not worth engaging with at all. The presence or absence of artificial intelligence becomes besides the point. Something created without AI can still be inexpressive. We find ourselves drowning daily in content that feels completely unmoored from, well, anything: it could have come from anyone, is meant to be consumed by anyone, and might find us on any platform. It ultimately communicates nothing, and leaves us unchanged.
I will also allow that something created with AI can be expressive (but more often than not, AI might make achieving expressiveness more difficult, not less). It is not that computers can never induce feelings in their audience, but that in so doing they raise the bar for what will eventually be perceived as unexceptional, thoughtless, predetermined.
Trying to confront a gaslighter on their own terms almost never gets you anywhere. So I wonder if, in changing the conversation to one of expressiveness, we might liberate ourselves from AI’s exploitation. If the original Turing test evaluated what computers are capable of, this new Turing test evaluates what we are capable of. And that re-centering of humans, if done in a supportive environment, can turn AI from something to be feared into a challenge: how beautifully, imperfectly, perceptibly human can we be? As the AI gets exponentially better at pretending to be us, that only moves the expressive goalpost; will we rise the the challenge of actually being us, but more?
This essay was originally published at Elan's substack on December 07, 2023..
127+ Possibilities... Things You Can With Your Personal Site
Zachary Kai
The etchings we attempt to carve for ourselves in the great stone of the internet are mere lines of code, pixels on a screen, immaterial ones and zeros. Ephemeral snowflakes forever disappearing from our grasp.
Yet, in a way, they're parts of our souls.
No doubt you're an internet citizen (is there anyone left in this world who isn't?), but have you ever considered making your markings more permanent? With, say, a place to call yours?
Creating oneself a website is a worthy endeavor, and yet. It's an empty canvas like the vastness of space, so full of possibilities it's terrifying.
So I quell the overwhelm the only way I know how. With a list.
First, if you'll indulge me: some background.
I'm Zachary Kai, and though we're separated by time and space, allow me to wave hello. It's a pleasure to meet you, dear reader.
I'm more inclined to poetry and philosophy than programming, but the beauty of our shared humanity is our common knowledge. The only reason I learned to create my site is through the generosity of countless others, and I hope to continue that noble quest.
It took me seven years to muster the courage to finally dare to take up space on the internet. I hope you won't have to wait so long.
So, what of the ideas I mentioned?
They're a constellation of potentiality waiting to explode into life: features to add, pages to create, posts to write.
Dare I say this isn't just a list. It's an invitation to paint your corner of the web with your very essence. To build walls that showcase your strength, and to let them crack just enough to let your human show.
So. Take a deep breath, dear reader. Your journey to carving out your space in the digital infinity starts here.
This essay was orginally published on Zachary's website.
•--♡--•
The internet is where I have always made myself.
Chia Amisola
As a precocious child, I made websites. Without much of an environment around me, I wanted to shape places for myself, and found that the internet gave me this potential. Here, I taught myself the language & code, pointing at screens and not understanding why my parents were confused when a collection of boxes was, to me, indistinguishable from me. Slowly nestled under any free website hosting service I could find was an accumulating corner of stories, posts, resources, and games — all things I loved and couldn't lose, now safeguarded in a home.
* Website *
The place we make for ourselves. A world in itself.
* Internet *
Aren’t stories built into our societal infrastructure?
One of the first steps you take when creating a website is choosing a domain name. The domain name becomes your presence, a point of access; you are a site that people may recognize, are welcome to visit, one that is real. I took as many names as I did selves: destinyzbond.webs.com, cirrumilus.sky-song.org, belovedhearts.webs.com, each a name to my stories, a place to fill, a becoming.
* Home *
“All really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of a home.” – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
As I grew older, my domains began to take on a realness (chiaski.com, chia.design, chias.website, chia.audio). I was interested in how my name alone could be as vast a container as my earlier website names that leaned towards my interests and ambiguous provocations.11 Norman O'Hagan's Are.na channel, Personal websites named after an idea rather than the human, is a perfect example. https://www.are.na/norman-o-hagan/personal-websites-named-after-an-idea-rather-than-the-humanThe self is fragmented, and the internet affords it this complexity. We split and weave these names across spaces, marking the boundaries and lines that make the self.
* Chia *
I own too many domain names to count, spread across registrars. Most of them are my name, but I’m not sure what my name really is.
“People determine who they are by drawing a line.” – Luc Devoldere, translated by Astrid Vandendaele
I buy domain names when the right word or phrase resonates, incubating the space far before a tangible idea has come to mind. Technologists commonly joke about how many domain names they have in their pocket, a collection of unrealized dreams just waiting for activation. When I start thinking about these names as invitations rather than tombstones, I find that what I work on naturally settles itself into one of them, inhabiting language and perhaps even redefining it.
* Space *
The history of space has always been that of hunger: where to locate, connectd, move, survive; how to map these out, classify, spatially process; how to border, demarcate, and surrender to space to draw new worlds from others.
When I wanted to make space for myself, I thought to make a website.
* Site *
To site is to use a name to draw a boundary, and to begin inhabiting.
A website is a site of potential. A domain isn't only a name, it is an invitation to start something new. Websites have always functioned to me as translations and fragmentations of myself, ways to give form to myself through constantly re-situating and re-contextualizing across the internet. The act of construction is a practice of making the self (rather than just a re-presentation): filling a domain is assembling a new body for the self, with the site as an extension of the body, or a distillation and compression of it… Conscious of how being online is intertwined with distribution, presentation, marketing, but never going without making. If names are nothing and naming is everything, the website is the perfect medium in which I carve space, take space, and make space… A website in its infinitely republishable, malleable, transient, and perpetually unfinished nature; its accumulation of histories, a body that attempts to obscure so much of history. I think of myself like I think of a website. At any moment, I am remaking my name and what it means. Names are functionally territories. I become a landscape.
* Self *
I know that wherever place I end up in, I will make it home.
I know to inhabit, I must give my whole self.
Decades later, these digital records are one of my only remains. I trace these sites, dissolving to time, assembling a fragmented collection of selves that tell a story of a becoming. I watch the way I carry an ever-changing girl through new containers, always outgrowing myself. At each step, I'd bare an old self, searching for a new name I could inhabit.
* Visibility *
Take the material of the internet: that which purports itself to be invisible or ambient, like data, cloaks vast swathes of information and machinery that hold us.
Language shapes worlds and selves, drawing the territories that we then inhabit. Naming then, is placemaking: as naming identifies a domain of control, it becomes the act of domaining itself.
All digital space is anchored in physical infrastructure. The internet cannot point to itself.
* Names *
“Names are nothing; naming is everything"
As names point to both the online and offline, the URL/IRL divide is less blurry than one might think. Internet geographies are reroutings atopof the human world, more than they are distinct, fantastical spaces unconstrained by the world. Domain names collapse and reorder territories to form ones of their own through assemblages of cables, data centers, and clouds; the physical conditions that let us make ourselves malleable.
Domain names function as unique identifiers that point to locations. Functionally, domain names map onto less human-readable numerical IP addresses (like 192.168.1.1), corresponding to a host server that stores a website's content and assets. When typing in a domain name, the machine translates it into the respective numbers and addresses, then takes you to the correct server's location. Call the website by its name, and the machine helps you get there. Here, hardware and software tuck their mechanisms underneath human language.
Domain Naming
Domain naming is the social, situated, and environmental practice of "naming as placemaking" on the internet, recognizing the power in words to shape worlds materially, ideologically, and socially. 'Domaining' draws out places and borders by naming. 'Naming' makes place legitimate, legible, and accessible. Enter a name to access a site. Name it and it becomes a site.
The process of domain naming acknowledges our self-made authority to define the environments we inhabit, and thus ourselves. As we settle with language, words determine the visibility of a place's logic. Logic in turn, is just an evaluation of language. Within these dichotomies, naming treads the line between liberation and oppression, illegibility and clarity, obfuscation and identification.
* DNS *
The Internet Domain Name system is a [protocol] that helps us translate internet [domain name]s into IP addresses, allowing us to map and locate [websites].
