The Lost Art of the Internet

Hypnospace Outlaw is one of my favourite games of all time, yet important aspects of it are under-discussed. Most analyses I’ve seen only talk about it as a pastiche of Y2K internet or as critical of tech companies, but I haven’t really seen anyone analyse it from multiple angles I care about. For example, I haven’t seen much about its place as a piece of interactive fiction or “hypertext fiction” design, or about how its audio design ties so much together, or appreciation of its characters making and collaborating and mentoring each other about art in messy and human ways.

There are other things I want to talk about too, but they require lots of research. I will try and write those later! In this blog post, though, I just wanna touch on formal and thematic elements of Hypnospace Outlaw that don’t often get talked about. I want to provide context, and I want to provide a lot, and I had to write a lot because all of you didn’t do it first! You left me no choice. I love the internet, and hate what it’s become, and if my thoughts are influenced by all these aspects that I don’t see talked about, why not try and say something about it even if its imperfect? If all art is conversation with the world it was made in, we should actually try to converse. That being said if you could tackle some of this first in the future for other topics so I don’t have to write another 20k words on top of the 13k here I’d appreciate that ok thanks smile

If you’re spoiler-averse: I only start talking spoilers in the second section, when I mention “Dylan’s bad car game”. From that point, the post discusses Hypnospace Outlaw’s ending sequence, some late-game mechanics and plot details, and the stories of some of its characters. Apart from that, a lot of characters and world-building details are left unexplored so that you can explore them yourself.

Table of contents:

• An Incomplete History Of Hypertext Fiction
  
• Connecting You to Web Art I Like
• Compression of Time
• Mentorship and Community
• What We Can Do With These Tools
• Footnotes

You don’t have to read this all at once by the way. Read it in chapters! That’s what the table of contents is for.

An Incomplete History Of Hypertext Fiction

Firstly, let’s discuss Hypnospace Outlaw not just as an adventure game, but also as a piece of hypertext fiction. I think it gives valuable insights into similar works and into how the internet has changed over the last 25 years. Firstly, I’m gonna have to make a brief and loose definition of hypertext fiction. It’s not a household term, I only want to look at specific kinds, and I want to limit how much research I need to do while still discussing a fair bit of stuff. So, my personal definition is the following:

• It’s digital and uses some kind of visual markup language, like HTML
• It’s multimedia, so you can arrange text, images, audio, video, and other interactive elements, without it being entirely video/images.
• It’s split into “pages”, and pages link to other pages.
• You can navigate through these pages at your own discretion.
• This allows the player to discover information non-linearly.
• There’s distance from the game world; the framing is less “player character navigating a fictional world” and more “You The Player personally sifting through details”.

So basically what I’m interested in is works that are tailor made for HTML, a.k.a. the document format that people have grafted styling and interactivity onto like it’s Frankenstein’s Monster. This means stories told solely as hypertext fiction end up feeling like sorting through collections of documents, while also having visual styling specific to HTML. For example, with HTML and CSS it’s easiest to make segments of pages in certain ways with certain styles and borders (like on the website you’re reading this on now), and it’s harder to move other things around in reaction to the user dragging something around on their own.

It’s easiest to use this to make stories with non-connected linearity. Tracking the state of the game as it goes on and reflecting that state on the page, like you would with traditional adventure games, isn’t easy to do with raw HTML and CSS!¹ This means progression mostly ends up being gated by knowing puzzle solutions instead of player stats or inventory or events in the world. Of course, this is fluid like all genres; Hypnospace Outlaw is one of the biggest archetypal examples of this genre to me, because you’re literally sorting through webpages, but it’s still an adventure game with an overarching narrative and game state. Navigating hypertext fiction to figure out those smaller narratives non-linearly is the way that the player does those adventure game things.

There’s also a lot of things I’m discounting here, like Lain PSX and Immortality. They’re wonderful games and textbook examples of this genre in every sense, except their aesthetic is not quite what I’m thinking of because you’re sorting through audio or video instead of documents. However, Lain PSX has its lineage in a similar medium that had its own boom of interest in the late 90s: interactive CD-ROM software. Hazel talks about this in her video Playstation Lain and the Weird World of Interactive CD-Roms, and their limitations were similar to the limitations of hypertext fiction. Quoting from about 21:25:

Non-linearity and existentialism are the two key pillars here. The medium in its infancy were predisposed to those thematic elements underscoring its works. Yeah, those penis-pump graphics aren’t going to fly on any computer; we’re gonna have to pre-render this shit, so it’s going to have to happen around you. All you can do is wander and observe.

And a bit later on,

It’s pretty inevitable that stories told in this manner with visuals like this [i.e. Garage: Bad Dream Adventure] aren’t going to be able to tell any old lighthearted coming of age story. Thus, their stories were distant, and had to be pieced together out of order. There’s no need to compromise your vision trying to make something that unbreakingly flows like a game if you just let the player do exactly as they please, however they please, and in whatever order they please.

I haven’t played many of the games she mentions there, but a lot of them still involved being a player character navigating a physical space. There’s a difference between the “happening around you” she describes and the “piecing together what has already happened” in Hypnospace Outlaw. Her point about pre-rendering is also an interesting comparison. Real time graphics technology has gotten exponentially better since the 90s, but a web browser’s page rendering can only get so complicated before it makes it difficult for people to make web pages and for browsers to render them.

We can also look at tools like Twine, a middleware that sits on top of HTML and lets you make adventure-game-style interactive fiction, and whose stories are made up of “pages” that can link to each other non-linearly. Twine is really really cool, but even outside of the aesthetic, it also doesn’t quite fit the genre because the middleware tracks game state for you in ways that are easy to use and understand, meaning text-based adventure games can be made with it more easily. Hopefully you can extrapolate why I’m not talking much in this post about things like Homestuck, 17776, or the SCP Wiki², though you can look at all of these works through this lens.

