alive internet

The cozy web arose as an antidote, evoking the quirky hobbyist communities and handmade Geocities aesthetics of the early public internet before scale and corporatization altered the landscape. Niche blogs, craft forums, and subcultures bonding over specific interests aim to recapture that spirit of shared meaning over metrics.

You can’t call it the “online world” if you never leave your feed. If your entire internet life happens inside TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, or Twitter, you’re simply mall-walking, and malls are fine: predictable, climate-controlled, food courts and chain stores on every corner, but don’t mistake the mall for the city. The city is bigger,... See more

This physical experience had transformed into an emotional one. And it doesn’t stop at emotional connection. When you become intimate with something, it makes it feel like something you can change. A mental connection is developed—an understanding of how the other behaves in relation to you.

Touch develops connections across our fields of... See more

The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight.

These are largely static pages, but it doesn't take a huge leap of imagination to envision what people could make with more functionality: interactive pages (draw four circles; record sounds; make a DIY ocarina), moodboards, personal pages, encyclopedic rabbitholes. It gets really exciting when you give people basic social primitives (permissions,... See more

Playful software that let people experiment with their own spaces and forms of expression are a precondition to a more enlivening internet. It must begin organically from the many and not dictated by the few.

This is the transformative power of this type of software. It changes the way we perceive our systems and exist in our digital spaces.

They delight. They exist just to bring joy to people!

The internet is dying on the outside but growing on the inside.

These experiences are not going to be SEO optimized. Instead of being passively discovered via search, they’ll have to be so good that people seek them out. They’ll spread through word of mouth. People will one-up each other, create weirder, more unique, and more magical experiences. If they optimize for anything, it will be creativity.