The secret to construction (of identity, object, or place) has always been in naming. Language and space are interlinked, each mutating our understanding of a world and the possibilities within. Truth is revealed when it is recognized. Names are tools for recognition / memory-making / cognition / meaning-making. Like a collective contract to recognize one color as red, or to dispute for centuries over the name of a land and its authority, names as relations are always embroiled with questions of power.
When I wanted to find myself, I made websites.
* Place *
A real location, a pointer. A sense of a place, the relations. The wayfinding.
* Identity *
An ever-shifting body on a set label. I am remaking my name every moment.
* Protocol *
Hardware/software reinforce human exchanges of information.
All of naming, of language — stems from the desire of (re)affirmation.
My name is not really a name until you call me by it.
My name became what was always my name—the moment you spoke it.
It is a social language, an exchange, a contract, a shared exercise.
* Connection *
For the computer to know where I am. For you to remember me a bit better. For us to make our way to one another. For me to find a way to better fit into myself.
* Knowing *
“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something”
I registered ifyouknewmewouldyoulove.me in a time of reinvention, it carryied me through an era of erasure, seeing. I lean towards websites (more than newsletters or physical artifacts) precisely because they are immaterial and impermanent, but instantaneous and immanent. For many bodies, to be unseen means repression, erasure, and exploitation. Love was and is to me, about fully embracing a whole self: I thought it impossible to know all of someone without loving them. Otherwise, how would you get to that point? I wanted to be an environment, not a monument. A place where people could go, fill, address, see, and then eventually know.
One of our primal desires is to be seen. Or more precisely, to say how we want to be seen. Naming is knowing.
Chias.website would hold a field of lifelong flowers, lifel.ong would be the place where I could find all my friends, chia.design would be an illegible index of all I have done and could become, ifyouknewmewouldyoulove.me would be an invitation to this labyrinthine self, chia.audio would be a fishbowl collecting fragments of fields and sounds, engine.lol a tool that would make itself, chia.pics a series of clippings, chias.computer a repository of all that make me.
A Google Search
Each name serves as a boundary. Names serve as recognition of a place, body, or identity: drawn out from relationships and context: what we call each other, where we go towards, who we respond to. For the person I become—only once you recognize me. The name situates, letting us access sites on the internet when names point to space (as DNS protocols name to point & recognize; turning numeric IP addresses into human-readable names), and when names prevent collisions in space (as programming languages & filesystems utilize 'namespaces' that assign, group, and prevent collisions; preventing naming conflicts by providing unique identifiers within their scopes of control)—using names to determine relations (in what sphere is a name recognized?), control (what does the name enable?), and power (who assigns the name?). Domains are controlled territories and names draw out nations.
* Infrastructure *
"Infrastructures tend to be associated with power, sovereignty, and privilege, but they also underline the need for alternative architectures of association and resistance." – Lauren Berlant's Affective Infrastructures
* Self-preservation *
The website is a tool for self-preservation: a place where I can make myself, archive myself, deem myself important.
Domains are controlled territories and names draw out nations.
When I choose to make space on the internet, I place my faith in vast systems of infrastructure, care, and ecologies. I put my faith in people. All within a network of relations, an ecology of machines and places all tended by human hands, interdependent to all. Identity is infrastructure because naming unites the self and its signifiers with a site; these relations are the foundations of the worlds we can visit.
* Domain as Nation *
Sometimes I also think about the domain as an imagined community: you will never meet me or hear my voice, but here you are, thinking of us in communion.
* .com *
The standard for TLDs, initially designated in 1985.
For the computer to know where I am, and for you to reach me. From any point in the world, point at the name you remember and find me, if I'm still there, I am found again. Domain naming is self-preservation against a world that demands singular cohesion.
“Domain naming is self-preservation against a world that demands singular cohesion.”
Perhaps who decides what is named and what the process of naming entails is authority. These concerns are all the more pertinent online, where although material conditions are necessary for us to move around the internet, the concept of 'place' is effectively nonexistent without names reinforced by relations & protocols. To cross from one site to another, one accepts its borders and conditions. Recognizing the name realizes both the thing referenced, and the authority that grants who may be identified at all.
Take the most central institutional authority to the domain name system, ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) taking over the general administration of IP addresses and top-level domains from a lone researcher named Jon Postel. Today, many top-level domains are administered by countries (such as .us or Tuvalu's primary export, .tv), sponsors (.gov or .xxx), or other genericized domains (.design or .wiki).
We begin constructing space for ourselves to conquer, a need for domination and control... Am I only taking up space to become something? Am I expropriating myself for the internet?
* Expropriation *
Disposessing someone from their property for 'public use or benefit'
3 With the amount of options today and an expanded IP standard, the concern is more in the 'viability' of certain domain names, such as .com still being much more recognizable than .vodka
4 We must examine cases like the island-nation Niue that seeks control over their designated .nu that has been controlled by the Internet Foundation in Sweden since 2016, costing the smaller state over $150,000,000 in potential revenue
The delegation of these names sweeps physical infrastructure under a rug, acting as if internet cartographies are exempt from politics, borders, and protocol biases. While the DNS system was designed to resist territorialization, it's even more strongly coupled to physical geography today. Entire digital cultures and histories have dissolved from domain deletions, from the self to nations.2 Scaling the self contends with the hypercapitalist system of delegation, exploitative and predatory, manufacturing 'scarcity' for mere identifiers. 3 Imperialism manifests through power struggles over in-demand TLDs. If domain names are considered as 'natural resources,' do we know where we inhabit?4 In the very fabric of the internet is the violence in naming, the delusion of self-extension at odds with expansionism.
* Borders *
"Borders are the interior routes of modernity/coloniality and the consequences of international law and global linear thinking." — Walter D. Mignolo
* Logic *
Platform technologies have seized the logics of the web.
* Platform *
"Online social platforms are both languages and spaces." – Charles Broskoski, Rules Are Rules
In knowing, we must also know the underlying expansionist goals of the internet project that underscore the promise of connection. As I use websites and names to expand myself, I borrow addresses atop an internet that posits itself as ever-expanding, near-infinite. With no real-real space to own and conquer, we look towards the internet. With nothing in real life, I made life for myself online: was it as limitless as me?
The internet can be traced to its imperialist U.S. roots, a military venture connecting scientists, the academe, and defense contractors. These origins underpin its infrastructures and continue to weaponize its shape: from DNS governance (the authorities that administer the provision and control of domains), ongoing platform centralization (where more and more internet users rely on social networking and profit-oriented platforms to maintain presences online, nestled as slashes on Facebook instead of naming their own space), to surveillance and repression (domain names provide information on the physical location of host servers to point, so can be used to loosely detect an area). All sites on the internet are tinged with a sharpness and an ever-pervasive question of who serves who. When I speak of the liberatory potential of the internet, I speak with cautious optimism: these very structures have been used to destabilize democracies, radicalize nations, and erase people. The dream of the internet did not begin with intimacy and interdependency, it began with power and subjugation.
Borders are drawn by names, tangible or intangible, routes for wayfinding and routes for coloniality. Names, with all their power, are weapons themselves.
A true reinvention of the name might involve a remaking of our protocols for knowing. A redistribution of addressing, of power, and of place. Today, names exacerbate inequities, further territorializing the internet by perpetuating the limitations of place in the real world. The internet is not the utopia it appears to be: it masks our bordered, imperfect world, not as a mirror, but a recreation absolved from the physical world's limits – a far more dangerous presentation.
* History *
Names that stand the test of time carry something beyond them.
* Mythologizing *
Much of the making of a world is simply giving a name to it
When language is re-translation and re-situation, and when language is equated to space and place, we need to question both ends of this re-assembly… the institutions that determine the name, the objects that the names point to, and the sovereignty that all in-between may truly hold. Domain naming might be liberatory on the level of the individual who holds autonomy over a world, but on the level of larger societies, it falls to the roots and authorities that only push imperialist agendas.
Even the language we use to describe ourselves online needs prodding: those who tend websites as worlds, gardens, and rivers, might be invited to evaluate what they are looking to carry from these real-world spaces. If language is world-shaping, why limit ourselves to the borders and failures of the offline, where existing words and languages might exacerbate inequities? Why limit the mythology of the internet rather than write new ones?
“Why limit the mythology of the internet rather than write new ones?”