Whether hypertext fiction directly inspired Hypnospace Outlaw or not, these works are still connected to each other through using similar conventions, and it’s the same with hypertext fiction released after Hypnospace Outlaw too. I want to share some of this medium’s history and later I’ll share some works important to me, since discoverability for this medium still isn’t great. I want these things to be a part of your context too.

Self-guided non-linearity is the main advantage of hypertext fiction. You can navigate between pages when the work directs you to with more ease than actually looking through documents and following citations, and it can be more visually interesting too. You can approach pages from many different entry points. Similarly, much like a book or comic, you can also choose not to go anywhere and linger on a page. These things are also drawbacks, though, because the writer has to account for all of this. In his 2013 article for WIRED titled “Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story”³, Steven Johnson says this pretty explicitly:

When you tried to make an argument or tell a journalistic story in which any individual section could be a starting or ending point, it wound up creating a whole host of technical problems, the main one being that you had to reintroduce characters or concepts in every section. Feed did manage other interesting hypertext experiments: We annotated important documents or passages from new books, and we held multithreaded hypertext debates. But we never managed to publish a true branching-path narrative.

In other words, if this format only lends itself to stories where you have to piece together details after the fact, when you want to make an actual adventure game it kind of falls apart. Johnson’s use of “branching-path narrative” suggests to me that he probably would have killed to use Twine in the late 90s: if you can track game state easier, you can make a branching-path narrative easier.

The ways people talk about hypertext fiction, like in Johnson’s article, reflect how people use and understand the internet, and we can chart that over time. For example, most of the examples when you google “hypertext fiction” are from the late 90s, which is when personal website creation tools and infrastructure (and similar tools like Hypercard) were at their peak. The above article gives us an insight into what the people who made hypertext fiction in 1999 thought about it, both at the time in 1999 and when the article was published 14 years later in 2013.

To share one example of how our priorities have changed over time, supporting artists directly via one-off or continuous crowdfunding has become more ubiquitous online in 2025 compared to in 2013, so it may not have even occurred to Johnson to even mention this fact in his article. Meanwhile, Andrew Johnston briefly mentioned this in their more modern postmortem of the medium from 2022 titled “Hypertext Fiction: The Past and Future of the Internet’s Own Tales”⁴.

These articles may describe the change online storytelling’s shift away from using HTML and toward formats with more ease of use, but this was also reflected in non-storytelling uses of the internet. So, we can use the trajectory of this medium to chart that internet-wide change. Some tools that became more prominent since the late 90s include blogging platforms, social media, Flash, the old plugin ecosystem, and newer tools like Twine or Videotome. The developers of these tools built them to fit paradigms we already understood, such as newsletters and animations and video games, and they either spit out HTML for you so you never have to manually write it, or bypassed it altogether in the case of plugins like Flash and newer web infrastructure like HTML5 Canvas.

The era before before those tools changed too much is what Hypnospace Outlaw is interested in discussing. Jay Tholen, the lead designer of the game, talks about this in an interview he did with Noclip in September of 2020. At about 9 minutes in he mentions the game covers his idea of the internet from roughly 1997 to 2002, but it more accurately covers the internet before the dominance of Flash. In our world, this is also before the dominance of blogging services, the predecessor of social media, such as Movable Type. Amy Hoy argues that this killed raw HTML as the dominant paradigm for even techy people in How the Blog Broke the Web.

So, here’s another big difference between 2013’s internet and 2025’s: Algorithmic recommendation of content outside of your network only started to become more prominent in roughly 2014. Things like Facebook’s EdgeRank did exist before 2014, but were for recommending content out of the people that you follow. So it’s funny in hindsight that Johnson’s 2013 article talks about people linking to places that weren’t social media despite hypertext fiction not taking off:

Rather, a whole different set of new forms arose in its place: blogs, social networks, crowd-edited encyclopedias. Readers did end up exploring an idea or news event by following links between small blocks of text; it’s just that the blocks of text turned out to be written by different authors, publishing on different sites. Someone tweets a link to a news article, which links to a blog commentary, which links to a Wikipedia entry. Each landing point along that itinerary is a linear piece, designed to be read from start to finish. But the constellation they form is something else.

But here in 2025 this constellation he describes isn’t most people’s experience with the internet, right? He mentions social media, but most social media posts don’t link off-site now for many reasons. TikTok pioneered this, but all social media is like this now. Those apps are designed around a For You page, which is designed to show you posts in endless streams, outside of any other context, where you never have to click off or swipe away. Much like a slot machine⁵, it’s about inducing a frictionless flow state, and that’s because they want browsing it to be your default activity. There’s many reason for this. They want to encourage you to stay on the platform, so you spend more time there. That way they get more ad revenue, can sell more of both your personal data and data on the network they are curating, and they can influence what to show you. Every social media now asks you this subconsciously: “Why choose what path to follow at any given time, why go back to things you saw earlier and build a more concrete understanding of the world, when it’s much easier to receive a stream of information disconnected from any broader context? Why choose what to do when having advertisers choose for you is less effort AND we’ve pumped billions of dollars into making it effortless?”

Personally I hate this, but these streams of information attempt to solve a genuine problem with the internet: when so much stuff is online, how do we sort though it? Facebook said it should be through the algorithmic recommendation systems they built and that we can’t see the details of, but this is because they were in the ad business. Their primary customers aren’t individual people, but the corporate entities, advertisers, copyright holders, and governments influenced by those last few. Their bottom line relies on you being unable to dismiss ads. They say you shouldn’t get to choose what to see; they said they should get to choose for you.

But this is a case of the profit incentive shaping the internet. Advertisers and copyright holders and venture capital investors voted for how the internet should be with their vastly oversized wallets. However, corporate entities don’t use the internet. People do. We want to tell stories and we want to share history and we want to build an understanding of the world, and those things connect to stories and histories and understandings of the past. We want to make choices for ourselves, given the time and tools to choose what to engage with. If we don’t choose, because other factors take away our time and tools and understandings, those advertisers will choose for us. In reality, unlike social media, culture is not a stream: it’s an ecosystem of gardens that each of us curates, whether we are aware of it or not. We can and should choose what to preserve, what new gardens and ecosystems to curate, things from others we can link to and provide context on, and what we want to discard.