Critical and poetic reimaginings of the internet require the authoring of entirely new logics. We find language to carve out landscapes, defining their curves with words, terraforming the world and its histories in tenses. Much of this practice of writing comes from inhabitation: After all, while the border is drawn with articulation, we live in looseness. We live within the self before knowing our name. We live to draw the border between ourselves and all around us. We live in states whose borders are drawn and redrawn. We live in sites that we have yet to find the language and write the poetry for.
* Point *
Domain pointing or, “The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Domain naming invites us to inhabit worlds so emergent and unnamed, that to refer to things, we might only be able to point. Language is laggy, boundless, bounded, overlapping, constrained, situated, uttered anywhere, everywhere, embedded, becoming. Extending ourselves onto a website might not only be an interior, individual practice of preservation, but part of a broader non-linear history that welcomes many visibilities, each with countless lines and opacities.
I know that whatever place I end up in, I will find a way to make it a home. I know that for a name to be truly known, it must be inhabited. A name is not just sounded, it must be lived.
What's in your name?When you ask the name of someone next to you, attempt to truly know it.(Don't just remember it politely, know them.)How are you using your name to border yourself?What names have you taken that you've truly felt you've filled?Does the potential of anonymity on the internet inspire you?How do we recognize the place and geography of the internet, whilst simultaneously recognizing that what we build does not have to map cleanly towards real-world geographies?Call the world you live in something new.What words do we use? What words do we ignore? What words do we need to use in new ways?What name do you want to become? What name do you want to kill?Do you have the language to reinvent a world?How do we engage in a way of seeing and naming that stands as cognizant, optimistic, and agentic? How might we become cognizant of the imperialist, expansionist desires underneath names?
A view source web
Garry Ing
In the Fall of 2000, after the panic of the Y2K scare and the
collapsing dot-com bubble, I sat in front of a Macintosh desktop
computer running a program called HyperCard. I created stacks of
virtual cards which I, or anyone at the computer, could click
through to freely explore. I recall that navigating my stack from
first card to last made little sense. Each card was a fragment of
some concept I was thinking through with the program. Linking cards
was my first impressionable encounter with the concepts of
intertwingularity11 “Intertwingularity.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 1 Aug. 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertwingularity.—Ted Nelson’s
expressive term to describe the sense that there is no neat
organization of knowledge: EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED.
It was soon after this experience that I started to discover HTML.
Programs like Microsoft FrontPage helped me author hypertext through
a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. Composing a “page”
was done by adding elements to what seemed like an infinitely tall
and wide document that I could assemble like Word Processing
software and drawing programs. Like HyperCard, these programs
considered the composing of HTML to be an open-ended
practice—software with “low floors and high ceilings.”22 A term that is often attributed to Seymour Papert and his design principle for the Logo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language) programming language.
They started with the simplicity of editing elements on a page and
allowed users to make the (often considerable) transition to
expressing those objects in written code.
The act of assembling a website using these pieces of software felt
different from learning a programming language. Content was authored
by inserting elements on a page and a layout was clicked and dragged
into existence as a container for words, images, and links to other
pages represented as files and folders connected together. In
contrast, view source was the textual space where syntax
was laid bare.
The ability to view source was introduced in the
mid-1990’s through web browsers like Netscape Navigator 3.0,
released in 1996. Clive Thompson’s book Coders notes
that early versions of Netscape Navigator introduced
view source as a “fun way to let people surfing the web to
see this code, if they wanted to.”33 Thompson, Clive. Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World. Penguin Press, 2019, p. 49.
At the time it was called “Document Source,” and located under the
“View” dropdown menu of the running application. When clicked on, a
window would open showing the raw HTML of the page you were
currently viewing. The window displays a disorienting stream of text
with traces of visible content, files, and links that feel like
encountering a new language.
“Every single web page you visited contained the code showing you
how it was created. The entire internet became a library of how-to
guides on programming. If you wanted, you could cut and paste that
code into a new file, change a few elements, and see what happened.”
On my personal websites view source meant being able to
adapt and remix ideas. Like drawing a map, elements and pages acted
as landmarks in the browser to be navigated between. As a
self-initiated learner, being able to view source brought
to mind the experience of a slow walk through someone else’s
map.
This ability to “observe” software makes HTML special to work with.
In particular, it’s sense of “transparency” as Clay Shirky
wrote in April, 1998, numerating on what makes for “good” software:
5 “Sneakernet.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Dec. 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet.
“Good tools are transparent. Web design is a conversation of sorts
between designers, with the Web sites themselves standing in for
proposal and response. Every page launched carries an attached
message from its designer which reads "I think this is a pretty good
way to design a Web page", and every designer reacting to that will
be able to respond with their own work”4
I brought these early websites with me from computer to computer on
3½-inch floppy disk—like an improvised sneakernet5
before using free to low-cost servers—and opened them with the
installed browser to share what I’d made with friends. In the
moment, seeing something you had made on someone else's computer
felt like a gift. It became an important gesture in what I was
learning, the feedback loop of creating a website and being able to
view it on another computer and continuing to change it over time.
I sometimes wonder what happened to those original floppy disks.
I’m sure the websites on them would continue to display as
they had in 2000 if they found their way to a computer again. HTML,
browsers, and the protocols they work with are incredibly durable
ecosystems. You could open these websites as a series of plain text
files using an editor. Alternatively, you could use the
browser’s
view source
feature; a capability that allowed me to learn how other websites
were created by seeing markup and what is rendered in tandem.
View source is still present in most web browsers as a menu
option or a standardized address that could be typed in the address
bar. In 2011 the IETF66 Internet Engineering Task Force is a standards organization and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite.
7 Yevstifeyev, M. “Viewing the Source URI in HTTP(S).” IETF Draft, draft no. draft-yevstifeyev-view-source-uri-01, April 2011. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-yevstifeyev-view-source-uri-01
registered the pattern of using “view-source:https://…” to show the
source code of a given page in plain text7 —a view preserving much of the author’s formatting and
presence. This can be in the form of comments, the traces of unused
elements, and the idiosyncratic presentation of preformatted text.
I often wonder what would happen if the ability to
view source was made to be more present in the browsing
experience—a gesture, or invitation, to see what and how a site is
composed. What if the structure of an HTML file spoke further to the
content being rendered? If an element had an inner voice, what would
it say? Can this history and context be expressed in the way we
interact with and learn from view source?
“Markup works similarly in the formulation of historical
(electronic) texts. It has its own history (the versioning of
SGML/HTML/XHTML),
its own grammatical lineage (the development of
some tags over others), its own narrative (the archaeological layers
of comments attached to shared code), and even its own politics
(language choices, browser compliance, and the choice to share code
or retain its mystique as the writing of an invisible professional).
Markup thus becomes a kind of ghostly writing dependent on context
and history, rather than merely a means of formatting text.”88 Burgess, Helen J. “<?php>” From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup, edited by Bradley Dilger and Jeff Rice, University of Minnesota Press, 2010, p. 169.
The ability to see marginalia through view source could be
a place for this to happen. We can draw parallels with the
physicality of a book—when you see a page in a book you are
sometimes able to see the next page depending on the paper and the
way it has been printed. I wonder if view source could be a
similar gesture, a website being a porous material where its
creation can be viewed at the same time. This idea draws its
parallels to book publishing and the use of hidden markup from Helen
J. Burgess:
“Long before the magical moment of “View Source,” print and book
producers were already using their own forms of hidden markup: the
symbols written on texts that contained instructions or marked
points for the purposes of textual reproduction. These
printers’ marks are the antecedents of today’s markup
schema: they are marking up manuscripts in the same way we mark up
electronic texts.”99 Burgess, Helen J. “<?php>” From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup, edited by Bradley Dilger and Jeff Rice, University of Minnesota Press, 2010, p. 168.
“The HTML tags we can see in our browser’s “View Source”
window are akin to early printers’ marks: they are not readily
apparent, but they can be read if we know where to look, in the
process of flipping back and forth between page and source
code.”1010 Burgess, Helen J. “<?php>” From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup, edited by Bradley Dilger and Jeff Rice, University of Minnesota Press, 2010, p. 169.
This brings to mind J.R. Carpenter’s writing on
A Handmade Web
where a relationship is made “between handmade web pages and
handmade print materials, such as zines, pamphlets, and artists
books.”1111 Carpenter, J.R. “A Handmade Web” https://www.luckysoap.com/statements/handmadeweb.html
Pages made by hand, the presence of a person in motion, manipulating
a medium as an act of self-publishing as well as an act of allowing
others to contribute.
Our cursors are often gliding from one page of the page to another
in the browser window. We take for granted the ease of this
interaction as each element commands some level of attention by us,
the viewers. A texture is created not just by the final rendered
form, but also by how the layout is constructed, by the underlying
language an author imparted in constructing these documents.
I think of this as how Alexander Galloway describes the work of net
artists, Jodi (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans): “The resulting
aesthetic is, in this way, not entirely specified by the
artists’ subjective impulses. Instead, the texture of code and
computation takes over, and computing itself—its strange logic, its
grammar and structure, and often its shape and color—produces the
aesthetic.”1212 Galloway, A. “JODI’s Infrastructure” e-flux journal, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/74/59810/jodi-s-infrastructure/
For Jodi this consideration extends beyond what is shown in
browsers, it includes the underlying protocols, standards, and
applications that enable much of what we consider to be the internet
today.
Examples drawing on this computation and code aesthetic include
ASCII Town1313 As part of A-B-Z, https://a-b-z.co with Mindy Seu in 2017., a workshop influenced by concrete poetry and typewriter art.
Participants created imaginary dwellings referencing the rich
histories of ASCII art1414 “Joan Stark.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 29 Sep. 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Stark.
15. “All HTML.” esoteric.codes, https://esoteric.codes/blog/all-html. And Evan Roth’s
All HTML15,
a page containing every HTML tag in alphabetical order. Browser
default elements crudely composed in the browser window become fully
legible when view source is used to observe how the file is
constructed.
From the book, to HyperCard, to the internet, information is encoded
and “marked-up” as instructions so that it could be rendered into
their intended form. View source is a gesture that sits
somewhere in between these moments, another space where a visitor
could reside with its own aesthetic qualities and materiality. The
space is both complementing and in tension with being interoperable
with a browser—the precision of syntax in determining if syntax is
“valid” or not to the minutiae of comments left a HTML file for us
to discover and trace its creation.
In the end, view source is a reminder that software is a
human activity with all its nuance, and mundanity, laid bare waiting
to be viewed in our browsers. View source is a slow space,
a gesture to see the presence of a person, and a space to come back
to.
My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?
Laurel Schwulst
What is a website?
For the past handful of years, I've been teaching courses about interactive design and the internet.
I teach within art departments at universities, so we learn about the internet's impact on art—and vice versa—and how technological advance often coincides with artistic development.
In class, we make websites. To do this, we learn the elemental markup and code languages of the web—HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript.
However, sometimes after the semester is over, I receive perplexing emails from students asking, "So how do I actually make a website?"
This sparked my own questioning. "What is a website, anyway?" It's easy to forget. Today there are millions of ways to make a website, and the abundance is daunting. But at its core, a website is still the same as ever before:
A website is a file or bundle of files living on a server somewhere. A server is a computer that's always connected to the internet, so that when someone types your URL in, the server will offer up your website. Usually you have to pay for a server. You also have to pay for a domain name, which is an understandable piece of language that points to an IP. An IP is a string of numbers that is an address to your server.
Links (rendered default blue and underlined—they're the hypertext "HT" in HTML) are the oxygen of the web. Not all websites have links, but all links connect to othe.webpages, within the same site or elsewhere.
But my students already know this! So when they ask me about actually making a website, they are referring to a website in the world ... today.
It's healthy to acknowledge today's web is much different than the web many of us grew up using. So when they ask how to make a website (despite having already "learned"), they are alluding to the technological friction and social pressures that often come along with creating and maintaining a website in 2018.
Although they may seem initially accommodating and convenient to their users, universally popular social media sites—like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest—are private companies that prioritize advertising above their users' needs. Their users' happiness is not the primary focus, so it's perfectly normal for you to feel anxiety when using or even thinking about social media. In this age of digital cacophony dominated by these platforms, no one is looking out for you... but you. It makes perfect sense, then, when individuals tell me they want their website to do the job of "setting the record straight" on who they are and what they do.
However, clarity is one of many possible intentions for a website. There are other legitimate states of mind capable of communication—a surprising, memorable, monumental, soothing, shocking, unpredictable, radically boring, bizarre, mind-blowing, very quiet and subtle, and/or amazing website could work. You also need not limit yourself to only one website—as perhaps you'd like to confuse or surprise with multiple.
My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they're both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously. There are endless possibilities as to what a website could be. What kind of room is a website? Or is a website more like a house? A boat? A cloud? A garden? A puddle? Whatever it is, there's potential for a self-reflexive feedback loop: when you put energy into a website, in turn the website helps form your own identity.
Why have a website?
Today more than ever, we need individuals rather than corporations to guide the web's future. The web is called the web because its vitality depends on just that—an interconnected web of individual nodes breathing life into a vast network. This web needs to actually work for people instead of being powered by a small handful of big corporations—like Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, and Google.
Individuals can steer the web back to its original architecture simply by having a website. I think artists, in particular, could be instrumental in this space—showing the world where the web can go.
Artists excel at creating worlds. They do this first for themselves and then, when they share their work, for others. Of course, world-building means creating everything—not only making things inside the world but also the surrounding world itself—the language, style, rules, and architecture.
This is why websites are so important. They allow the author to create not only works (the "objects") but also the world (the rooms, the arrangement of rooms, the architecture!). Ideally, the two would inform each other in a virtuous, self-perfecting loop. This can be incredibly nurturing to an artist's practice.
To those creative people who say "I don't need a website," I ask: why not have a personal website that works strategically, in parallel to your other activities? How could a website complement what you already do rather than competing or repeating? How can you make it fun or thought-provoking or (insert desired feeling here) for you? How can the process of making and cultivating a website contribute to your approach?
A website can be anything. It doesn't (and probably shouldn't) be an archive of your complete works. That's going to be dead the moment you publish. A website, or anything interactive, is inherently unfinished. It's imperfect—maybe sometimes it even has a few bugs. But that's the beauty of it. Websites are living, temporal spaces. What happens to websites after death, anyway?
What can a website be?
Website as room
In an age of information overload, a room is comforting because it's finite, often with a specific intended purpose.
Simultaneously, a room can be flexible: you can shift its contents or even include a temporary partition, depending on occasion. You can also position elements in spatial juxtaposition, or create entrances to adjacent rooms through links.
In the early days of The Creative Independent, we sometimes thought of TCI’s website like a house next to a river. We considered the interviews the flowing water, as they were our house’s nutrients and source of life. We would collect and drink from the water every day. But sometimes, depending on its nutrient makeup, the water would change our house. We’d wake up to see a new door where a picture frame once was. Knowledge became the architect.
Like any metaphor, it’s not perfect. For better or worse, it’s much more difficult to delete a building than a website.
Website as shelf
Zooming into this room inside this house, we see a shelf. Maybe a shelf is easier to think about than a whole room. What does one put on a shelf? Books and objects from life? Sure, go ahead. Thankfully there’s nothing too heavy on the shelf, or else it would break. A few small things will do, knowledge-containing or not. Plus, lighter things are easy to change out. Is a book or trinket “so last year?” Move it off the shelf! Consider what surprising juxtapositions you can make on your little shelf.
Plants can’t be rushed. They grow on their own. Your website can be the same way, as long as you pick the right soil, water it (but not too much), and provide adequate sunlight. Plant an idea seed one day and let it gradually grow.
Maybe it will flower after a couple of years. Maybe the next year it’ll bear fruit, if you’re lucky. Fruit could be friends or admiration or money—success comes in many forms. But don’t get too excited or set goals: that’s not the idea here. Like I said, plants can’t be rushed.
Fred Rogers said you can grow ideas in the garden of your mind. Sometimes, once they’re little seedlings and can stand on their own, it helps to plant them outside, in a garden, next to the others.