HTML and hypertext fiction are not the specific panaceas here; they are small, niche mediums. I’m just a fan of whatever tools make this curation easier. Before the internet, the things you made had to fit into already existing streams like TV channels or newspapers or commercial radio stations or big museums in order to reach anyone. I didn’t grow up with Geocities, and in my childhood I immersed myself in the other ways that the internet helped people create those gardens: Flash and Game Maker and RPG Maker and GMod animations and Kingdom Hearts 2 AMVs/hacked fight videos and older versions of forums and social media that were more open/customisable/interoperable. You could argue Flash is more significant than websites for this; Flash animations allow for more inventiveness, interactivity and interconnectivity than the video functionality of HTML5. Consciously thinking about websites is just one tool among many for creating and inhabiting the kind of internet (and world) that I want to be a part of.

While it’s more difficult to write and read hypertext literature compared to other mediums in a vacuum, we do not live in one. It’s still hard, but it’s harder to make it if you don’t know how to write it, and it’s easier if you do, and it’s also easier if the people around you are also doing it, AND it’s easier to read if you know how to navigate it.

That’s why I feel like there is also a correlation between hypertext fiction’s return and free static web hosts focused on personal websites like Neocities. I assume it’s like this: Neocities was created when people wanted to move away from social media and back toward a more conscious and curated internet presence. They did it on Neocities because it reduced a bunch of friction toward making, hosting, and discovering websites. People learned HTML to make those sites, and their friends did, and they made new friends who did, and then they wanted to experiment with the form. Boom. New hypertext fiction! The next section is full of examples of Neocities sites specifically. Neocities also has some social features on top of its hosting, so people can follow sites for updates and can also more easily share things without needing to manually maintain a newsletter or whatever.

Additionally, there are marketplaces where you can directly support creators of these works now. Some have variable pricing or pay-what-you-want options, such as itch.io, and you can also fund continuous creation of a work via services like Patreon. In 2025 it’s easier to get paid for or even make a living off of making works like these, because internet infrastructure has evolved since 1999 where banner ads were the only option. It’s still hard to share and discover these works and to make that living in the first place, but the friction for this is slowly disappearing.

While hypertext fiction is hardly a well-known medium, it’s carving out its niche. Most writing on it that I’ve seen hasn’t tried to tie all of that together, so I figured I’d give it a shot. They also talk about hypertext fiction as though it’s over, when everything I’ve seen suggests that isn’t the case in the slightest.

Connecting You to Web Art I Like

There aren’t a huge amount of places for discussing fiction like this. The main example I could find was the Electronic Literature Collection, though that’s more of a catalogue with metadata than it is a piece placing it in a grander historical context. It isn’t hypertext specific but does have a category for it. These include authors whose work you may have heard about in some other contexts: Christine Love (who made of Digital: A Love Story), Natalie Lawhead (who made Electric Zine Maker), even some early twines by Porpentine (long before they wrote Serious Weakness, the only book that girls in my local area will ever fucking read apparently). However, the main examples I want to discuss aren’t found here, are more recent, and have shaped my own personal understanding of web art enough that I want to slot them into this historical context. So let’s discuss them!

One of the biggest sources of inspiration for lots of people (so much so that you probably will roll your eyes at me mentioning it) needs a big flashing lights warning whenever I talk about it, but it’s Wired Sound for Wired People by fauux. It’s essentially a gallery full of collage web art that uses a lot of imagery from Serial Experiments Lain. I wouldn’t call it hypertext fiction by this definition since you click to advance through a linear “timeline” of artworks. Regardless, those works meet some of the criteria by arranging images and text and music and whatnot together, and the next few sites I will talk about explicitly mention fauux as an inspiration or otherwise mention that they like this site.

fauux themself moved on from using the site as an artistic outlet a few years ago, save for some ARG-style puzzles. If you’re making web art like this, where people can click wherever and scroll at their own speed, how do you pace it? Outside of making people scroll large distances, both Hypnospace Outlaw and later entries in this list end up at the same solution most of the time: puzzles, ideally ones that make you explore other branches before continuing. It’s interesting that this is common between all of these.

However, there’s less maintenance being done on the existing art pages than there used to be. These pages that embed YouTube videos for their music are susceptible to link rot because those videos go down all the time. Just another annoying facet of making hypertext art on the web: sometimes the links break, or web browsers interpret that HTML differently⁶. Regardless, the site is still there, and you can still see things on it. Just make sure you turn on autoplaying audio, and seriously please be careful if you’re prone to epileptic seizures it’s kind of really bad about that.

Most people know Angus Nicneven’s author website as Terminal 00, but that’s just the framing for an author website that ends up being more hypertext fiction-y than most. Made up of over 2000 pages, your mouse cursor is a probe navigating through and gathering information on the Terminal array, of which Terminal 00 is just your entrypoint. I don’t want to talk about its world in detail, but you can look at this YouTube video by 4o3o1 for some initial pointers. What I will say is it’s set in the same universe as his novel, Stars Bleed, and is meant to elaborate on some elements of that world. The website uses its format for something a lot closer to Hypnospace Outlaw than fauux’s site originally did: as a vehicle for nonlinearly presenting puzzles, and hiding information on a world behind their solutions.

Navigating this site is similar to navigating Hypnospace Outlaw: you click through pages to find new pages with new information, featuring musical accompaniment, some pages only accessible if you solve a puzzle and look up that page on the site via typing a URL. One difference I want to highlight is that Hypnospace Outlaw gives you a way of looking up the internal details of a page that would otherwise be invisible, like the name, age, and location of the account that made it. This is used to help you solve puzzles, and as a way of establishing the actual owner of the page.