Gardens have their own ways each season. In the winter, not much might happen, and that’s perfectly fine. You might spend the less active months journaling in your notebook: less output, more stirring around on input. You need both. Plants remind us that life is about balance.
It’s nice to be outside working on your garden, just like it’s nice to quietly sit with your ideas and place them onto separate pages.
A website could also be a puddle. A puddle is a temporary collection of rainwater. They usually appear after rainstorms. Like a storm, creating a website can happen in a burst. Sometimes it’s nice to have a few bursts/storms of creating a website, since the zone can be so elusive. Some people even call rain “computer weather.”
There is also no state of “completeness” to a website, like a puddle, since they’re ephemeral by nature. Sometimes they can be very big and reflective. Despite their temporal nature, I’ve even seen some creatures thrive in puddles. Meanwhile, some smaller puddles may only last a day.
Not everything, even the most beautiful puddle with its incredible reflective surface, needs to last long. If the world doesn’t end tomorrow, there will be another storm. And where there’s a hole, a puddle will appear again.
Puddles evaporate slowly over time. It might be difficult, but I would love to see a website evaporate slowly, too.
Website as thrown rock that’s now falling deep into the ocean
Sometimes you don’t want a website that you’ll have to maintain. You have other things to do. Why not consider your website a beautiful rock with a unique shape which you spent hours finding, only to throw it into the water until it hits the ocean floor? You will never know when it hits the floor, and you won’t care.
Thankfully, rocks are plentiful and you can do this over and over again, if you like. You can throw as many websites as you want into the ocean. When an idea comes, find a rock and throw it.
The web is what we make it
While an individual website could be any of those metaphors I mentioned above, I believe the common prevailing metaphor—the internet as cloud—is problematic. The internet is not one all-encompassing, mysterious, and untouchable thing. (In early patent drawings depicting the internet, it appears as related shapes: a blob, brain, or explosion.) These metaphors obfuscate the reality that the internet is made up of individual nodes: individual computers talking to other individual computers.
The World Wide Web recently turned 29. On the web’s birthday, Tim Berners Lee, its creator, published a letter stating the web’s current state of threat. He says that while it’s called the “World Wide Web,” only about half the world is connected, so we should close this digital divide.
But at the same time, Berners Lee wants to make sure this thing we’re all connecting to is truly working for us, as individuals: “I want to challenge us all to have greater ambitions for the web. I want the web to reflect our hopes and fulfill our dreams, rather than magnify our fears and deepen our divisions.”
“Metaphor unites reason and imagination,” says George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book, Metaphors We Live By (1980). “Metaphors are not merely things to be seen beyond. In fact, one can see beyond them only by using other metaphors. It is as though the ability to comprehend experience through metaphor were a sense, like seeing or touching or hearing, with metaphors providing the only ways to perceive and experience much of the world. Metaphor is as much a part of our functioning as our sense of touch, and as precious.”
Instead of a cloud, let’s use a metaphor that makes the web’s individual, cooperative nodes more visible. This way, we can remember the responsibility we each have in building a better web. The web is a flock of birds or a sea of punctuation marks, each tending or forgetting about their web garden or puddle home with a river of knowledge nearby.
If a website has endless possibilities, and our identities, ideas, and dreams are created and expanded by them, then it’s instrumental that websites progress along with us. It’s especially pressing when forces continue to threaten the web and the internet at large. In an age of information overload and an increasingly commercialized web, artists of all types are the people to help. Artists can think expansively about what a website can be. Each artist should create their own space on the web, for a website is an individual act of collective ambition.
Maybe you are like me, and try to understand an author by what they reveal of themselves when they are not writing. I was reading an aging copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven when I found myself wondering what her dreams looked like. I searched for answers elsewhere; in the slant of her signature in a letter to an editor, in a photo of her white-pawed cat drinking from the tap, in her morning routinehttps://deepstash.com/article/73298/ursula-k-le-guins-daily-routine-the-discipline-that-fueled-her-imagination (write daily until noon and never after 8PM, when she becomes “very stupid”).
Eventually, I landed on her websitehttps://www.ursulakleguin.com/home/, a buttoned-up, forest green and ash gray place managed by her estate. It looked a little like the curving frontiers of the Pacific Northwest where the late author raised three children with her husband and wrote 22 novels, 12 short story collections, and countless essays. I clicked around its well-managed area. It revealed nothing. Until—tucked away in a corner—I stumbled upon the craggy hills of her old websitehttps://web.archive.org/web/20200808023540/http://ursulakleguinarchive.com/, opening first to a blurry, slow-loading map pulled from Earthsea, her series of fantasy books released over the span of 30 years.
Inside was an uninhibited, half-alive place, the code struggling to articulate what Le Guin had intended; blog posts with the formatting mangled, partially-bulleted lists of books she’d enjoyed. The website was started in 2006. It had come to resemble what I understood of Le Guin: pioneering, inventive, and rapidly fading.
It had come to resemble what I understood of Le Guin: pioneering, inventive, and rapidly fading.
It was website as imagination, a website was effort. Author ephemera that is integral to understanding Le Guin, tossed to the dustbins of internet history. So let us fish it out.
Le Guin started writing science fiction in the ‘50s, publishing first in pulp magazines and struggling to beat her genre’s reputation as low culture. Rejections were the norm. She continued to write. Eventually, book after book—the Earthsea series, Left Hand of Darkness, Lathe of Heaven—found sweeping audiences, won major awards, gained cross-genre attention, and earned its share of critics.
In 2006, Le Guin published Voices, the second in her young adult trilogy Annals of the Western Shore. In the same year, she launched her website onto an internet that was just gathering itself up. A decade of the web had created a strange tangle of pages. Today’s big names were beginning to lay their paths; Twitter had just launched, Facebook rolled out newsfeeds, and Google had bought YouTube. Then, as now, it took work to make a website that reflected how your individual world appeared.
The website was coded by her longtime friend, the late science fiction writer and programmer Vonda N. McIntyre, who passed away a year after Le Guin. Le Guin’s estate mentionshttps://www.ursulakleguin.com/about-the-website that McIntyre “organized and managed every line of code” with a hand so original that it has been impossible to maintain what she built.
This is where one can start to speculate on the nature of Le Guin’s dreams. “I don’t know how to build and power a refrigerator, or program a computer, but I don’t know how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either,” Le Guin writes in one blog posthttps://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology. “I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do.”
Le Guin’s old site is scrappy and has the clear mark of a novice, two-person team. Words are capitalized sporadically. There are audio excerpts from sections of her books with the file size written out next to them, back when data was not unlimited and size mattered. There is a bibliography that loads forever and never emerges. A hand-drawn, amber spider spins a slow cobweb at the corner of each page.
There were fewer website tools then. No Squarespace, no Wix, no drag-and-drop tools. No best practiceshttps://www.wix.com/blog/web-design-best-practices on where to place a button to make you click. No rules on what sort of code might translate easily between your phone and your tablet. Maybe that granted her imagination more latitude. Her old domain locates an important moment, in which a personal website could be more than just a banner ad for work or a case of trophies—when it represented an attempt to translate something about the self into virtual space.
Her old domain locates an important moment, in which a personal website could be more than just a banner ad for work or a case of trophies—when it represented an attempt to translate something about the self into virtual space.
We are told we need to appear a certain way on the web—grids and character counts and image sizes. The site does not adhere. For example, no comments allowed. “I was also put off by the idea that a blog ought to be ‘interactive,’ that the blogger is expected to read people’s comments in order to reply to them and carry on a limitless conversation with strangers,” she writeshttps://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/0-a-note-at-the-beginning.
But if the internet flows in one direction, going in the opposite has its downsides. The old website’s style is written in HTML, rather than CSS on a separate sheet as is popular today. Large parts are unreadable by modern browsers. It’s hard to resuscitate or maintain. The original vision has been distorted.
My favorite of Le Guin’s works is “Space Crone,” an essay written for the Whole Earth Magazine. In it, she lays out a scenario in which aliens come to earth from the planet Altair. It is up to humans to send someone who will represent them best.
They wonder: Should it be a president? A top athlete? Le Guin speaks up. She suggests an old woman who works part-time behind the counter of some shop, because she understands life best. She has, after all, faced death several times. She has transformed: during her own birth, during the birth of her children, during menopause. Whether or not she has been recognized by society is besides the point.
Le Guin speaks up. She suggests an old woman who works part-time behind the counter of some shop, because she understands life best.
And the old woman asks: “What will an old woman like me do on Altair?...it will be very hard to explain to her that we want her to go because only a person who has experienced, accepted, and acted the entire human condition—the essential quality of which is Change—can fairly represent humanity.”
It is possible that Le Guin’s website is effluvia as impossible to read meaning into as letters she wrote to her family or her film photos, bright with glare, and that her dreams can only be spotted in the writing she completed and published.
Consider the oppositehttps://laurelschwulst.com/e/my-website-is-a-shifting-house/ possibility: Le Guin’s website is a relic of an author attempting to gain control over how she was remembered on the internet—history’s largest documentation project. For that reason, it is a small archive of her dreams: a restless imagination looking for new frontiers; a model of age and regress; the essential quality of which is change.
I never had formal training in design, but I’ve always been designing. Like many designers, I have had my fair share of building and rebuilding portfolios over the years. Initially, my idea of websites naturally settled into a need for self-branding as this seemed to be the default gateway for web design. I thought a “good website” meant striving for eye-catching, bold interactions with vibrant colors and inner pages inundated by detailed case studies. I thought a “good website” would land me design jobs — which in some cases, turned out to be true (more on this later). I quickly realized that a “digital portfolio as a website” served a specific audience and practice I was not interested in. Its layout seemed to honor productivity: a layout for capitalism, homogeneity, the artist reduced to a modern worker.
Updating my portfolios felt like a chore. The urge, the need, to improve my websites never ended. I was always stuck in a circular loop of designing for the sake of better interaction, better animation, better copywriting, and to be a better candidate, but my websites never satiated me. I deeply yearned to craft an online space for myself to capture the essence of my thinking and working. My archive of websites is a history of my self-learning journey, but also reminds me that my relationship to net art and web design had been parochial and flattened by big website builders: I had been building websites for others this whole time.
“Most personal websites aim at personal connection with other people, or at establishing oneself professionally. They're not usually about helping the author think and create, except incidentally.
Those things – personal connection, professional marketing – are important. But as the purpose for a website I can't get excited about them. But I can get excited about the idea of using this website toenhance my ability to think and create.”
Before I learned the frameworks of frontend, before I took my first art class in college, before I even fathomed a career in design, when I was knee-deep in a pre-med track as a neuroscience major, I made my first website.
An intro to websites / Adobe Portfolio
My first website was built on Adobe Portfolio because it was included in my student Adobe package (I miss being a student and all the free things that came with it…) and I thought it had a low barrier to learning compared to other website builders. I picked an empty template to make the background green, with texts “Work”, “Play” “About” and “Contact”, in big bold purple fonts (a classic green x purple combo that I still embody to this day). I am unsure what work I even included here. Perhaps some projects, illustrations, and photographs. I remember feeling compelled to include “play” because “work” felt like a professional delineation that did not share the full extent of my craft and thinking — perhaps an initial inception to my portfolio dissatisfaction that had been brewing from the start (Unfortunately, no screenshots or images of my site could be found).
A practical portfolio / Cargo
Moving away from Adobe Portfolio, I wanted to dedicate some time to building a more “practical portfolio”… optimized for hiring, something more legitimate, if you will, whatever that means. I stayed on Cargo to build a few different websites over the years. I added custom codes for the first time. I built out full case studies. Cargo was cute, and it landed me multiple design internships including Wix and a political design fellowship that eventually turned into my first full-time design gig. It was organized and playful, but the interface was not very user-friendly and at times, I felt a plateau in its customization. I started yearning for a more sustainable non-templatized website and imagined what it could be.
The lord of websites / Wix
Summer of 2021, out of college, I had my first design internship at the Wix Playground Academyhttps://www.wix.com/playground/academy-nyc. It was a one-month intensive summer program (completely free!) and I turned down the first offer of a political design fellowship to attend the program. I was only really compelled to accept Wix for its big industry name and at the time, I foolishly thought that this internship would have a better chance of leading to a full-time job (oh boy was I wrong!). At the height of COVID, I attended the 4-week remote program in my childhood bedroom, online every day at 6 am to attend lectures, workshops, and demos.
We were expected to leave the program with personalized “high-level portfolios” hosted on EditorX by Wix — a wording specifically provided by the mentors to add to our resume. The program was fast-paced with regular critiques and I was in a constant creative rut trying to meet deadlines and show something that would help me stand out. At the end of the program, my portfolio received a lot of marketing traction, and my final portfolio was plastered as the star child of fervent marketing for the program. I collaborated on a few pieces for their socials, interviewed, and was featured in a few design articles. I started receiving emails on freelance and collaborations (that I completely missed because they went to spam). I was suddenly receiving an overwhelming amount of spotlight from good marketing and one well-designed website.
I share this not as a highlight of my design career, but as a sobering moment. Surely, the program presented a good learning opportunity to meet with high-profile artists and designers as mentors that I otherwise would have never met. However, the program seemed to hold more emphasis on producing high-level portfolios built and hosted on Wix than the actual process itself. It was a compact marathon pushing for production and completion. I was designing for 8-10 hours every day for four weeks, turning dead wheels and receiving dividing critiques from different mentors. By week four, I was completely exhausted and it was evident that my peers were also struggling to meet the deadlines.
There was also a very notable lack of diversity in the cohort. The demographic of my class (although I am unsure how it has changed over the years) had been mostly East Asian women in art school. Out of 30 students, there was only one Black student, about 3-4 male-identifying students, and less than 5 students representing Latinx, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, and mixed heritage. Furthermore, as one of the few students without a formal design background, I felt immense imposter syndrome and knowledge gap seeing that the majority of my peers already had “high-level”, polished portfolios used to apply for the program. I was lucky that my website on Cargo was sufficient enough, but I found it ironic that to be accepted into a web design program, one needed to come in with an already polished portfolio. The only difference? Now it’s hosted on Wix.
I am not trying to dismiss the labor, effort, community, resources, and intention of free mentorship programs. Growing up low-income, I have benefitted immensely from incredible mentors who made personal sacrifices and labor to make free programs possible. I believe in the power of paying things forward and have a big penchant for (true) accessibility and open-sourced knowledge sharing. I know that some folks would be grateful to be accepted into this program and I, too, felt a desperate desire at one point when job searching. But this opportunity had rather left me with an ick. Perhaps this is because institutionally, I saw the hidden politics of the organization and the problems underneath. From buried HR complaints of sexual harassment of one of the mentors to the lack of diversity in guest artists and lecturers, it was hard to come out of the program feeling proud of my work.
I also say this experience was sobering because I wondered if this is what it takes to “make it” in the traditional world of design: corporate marketing, compressed designs, templatized solutions without listening to what I wanted to see on my websites. I added plastic bags and wraps as the theme of my website because I received feedback that there wasn’t any “legitimate story that brings everything together” in my first few drafts. For some reason, adding repeated elements was groundbreaking enough to receive legitimacy for marketing which I still find silly to this day. If this was the acme of corporate design or a glimpse of what it could be, I knew I did not want it. On the fifth email for a marketing interview from Wix, I turned it down, telling them I was exhausted. My portfolio still highlights the main landing page of the program.
This time reinforced the practice that a portfolio does not necessarily have to be a website, nor does one’s personal website need to showcase a portfolio. A portfolio does not necessarily capture one’s essence, and it’s just a matter of finding the right mediums, tools, material, and intention. My idea of a “good designer” has also changed drastically over the years. I don’t find a good designer to necessarily have a website. Good design is anything that I find compelling and makes me think. It’s the kind of work that makes me imagine how this process could be applied to my work. It’s something that helps me rediscover my wonder that is often overshadowed by the motion of work and being.
Unfortunately, this practice was short-lived because most job applications required links to live websites for portfolios. So I made one in 3 days. I went to Readymag, took their most basic template, and tweaked it slightly to upload my content. At this point, I felt defeated by web builders. I surrendered completely to its efficiency knowing that this wasn’t going to be an intentional reflection or an exploration of who I am as a person and an artist. I knew I had to find a job and this was the easiest way to do it and I did. This website lived for 3 months.