Angus’s site can’t do this exact thing, but it lets you experience a similar feeling of digging through a page’s internals by hiding comments in the source code of some pages. By right-clicking on an element of the page and choosing “Inspect”, you can view those comments, and they sometimes hint toward puzzle solutions or just provide flavour and worldbuilding. This can also help a reader understand how the page was put together! The site also has some interesting tricks unique to it, such as pages in darkness that only light up around your cursor.

Angus’ site used to say on its FAQ that it was inspired by Wired Sound for Wired People, and though it no longer mentions that fact anymore the site is still linked in the “sites to check out” section.

heaven_online is another site in this vein. Its about page is careful to describe momo as just a “messenger phantom of heaven_online”, but also mentions that it is intercepting and changing what it broadcasts on the site, so for the sake of ease of writing we’ll call momo its creator. The style has some stylistically similarities to Angus’ site but it has some key differences. There’s more going on from a technical perspective, for one, with a Javascript framework to build elements of pages on the fly and being easier for momo to maintain, and loading screens to ensure all of a page’s assets are loaded before you see it. Later segments can become mazes very easy to get lost in, especially once you get to Hathli, whose section I still haven’t found a way out of.

Now that we’ve introduced another work like Angus’ site, we can relate both of them to those CD-ROM games mentioned earlier. Unlike those games, these aren’t stories happening around you; they’re stories where you piece together everything that has already happened. While the cursor is considered a kind of player character for both of these (called a “probe” or “observer” by Angus’ and momo’s sites respectively), they interact with the world almost exclusively as information-gatherers. They’re, for the most part, a diagetic explanation of how you can explore the details of these cosmic-scale events. These sites also have very complex images, but they were arranged by hand before being put on the site. Obviously they would need to be pre-rendered in this way; good luck trying to make intricate pixel art murals out of SVG elements.

Again, heaven_online is mentioned on Angus Nicneven’s “sites to check out” page, and his site is mentioned on momo’s inspirations page. Are there more connections to discover? Who can say? I’m not the best at these kinds of puzzles, but I would never spoil the joy of this medium here by linking to specific bits and pieces out of context. Like in Hypnospace Outlaw, you can find them yourself, and you’ll have a better time if you do!

I want to make web art like those one day and seeing these comparatively huge titans of web art is both inspiring and intimidating. Both of these websites have lots of bespoke art and music going into them, and have a lot of stuff locked behind puzzles that I don’t know how to solve let alone make. How could I compete without sinking years into my own thing? I still don’t know despite knowing HTML/CSS/Javascript relatively well and thinking about personal websites for almost 9 years. So lets jump elsewhere for a second and talk about https://billwurtz.com.

This site is extremely simple. It’s just some links in some different colours. Sections contain lists of every song/video/other work he’s done. It’s not hypertext fiction, but seeing that it was possible to make a website that was just this was a big moment for me when I was younger. A lot of Bill Wurtz’s earlier work was just him trying to make things as simply as possible to get the hang of making anything, and then expanding scope slowly as he went on, even if he wasn’t sharing everything immediately. That’s why his website is “barebones”.

From this I learned a beautiful truth about making a website, or any art: you don’t need to have impeccable technique and talent or the best most intricate art or music or interactivity, you can just make anything. To use another example I learned of later in life and mentioned in my first blog post about the art style of Space Funeral, we can look at something like Higurashi. Ryukishi07’s art may be wonky but it’s still very emotive and endearing, and not focusing on unnecessary detail allowed him to not only finish his visual novel but also create works beloved by many people. That blog post of mine is also very wonky, but I hope it’s endearing. And hey, I finished it, and now I’m writing this!

Of course, without examples of this lower end, it’s hard to imagine what’s both possible and still good. Thankfully I do have an example: https://godishome.neocities.org.

It’s comparatively small and visually simpler, but it’s attempting to be a story set in part on the indie web that exists now due to places like Neocities, where that simplicity makes sense. It tells a compelling story without using massive intricate images and animations and bespoke music and it still looks good, and you can read through it and finish it in an afternoon. Despite what Hazel said in her video about not being able to depict a coming-of-age story it still manages to be one, in a sense, though one of the things listed in its content warnings is “psychosis” so it isn’t exactly light-hearted. It’s still a story that happens in a way that’s disconnected from you, but its scope is much smaller, more focused on the thoughts and interiority of a few people than on the cosmically huge scale of the earlier sites. These two types of work can coexist: Art movements need grandiose examples that artists dedicate lots of themselves to so that readers can be inspired by the grandness of its scale, but they also need examples of great things that are DIY, so that readers can be inspired by the fact that it’s possible to make something great like that in the first place.

One last example, even if it’s a bit less relevant. While wikis aren’t fiction, Steven Johnson’s article considered them part of the legacy of hypertext fiction. Neurocracy is fiction, however, set in 2049 on the fictional Omnipedia, the successor to Wikipedia after it was shut down due to copyright issues. You first view it on the day that a tech billionaire is assassinated via drone strike.

The story is told not just through the wiki pages but through it’s revision history as well: you can see what has changed on different days. Similar to Hypnospace Outlaw, it’s a way of not only viewing those connected pages but seeing how they (and their connections) change over time. Unlike Hypnospace Outlaw or even any other example in this section, Neurocracy is styled in a more mundane way, much like the SCP Wiki or one-off stories like Blackle Mori’s Basilisk Collection. It even uses its cookie disclaimer to do worldbuilding! Nevertheless, the styling is still in the service of this genre.

Hypnospace Outlaw (the game) does have some differences compared to these, obviously. For one, it has an overarching linear story in which things happen and the world moves forward in response. You only need to view a small amount of Hypnospace (the in-universe internet) for progression, though. Once you’re done you can still go back and look through everyone’s pages and figure out things about the people who use them and how they connect to each other, as I have been doing to write this.

Another key difference is that Hypnospace Outlaw circumvents certain practical limitations of the world wide web, because it’s a game you download all of at once that contains something kind of like HTML. For example, heaven_online didn’t have the ability to turn off loading screens for a long time, which meant people with our bad Australian internet (or worse) had a lot of trouble navigating the mazey pages before the resources of the page got cached after seeing them once⁷. HTML also has other limitations, like how if you go from one page to another one that is playing the same music track, it will reset the track, because there’s no way to persist elements like that across page loads.

Hypnospace Outlaw, on the other hand, doesn’t have these limitations, and can also do things to make the experience of browsing pages nicer than a general purpose browser could. If multiple pages play the same song it doesn’t restart when you move between them, and it doesn’t actually download audio and images from the internet while playing because you already downloaded the game when you bought it. For the sake of verisimilitude it still visually loads pages in some ways, however. Text and images gradually pop in, in a way that’s more visually interesting than the reality of dial-up internet circa Y2K, and it has a corresponding audio effect. In general, interacting with the interface produces a lot of nice sounds. Screen reader support is also a first-class consideration in ways it still isn’t on modern devices: just right click on text and your system’s text-to-speech will read it out. It even does this when an image has alt text! In practice what alt text images have (or lack) may not always be what the W3C recommends in our own world, but it is in character. Besides, most people reading this likely don’t how to use a screen reader (including me because I’m a Linux user)⁸ so the denizens of Hypnospace already beating us in this respect.

To start actually getting into spoiler territory, it’s also worth contrasting the hypertext fiction parts of the game with the part of the game that’s a game within the game: which is to say, Dylan Merchant’s bad car game, a.k.a. Outlaw. It’s his magnum opus, the thing that only he can finish, that he has to finish on his own everything else be damned. He rushes it out to meet the deadline of January 1st, 2000, and it crashes your headset twice, and the second time it kills a handful of Hypnospace users while injuring many more.

By the time Hypnospace Outlaw (the game you’re playing) is basically done, Dylan has repurposed Outlaw (the game he made) into something eulogising the people that the second version of his bad car game killed. It’s finally playable without bugs. The music is a more emotional rendition of the music that was on his homepage. You round up cars representing the people his game killed in the past, and when you do it says they “ASCENDED” as they drift off to heaven. Then, after you’ve got all of them, he appears and you round him up too. His car, of course, spends so much longer in the ascending animation than anyone else he killed. After playing it, you also get to read direct apologies to the victims, but they are still couched in veiled insults about how they’re hicks or not someone their parents would be proud of.

What I said about hypertext fiction is true of Hypnospace (the in-game internet) as well: one of its strengths is that you can linger. Dylan’s game doesn’t let you linger, even if you don’t launch it: Dylan forcing his car game onto every headband is what caused the deaths of those people, and time moves forward in the game even if you don’t move the car.

Even when Dylan issues an apology, he is attempting to elicit a specific emotional response. Whether or not it’s intended, my read is this: this game is only something he made to jerk himself off about how sorry he was. All that effort was spent on something no Hypnospace user could match. He didn’t collaborate with the other Hypnospace users or Merchantsoft employees. He even disregarded what all of them had to say. The game was completely disconnected from everyone else: it was only a thing designed to elicit a very specific emotional response about him. His game is nothing but a one-way conversation with the people that he killed, because he knows they can’t talk back.

Compression of Time

While Hypnospace Outlaw is about making art online, it’s mostly about making music online. Music is the highest fidelity asset available to the devs, and while some 3D art and some interactive fiction exist they’re hamstrung by the graphical style they’re using. How the styling of pages contributes to characterisation has already been talked to death, but how Hypnospace sounds is a less-talked-about tool the game uses to alongside that.

People have nostalgia for different parts of the old internet, and sometimes that includes MIDI music. Hypnospace taps into that: it has its own MIDI-esque format, HSM, which actually functions as sequenced music in-engine and can be messed around with during gameplay if you know how. There’s even a track editor in the game’s files.

However, the game also has streaming audio, which people weren’t really attaching to their pages in this way in even in 2002. The internet’s infrastructure was not up to the task at that point in time, though some places in the world were moving from dial-up (which could get to at most 56 kilobits or 7 kilobytes per second) to broadband. A report by Pew Research titled “Home Broadband 2013”⁹ charts that migration over time in the USA. In 2000, only 3% of connections were broadband, and broadband only took the lead in 2005. Even then, many people in remote or neglected locations also had dial-up for quite a while after 2005. I even knew a guy whose well-located suburb in Perth had dial-up until the 2010s!

This slow internet infrastructure gives us context for how streaming audio was actually used in the late 90s and 2000s. MySpace was most popular between 2005 and 2008. Napster only got started in the middle of 1999. Hamster Dance was from the late 90s but it uses 9 seconds of WAV audio that still took 15 seconds to download on the best possible dial-up connection. And it still sounds like ass! It makes sense that Pizza Style, the game’s analog for Hamster Dance, is done in HSM. Even for a significant chunk of the Flash era, Flash developers still assumed you would have to wait multiple seconds to download Flashes as small as 250 kilobytes,¹⁰ and that was only if they compressed the audio very heavily. You can listen to Neil Cicierega’s animutations, or Hatten är din if you want to be less USA-centric, to get an idea of how much.

Hypnospace Outlaw breaks “verisimilitude” in this way by having the streaming music load instantly at ANY level of quality, let alone a good one. In late 2020 the podcast The Sound Test did an interview with Jay Tholen about the music of the game, and he mentions about 36:45 that he included streaming music because the “experience of hearing prerecorded songs is more important than being faithful in something that isn’t already faithful.” The visual loading feels good: audio loading would not.

However, tracks are still compressed to some degree. Tholen talks in that interview about running some music through an old 1999 version of the MP3 encoder LAME to make it sound more period-accurate. As someone without a discerning enough ear to listen for compression, I’m fairly sure that there are at least some tracks which don’t have this, but I can’t be certain. So, what is the compression trying to evoke?