I shit on website builders, but I want to acknowledge that it is a very powerful tool that has lowered the barrier for web design. I do not want to dismiss how some creatives have found ways to encapsulate their unique artistic voice on website builders through high-level customization. And that’s okay! Using a template from Readymag helped reduce my timeline for my job search. My concern is that the notion of net art and the internet is often branded by the narratives corporations make them out to be, and it feels that the entry to this craft must rely on subscriptions or templates to fulfill guidelines set by an audience that is not the creator.
Brutalism as resistance / Handmade
After landing my new job, I knew it was time to stop relying on big corporate web makers that flatten design and make something of my own, no matter how long it takes. I wanted to make something lightweight and sustainable (for me and the environment) but also bare-boned. I have always gravitated towards brutalism as an act of resistance against the evolution of tools towards immense convenience and against conformity towards lavish builds, whether they be websites or buildings. Brutalism highlights the fundamentals and what is at the core: it urges a stripping of embellishments to reveal what’s underneath.
Peter Smithson believed that the core of brutalism was a reverence for materials, expressed honestly, stating “Brutalism is not concerned with the material as such but rather the quality of material”,and "the seeing of materials for what they were: the woodness of the wood; the sandiness of sand.”
[Brutalism is] an ethic, not an aesthetic.
Similarly, I think I am working to capture the “websiteness of the website”, or “Eileeness of Eileen”, whatever that means…
My websitehttps://www.eileenie.net is currently in progress. I am not too sure what projects I want to share here. Maybe websites are meant to be always in progress. But this website feels most like me. It honors an exploration of self and practices that build value through freeing and autonomous frameworks. Its architecture and subsistence are not tied to a corporation or a monthly subscription (other than my domain), just me. It may not convey all the UX case studies I have done or the marketing impacts I have made. It barely shares any professional background in my design career. But it builds on top of the people, reading, and writing that informs my practice and embodies the raw encapsulation of who I am and yearn to be as a person and an artist.
Thanks for walking through my digital sites with me.
This essay was originally published on Eileen Ahn's newsletter.
Coding in Situ
Benjamin Earl
I’ve wanted to be good at coding since I was a teenager. The translation of language to things on a screen has always intrigued me. When my family first got a computer, I would talk to it as I played games, browsed the internet, or drew in MS Paint. My mum would tell me off for talking to myself, but I think in my head I was trying to code — attempting to transform ideas and thoughts into pixels.
I grew up in the deep, deep countryside of southwest England. Back then I used computers to connect with things that were beyond the boundaries of my physical environment. But the internet never made me feel disconnected from my material surroundings: the vast stretches of green fields surrounding my house, the moors and wetlands, my parents’ clematis nursery. The landscape was as much a part of me as I was of it; I could sense and feel the place.
These two worlds that I inhabited as a kid were distinctly different in terms of tactility, and today I still find myself searching for what I was missing in each: tangibility in an online environment and connectivity in a physical one. This search has, in many ways, led me to where I am now, and my reason for writing this. I want to tell you about a practice I’ve been calling Coding in Situhttps://www.are.na/benjamin-earl/coding-in-situ
Web/Site Writing
On Valentines day 2022, an email arrived from some friends that I had never met. The email asked if my friend Kirsten SpruitVisit Kirsten Spruit's website at 238 in the directory under HTML https://kirstenspruit.com https://robidacollective.com and I would like to make a website for their collective Robida. I knew about Robida from friends who had been to visit them in the mountains on the Italian-Slovenian border where they live and practice what they call “inhabiting the marginshttps://thisismold.com/rural-urban-systems/inhabiting-the-margins-with-robida-collective.” Kirsten and I were intrigued by Robida’s practice of living and working differently. We decided that in order to make a website for them, we needed to practice making it differently.
As soon as we arrived in the small village of Topolò, where Robida is based, I was overwhelmed by the sound of birdsong, the smell of fresh woodland air, and an immense feeling of peace. It hit me all at once, along with the daunting realization that we had to somehow translate all of this into a website.
Topolò from Google Maps. [A digital map showing green mountainous terrain.]
To ease the uneasiness of a complicated task ahead, Kirsten and I spent the first day or two of our visit going for walks around the village and the surrounding mountains and valleys. We visited the caves, we crossed the border and swam in the river next to the waterfalls. We spent a lot of time with the people of the collective and others who were visiting at that time. We drank coffee, we cooked and ate dinner collectively, and we danced together in the evening. As we got to know this place more intimately, the website somehow became harder to visualize but easier to feel.
Before Kirsten and I had left our studio in Rotterdam for Topolò, our friend and studiomate Jack Bardwellhttps://jackbardwell.com pointed us to the architecture critic Jane Rendell, and a practice of hers that Jack thought seemed relevant to our task. This practice that Rendell calls “site writing”https://site-writing.co.uk is when “discussions concerning situatedness and site-specificity enter the writing of criticism, history and theory, and writers reflect on their own subject positions in relation to their particular objects and fields of study, and on how their writing can engage materially with their sites of inquiry and audiences.”
While with Robida, and guided by Rendell’s ideas, we began to ask what “site writing” might look like if it were to be applied to the act of writing code. Kirsten and I were writing a website, but we could still consider the material, political, social, and historical aspects of the place we were in. We wondered, what would it look like if we were to code in situ?
As we held onto this question, we continued to immerse ourselves in the life of Topolò. We developed routines and began to notice the sensitivities and peculiarities of the village. We felt the presence of different elements and materials that made up this site. We found that we could tell if someone was home by whether there was smoke drifting from their chimney, and that the fire salamanders only came out after heavy rain in the spring. We learned that the internet connection for some of the village came through a satellite dish pointed towards the sky, and that when it got cloudy, the internet connection got worse. We could sense the weather by browsing the web.
Satellite dish of the internet. [A small grey satellite protruding from the side of a concrete building, arching toward a blue sky.]
So we started to code. We began with translation: how can this physical place — seasonal changes, daily rhythms, properties of the landscape — be understood within this digital form? Inevitably not all of our ideas materialized, but along the way I realized that the process of making this website was never about translation to begin with. Rather, it was about creating something that would become a part of the space, a site-specific website that fluctuated, adapted, and moved along with the patterns of the place.
We finished the first version of the websitehttps://robidacollective.com a little over a year ago. Even today, it feels alive and somehow unfinished. I can see who is visiting the village via a scroll of names at the bottom, each name enveloped in a different color chosen by that person. I can see the events going on through the calendar, the thoughts people might be having in the journal. These are some of the ways that we designed and developed the website to be part of the site. We still haven’t finished the website, but ever since we started it I’ve begun searching for a way to turn this short experiment into a practice.
Possibilities of Connection
I like to watch webcams pointed at different landscapes around the world. I find them soothing. I often drift off, my mind wandering away from my body as I gaze into the screen. I’ve tried to figure out what draws me to them for some time. Do I have some voyeuristic tendency? Do I enjoy watching the wilderness? Or is it just the feeling of looking out over something that I like?
Recently, I realized that it wasn’t the video stream or the places that I was looking at that relaxed me. It was the infrastructure and systems that made that looking possible. Infrastructure made up of data centers, undersea cables, radio relays, and satellites, as well as the minerals they’re built from and the people who continue to maintain them. This technological system leaves me with a strange yet genuine feeling of connection.
After that Spring in Topolò, I visited another border — this time the Swiss-Italian border for an artist-in-residence program called Sassohttps://sasso-residency.ch/en/. I wanted to spend my time there exploring network infrastructure and the possibilities of connection. Before arriving at Sasso, I had come across a set of weather satellites that broadcast their data through radio waves, along with a community of amateur weather enthusiasts who listen to them. I felt potential in this system and wanted to explore it, so I built a ground station at Sasso following the instructions of online guides.
On the night that I assembled it, I sat out in the garden looking over the darkness of the Lake Maggiore below and the silhouettes of the mountains opposite. At first I heard nothing but static, but after a few minutes, a faint beeping sound came through my headphones. I was listening to a satellite hundreds of miles above my head. After I decoded the recording using open-source softwarehttps://open-weather.community/open-weather-apt-guide/, an image gradually appeared on my screen that showed cloud formations, land masses, oceans, and jet streams.