I’m sure you already know that Brian Eno quote about the limitations of the medium becoming desirable qualities once other formats without those limitations supercede it. To frame it in the theme of this post, to make art you need to understand the tools used to make it. Eno’s quote was something I had a bit of trouble wrapping my head around in this context, though, because I don’t make music or understand the process of making music super well. But I’ll try to talk about it anyway!

Compression is desirable in some senses and in some places, but making all audio faithfully compressed in Hypnospace Outlaw would just be unfun for the player and wouldn’t add much. Having varying levels of digital compression also means that its presence (or lack thereof) means something, and that adds more to the game than compressing everything the same amount. Most modern usage of audio compression in art evokes the mid 2000s anyway: the music genre of HexD uses compression, for example, but it’s used selectively and as a way of evoking nostalgia for MySpace or Flash animations.

Similarly, Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne released for the PS2 in 2003 with its soundtrack compressed to shit. People mod the music on modern ports to use the higher-quality soundtrack album if they can. We can contrast that behaviour with other PS2 janky music classics such as the soundtracks to Evergrace or Drakengard 1. These soundtracks’ weirdness isn’t seen as a mistake to rectify or existing solely because of technical limitations: they’re seen as good music that makes use of its limitations and that features chopping, screwing, and repeating samples, sometimes via MIDI-esque sequencing, sometimes modifying them via pitch bends.

Some tracks in Hypnospace Outlaw have both artifacts from home recording AND digital compression. Tamara’s recordings of her poetry have both of these elements to them which makes all of it feel very DIY: same for Kevvin-J’s demos. It’s clear that they care about what they’re doing, but are just using the tools they have. Meanwhile, Hypnospace is Cool has more “professional” instrumentation and recording, but it’s heavily compressed when embedded on Teentopia’s page. Unlike physical recording artifacts, digital artifacting on its own doesn’t suggest a DIY nature: in this case it suggests that the people who put it there in-universe didn’t give a shit.

To my untrained ears, there are tracks that either have no compression on the entire file or at least significantly less. The game’s rendition of Push by RedStryke¹¹ has barely any. The tracks by Difficulty Boy, which were made by real-life musician rj lake, also don’t have much compression. Interestingly, the Difficulty Boy tracks in-universe are ripped by a user called Slushmouth, who hosts a Hypnospace page dedicated to charting the lineage of electronic music creation and the tools that made it possible to create and distribute tracks with such ease, as someone embedded in those scene¹². Slushmouth LOVES Difficulty Boy’s music, and him hosting a low-compression rip of his songs is part of how he shows that.

If qualities of music suggest things, then the lack of music does too. When you gain access to the archival project, all of the pages there lack sound. It’s not a fun place to express yourself: it’s where serious work is done to archive and recover the self expression of years past. Within the archival project is a page that has the actual respectful way the people Dylan killed are eulogised: it’s just a list of their real names and Hypnospace usernames, in silence. It’s heartbreaking because it isn’t telegraphed. You have to read it for yourself, and then process it, and you can linger there for as long as you want. Unlike Dylan’s game there’s no music influencing you how to feel about it. You simply take it in, and move on when you’re ready.

In one section of 500 Years Later: An Oral History of Final Fantasy VII, Nobou Uematsu speaks about writing the music for the death scene of a key character:

I did realise it was probably going to be an important track … If I had known that scene would make people cry, I might have made something totally different – something designed to make you cry. But I went with a kind of sad but beautiful tune, and since it’s not the kind of track you typically hear when something tragic happens, maybe that worked out well. When something is missing, people tend to use their imaginations. So since the track doesn’t express 100 percent of the feeling in that moment, people might have filled in the gaps in their heads. Maybe.

When artists stylise or abstract things away, audiences fill in the gaps. Sometimes when we aren’t told to feel sad we feel a more acute sadness.

We can agonise for ages over whether the thing we made conveys everything properly. What if the music was sadder? Did I word that clearly enough? What could we have done to make people care more? You can agonize over your art forever and be as didactic as possible, but there will never be a perfect translation from your head to the page. Big corporations like Square Enix, or Hypnospace’s in-universe creator Merchantsoft, can sink lots of money and resources into conveying the perfect emotional weight, and even they can’t guarantee everyone will feel how they want. What hope do we have?

I understand the stakes of some of this. I’ve seen trans women get unpersoned because of people refusing to engage with their works on their own terms. But it isn’t the responsibility of artists to fix how people engage with art. Our responsibility is exactly what it always has been and will continue to be: to present our art fully and earnestly, give people something to engage with, and trust that those who engage with it will understand.

Mentorship and Community

So what do these conventions actually convey on a broader scale? Discussing Hypnospace Outlaw in terms of the Y2K-era internet is obviously correct; the team behind the game chose the aesthetic for a reason! So is talking about it from the perspective of corporations ruining the internet and co-opting and ruining creative communities and ruining people’s lives; that’s what the main plot of the game is about. But talking about Hypnospace Outlaw in only these terms is missing something. I personally think the game manages to capture something about collaborating creatively and mentoring each other online that I want to draw attention to.

Firstly, let’s talk about Icicle Kid a.k.a. Dripp Boy, whose newer name is awful but that’s just what he called himself so we have to deal with it. You’re first introduced to him in Coolpunk Paradise with his own Coolpunk song, except it doesn’t sound like any of the other upbeat and poppier Coolpunk tracks in the game; it’s a slow and sad song about a snowman melting. After the first time skip, as the Coolpunk scene starts to implode, he swaps to making Fungus Scene music. While most of Fungus Scene is moody and atmospheric, his track titled “The Mushroom Hop” is much more lively and upbeat and cartoony than anything else in The Cavern. It’s the opposite of his Coolpunk track! On the third capture he talks about also making music in some other genre, Pizzastyle, and all 3 tracks of what are ostensibly the same genre sound pretty different. There is also the genre he “made up” called Fungus Pizza. Personally, much like a Burger King burger, the last thing I want on my pizza is Dripp Boy’s fungus, but as it turns out that might be what you get.