Image from NOAA-15 satellite received on July 2nd 2023. [Two grayscale images showing abstracted cloud formations, land masses, oceans, and jet streams.]
I could see the world at that moment from a perspective far beyond my own. Naturally, I began searching for myself and Lake Maggiore in the images, but I couldn’t find it. I was looking at an image of the atmosphere, an image that measured on a scale I couldn’t even comprehend. Each pixel was the equivalent of 4x4km of land.
But I began to notice moments of disruption in the signal, which appeared as visual noise in the image. Radio waves have an analog form that isn’t the same as an on or off digital signal, but instead can weaken as distance, obstacles, or interference come between broadcaster and receiver. Disruptions can be caused by mountains, buildings, trees, or people. The momentary noise in the image was a sign of my presence and the presence of my environment. It wasn’t the one-to-one representation I was originally looking for, but it was a sign that I was here, much like the chimney smoke coming from the houses in Topolò.
This experience informed another aspect of coding in situ and made me see the practice in a new way. Coding in situ is not just about making sense of one’s environment before coding. It’s also about creating something that is sense-able — something that doesn’t disappear behind a smooth surface. Coding in situ means creating something that fosters a level of autonomy to those that it touches and lets them sense the underlying infrastructure.
Two years after I received the initial email from Robida, I found myself in New York City giving a workshop as part of Fruitful School. I was there to introduce the idea of an “ultralight computer” as part of Laurel Schwulst’s Ultralight workshop. The computer I brought was an amalgamation of an ESP32 Module, a battery, and a solar panel that could host a website no larger than 1MB. It could serve as a captive portal (similar to WiFi login pages at hotels and airports) to any device connected to the computer’s WiFi signal.
As part of the workshop, I asked the participants to create a site-specific website for this ultralight computer. The workshop took place in a space called Index. For the few hours we were together, the walls of the space became our boundaries, but it soon became clear that those boundaries were permeable. One group made a website that prompted you to sit at a specific spot, look out the window, and recount what you saw. Another website questioned where the dog whose name was embroidered into a bean bag was. There were websites as extensions of plants, websites as personal FAQs, a website as a kitchen guide — each dedicated to a specific site within the space.
In just one hour, seven site-specific websites were made, each in their infancy but born from a desire for connection between the material and the digital worlds. When the workshop ended, I left the building and found myself in the middle of downtown Manhattan. What I expected was a jarring contrast, one that revealed the difference between these two spaces: one calm, situated, poetic, and the other hectic, loud, and fast. Yet when I stepped onto the street, they didn’t feel disjointed. They felt different, but in no way separate.
Coding in Situ was born out of a collaborative act, and I tend to think of it as something that exists beyond myself, something that extends further than my mind allows. Ever since that initial moment with Robida, I’ve found myself talking and working with others in public or private about what it means to code in situ. We’ve talked about what it means to make a site specific website, what the idea of “placefulness” might look like online, and how hardware and software can become focuses of play and experimentation when considered through their material conditions.
The workshop at the Fruitful School was a window into what it might mean to share coding in situ as a method or a tool. But instead of prescribing how it can be done, I want to leave every site open to what you think is right for it. Perhaps make a website for your home, build your own wifi router, make a queer server and feral web, interact with weather satellites, imagine a server farm, simulate a space, host all your own digital infrastructure, design your own digital garden, solar power your website. Whatever you think you need, know that you can do it without knowing how to code. If anything, don’t learn to code. Remain amateur. My teenage self still wants to be good at coding, but my current self just wants to stare out the window or through a webcam.
I read a posthttps://docs.sendwithses.com/random-stuff/the-internet-is-an-seo-landfilla while back about how SEO and search engine ranking algorithms have created a landfill of useless search results across search engines. It’s interesting how dramatically different searching the web was before search engines began ranking results based on popularity and profiling user engagement. In the early days of search, there was a real feeling of exploring the vastness of the web.
In the last few years, websites and social media platforms have introduced explore pages/tabs into their interfaces. Usually these are just feeds masquerading as explore pages. Other times they are simply static curated “staff picks” lists, or personalized recommendation pages. To me, these pages don’t live up to the name “explore.” A feed is based around time, usually sorted reverse chronologically, whereas an explore page reveals the expansiveness of a website by pulling from disparate sources, indifferent to time, allowing one to jump into the depths of something entirely new. Even personalized recommendation pages like Instagram’s explore tab aren’t really explore pages either because they are limited to a user’s interests/similarities to other users on the platform. Being fed similar content based on your likes isn’t the same as exploring the vastness of a platform. Explore pages are unique in that they unearth things that are not necessarily the most popular or the most recent. When explore pages are built this way, it allows users to approach a platform with an open mind and with less expectations. Explore pages should give you that feeling of excitement that one gets from exploring a new place.
At The Creative Independent we talked about creating an explore page, but we never got far enough along on the idea to define what the page would actually look like. One thing we did implement was a https://thecreativeindependent.com/randomrandom button that served up a random interview from over 600 articles across the site. I ended up moving this button into the main navigation so that readers could continue to click the button until they found an interview that interested them. It’s fairly easy to implement a “randomized items/articles” section on a website. In the case of The Creative Independent, this simple addition revealed how expansive the site really was.
In 2008, I came across the site Muxtapehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muxtape, which was the original “mixtape on the web” website. Users would upload MP3s from their computers and curate the tracks into “muxtapes.” Though the site was eventually shut down, I often think about one key design decision. Muxtape’s homepage had a Random active muxtapes section that changed on refresh. This simple randomized section gave users a way to instantly explore muxtapes across the website. This feature alone replaced the need for a search. The site became centered around exploring mixes instead of searching for a particular mix or a song. I remember spending hours refreshing the homepage, clicking through to a mix, listening, and heading back to the homepage to find another. I’d never experienced anything like this on a website. It truly felt like I was exploring a vast archive similar to the experience of wandering through a library and randomly choosing a title from a shelf.
I doubt anything like Muxtape will ever exist again but I don’t think the idea of exploring a website through randomization has to be completely lost. Randomization can be extremely powerful on its own without any sort of curation or personalization.
In the last few years, platforms have stripped away any hint of how vast they actually are. As a result, users only get to see a tiny sliver of an entire platform. There’s been an overwhelming push to build tools specifically designed for engagement (like buttons, emoji responses, comment threading) instead of building tools that help users actually explore. This has replaced any sense of play with a bleak struggle for users attention. The marketing line for these new tools could easily be, “engage more, explore less.” Imagine if we started designing with vastness in mind again. The data is already there, all we have to do as designers and engineers is to build tools that reveal how expansive these platforms really are.
The Internet Phone Book is the only phone book I’ve felt compelled to read cover to cover, engaged and delighted the entire way through. Those less inclined to read it linearly will find many other ways in: jumping between the thoughtful categories; following charming illustrations and strings metadata; or reading through a selection of essays that give context to this extensive crowdsourced directory of personal and poetic websites.
All to say, there’s a wonderful sense of hypertextuality in the Internet Phone Book, accentuated by perhaps my favorite feature: the ‘dial-a-site’ system, which cleverly tethers the printed book back to the network it documents. But Kristoffer and Elliott are less interested in linking the online and offline worlds, between which they see little distinction, as they are in surfacing connections between people — those who admire and participate in a more intimate, experimental, and expressive web. We could ask for no better guides to, and stewards of, this corner of the internet.
– Meg Miller, Are.na Editorial
With contributions by…
Olia Lialina
Elan Ullendorff
Zachary Kai
Chia Amisola
Garry Ing
Laurel Schwulst
Meghna Rao
Elliott Cost
Benjamin Earl
Eileen Ahn
to be forwarded to the website. This makes it a bit easier to visit long urls.
timezone of person or server (see timezone chart on the next page)
estimated size of index.html and resources
recommended by Kristoffer
recommended by Elliott
Written by the creator of Kinopio, a thinking canvas for new ideas and hard problems
I like what I’m building, and if it dies it’ll be a shame. But it won’t kill me like it’s killing my baby that I would’ve loved to work on for the next 10+ yrs.