Dripp Boy illustrates a story writing trick that Hypnospace Outlaw will use almost constantly: introduce something about a character that in some senses may seem like a joke or caricature, but then build on it or introduce a different thing to suggest that the character is more complex than that. You see it almost immediately in Goodtime Valley: people complaining about how everyone outside their zone is a communist is juxtaposed with pages sharing life tips and tricks, or talking about newspaper comic characters, or celebrating the people they love, or remembering the people they have lost.

Maybe the game is slightly too heavy-handed in this: it feels like a lot of character’s depth exists almost entirely as a part of these subversions. Personally I don’t need to have the inherent humanity of everyone shown to me as a subversion: I already believe it exists! However, the internet in 2025 collapses away context like this. Social media’s algorithmic timelines would only show you the old people when complaining about communists because that’s what gets engagement. For that reason I can’t complain about it too much.¹³ This is also an exploration of the spiritual belief Tholen tries to impart in his games, which he describes at around 42 minutes on that Noclip Podcast episode:

I’m a Christian[…] I think people were created in the image of God, and as such I think everyone, even if they seem boring or vapid or not your kind of person that you would hang out with, I think anyone is infinitely interesting, in their inner world, if you really get to know anybody.

That can explain why it exists as a subversion: the “shock” of that new information making you rethink your initial assumptions is what communicates that idea.

In Dripp Boy’s case, the part that seems like a joke is his complete inability to parse the tone of a genre or the works within it and his overwhelming enthusiasm for them despite this. Dripp Boy’s weird mushroom gif and his text praising the atmosphere of someone else’s page completely clashes with the atmosphere he both is praising and is unable or unwilling to create himself. Being part of a concrete artistic movement doesn’t concern him as much as connection and community does, so he simply ignores the cues to conform.

If the only aspect of this was “look at this person who doesn’t understand social cues”, though, I wouldn’t think super highly of it. I sometimes don’t understand them either, and when I was his age on the internet I definitely didn’t. The bit that makes it not a joke at his expense is what FatherFungus, Fungus Scene’s founder, says about Dripp Boy’s music. You can find chatlogs in Dripp Boy’s FLIST (a file sharing page, not the other thing) from the second capture onwards: FatherFungus praises his creativity and affirms its place within the movement.

That being said, on the second capture, his intrusions on other pages in the Cavern are still there, and Father Fungus is explicitly telling him off for it, but by the third capture he’s listened to FatherFungus and they’re gone. There’s also other places on Hypnospace that suggest that FatherFungus gets into fights with former Coolpunks easily, but in these suggestions to Dripp Boy he is much more gentle.

Dripp Boy learns to share his enthusiasm without smothering others, and FatherFungus learns how to suggest these things without getting into fights. Dripp Boy’s disregard for genre remains of course: this is when he comes up with Fungus Pizza. Even if the joke is This Autistic-Coded Person Is Weird Isn’t That Weird And Funny, both him and FatherFungus grow despite this through FatherFungus being a kind of mentor to Dripp Boy.

This is not the only place where people collaborate in Hypnospace: Tiff’s collaboration with Linda is another example of a collaboration between adult and teenager, and it certainly seems healthier for Tiff than her collaboration with T1MAGEDDON did. This cross-generational collaboration isn’t something I see as much of on the modern internet. There’s value in these kinds of relationships, because children and teenagers are taught by and learn from adults in real life all the time. A healthy model of the internet should include these things, in structures that don’t enable abuse of the younger party.

Depictions of artistic mentorship are not exclusive to Dripp Boy and FatherFungus. Kevvin-J has a similar experience with RedStryke (as he appears in the game). Another different example is Tamara Frost. One read of her is that she is insincerely trying to insert herself into online spaces, which is one I’m not interested in for reasons I’ll say later. The read I’m interested in is that she’s an adult who is in a similar boat to Dripp Boy but with one key difference: she doesn’t have anyone to help her.

The first page of hers you see is her main page, talking about her spoken word poetry. She also has her Coolpunk page, where she has a spoken word rendition of the main source material that all Coolpunk comes from (the Gray’s Peak Cola theme). Her main page talks about her dreams of getting her poetry published, but not knowing how to do that. The last capture shows this lack of social understanding a little more clearly, though, where there are 3 pages listed in the Starport Castle Dreamstation zone. They are an ultimatum from the Sovereign Alliance of Imagination (a subcommunity planning on leaving Hypnospace), a page saying that they left Hypnospace because the ultimatum wasn’t met… and Tamara’s page, talking about how she loves the pages and community of the SAI. Obviously I’m not implying she made this only after they all left, but I’m implying that she didn’t understand the real reasons for why they did what they did, or at least how to contribute, and when they left she didn’t feel enough kinship with them to go with.

In game, most people don’t talk about Tamara, and Tamara doesn’t talk about many people. The exceptions are CPColdSnap’s Fake Coolpunk page, which doesn’t even attempt to empathise with her, and the Venue highlight thingy, which misspells her name. Most Hypnospace pages have a badge that displays how many “pals” they have on ChitChat, the in-universe chat client. Tamara has about 20, which is comparable to Dripp Boy, but he had a mentor and community. Meanwhile, most of the members of the SAI have between 50 and 200.¹⁴ Hypnospace lets users add statuses to their pages, and Tamara’s don’t suggest a social person: 2 of them are her looking for ChitChat groups and asking for invites, and the last one starts with the good old “Not sure if anyone has noticed” you deploy when you want to guilt people into looking at a thing. This game doesn’t depict social media but it DOES depict the exact kind of depressed vagueposting about feeling lonely and disconnected from other creatives (or people in general) that I feel the urge to do about 999,999,999,999,999,999 times every day. She has friends, like Kevvin-J, but she longs for broader connections. Her poem “Zones” asserts her belonging alongside everyone else, of everyone in Hypnospace being “on their own, together”, but most of what we see of her is just her being alone.

I chose to ignore a specific read so I’m probably projecting, but here’s what I see when I look at Tamara. She isn’t a part of any community, and her friends aren’t fulfilling that need. Her attempts to find community also fell flat. She’s attempting to make stuff in other communities that she admires and she wants to make friends there, but she doesn’t understand how to connect to others. They perceive it as insincere, despite her only knowing how to communicate via making that art.

This is a read that argues Tamara is autistic-coded, like Dripp Boy, and this is absolutely a projection on my part. One further thing that I think is worth drawing attention to for these 2 characters: Dripp Boy is a white guy and Tamara is black woman. I can’t speak very much on the intersection between autism and misogynoir, though, because I’m white and the only writing I’ve found so far on this intersection says “further studies are needed because of underrepresentation”¹⁵, but if nothing else you can read it as a structural reason for why she might find this harder.

Outside of that aspect, my perspective is one of struggling to talk and make friends in online spaces, so obviously I would see myself reflected in Tamara’s attempts to do the same. How do I find the creative spaces that will work for me? How do I interact with the people there? How do I not accidentally come off as insincere? How do I make sure the spaces don’t implode? Many many questions I frequently do not know the answers to.

The most insight we get into Tamara comes from the Hypnospace Archival Project. Since she’s a part of it, Tamara has a luxury in this story that few others have: she can look at her old self and reflect on the person she was after maturing. When she describes the Tamara 19 or more years removed from her in hindsight, she talks about how she felt aimless, how she felt blown every which way by all the things in her life. But, despite all of the loneliness she exhibited, she still says Hypnospace was one of her favourite online communities with how it fostered creativity. That’s as close to Word of the Author as I think we’ll get. She even becomes a successful author herself, enough to bankroll the archival project! The fact that she wants to do that in the first place shows what faith she had in Hypnospace and how it helped shape her.

And yet… obviously, the resolution to her ennui happens off-screen and offline. The real world doesn’t revolve around the internet in this way. And yet, I still struggle with the same things Tamara did. I see that there’s pieces here for the puzzle of how to tackle this feeling, in more detail than “log off”, but I can’t put them together on my own. I especially can’t do that if all the discussion about this game is exclusively about Late Stage Neoliberal Capitalism. There is context to the world and to games outside of the economic system we live under the boot of. It’s why I’ve linked to so many developer interviews and other works in this post, and made it way longer than it needs to be. The lens of simply criticising capitalism without discussing anything further is the equivalent of only having read Harry Potter: I understand that it helped you when you needed it, but please for the love of God read another book.

Now that this is out there and you’re reading it, I can stop being in my own head about all of this. I can stop agonising over whether I’ve gone off on tangents for no reason, or projected so much of myself into this analysis that I’ve misunderstood everything. I can now refocus my efforts toward actually being connected to others, both when I make stuff and when I’m not. For making fiction that’s easier. I have a game I am actively making with a friend. For writing non-fiction, though? It can be very solitary. Most people who have peers in this field are video essayists, and I am not, so I haven’t figured out how yet. But god do I want to. Dylan didn’t figure out how over however many years, but that’s because he didn’t care. Tamara cared, even if it took her a while. If she can figure that out, then so can I.

Because I hate ending nonfiction on personal notes like the above, let’s talk about the pages on Hypnospace that are writing about art, because there’s a lot of varying perspectives being shown here. For one, there’s CPColdSnap, a guy who rates Coolpunk songs based on how good they are AND how well they fit into the genre. A song can get 40/50 points for being a good song, but only 50/100 overall if it’s not proper Coolpunk. Star Wars YouTubers circa 2018 would have loved him! Notably this is the character that talks shit about Tamara’s spoken word poetry and calls her a faker, and also makes fun of Dripp Boy. Hence why I don’t like that reading of her: I don’t think the game is going for this, if this character is so dismissive of the inner world of others.

There are also different kinds of critics. There’s the Dumpster, which exists mostly to talk shit about people. Dude never has anything nice to say about anyone! It’s the game’s Something Awful analogue. Eventually the guy running it gets bored. The last entry says “Maybe I’ll start doing something constructive’?” which is obviously indicative of how the game feels about this specific kind of critique. This isn’t empathising or understanding: it’s pointing and laughing.

Meanwhile, Connie’s Connections is explicitly a link directory, sharing cool things from across Hypnospace in one place. These kinds of link directories have gone out of style, and no, carrd doesn’t count. Personally I think they should make a comeback. Things are linked to each other anyway; we may as well make it explicit.

Aldrin’s House of Sound shows a different approach to talking about art. The page starts off with just scanned pages of the physical zine, with text everywhere he can’t remove due to not understanding how to make pages. As time goes on, however, he gradually becomes more and more tech literate and makes a page proper by the end, a harmony of the old technologies and the new. Other music fans like Slushmouth talk about the lineage of genres they like, of course. They chart the technological progress toward and including Hypnospace as good things, for the ways they facilitate creation and sharing of new art and new subcultures.

There’s room for traditional reviews of other works as well, like with The Observer, a video game review site that is worth contrasting with The Dumpster. It actually reviews things on their own merits and without being an arse about it. Even with those reviews mostly being self-contained instead of grand works attempting to tie all history together, they’re still discussing their subjects relative to other games that came out around the same time in-universe. Contextualising things can be as simple as talking about another thing you like.

These pages show writing about art at it’s best: not just discussing the details of the thing, but attempting to contextualise it, being deliberate with what lenses you view it with, and drawing subjective conclusions based on these. I hope I can continue to get better at doing this myself, but I don’t want to sit here on my own cataloging these things. I want it to be alongside people I care about. And only if it’s shorter than this post!

What We Can Do With These Tools

I’ve been writing this from the middle of 2024 all the way to March of 2025. Things online (and in other places) could be better, and yet they are instead terrible dogshit. The internet continues to spin toward ruin, so here’s my attempt at halting this: what kinds of alternate internet can we envision with the help of Hypnospace Outlaw? What good things does it show, and what good things does it lack? It sure was nice in my last post almost a year ago about UMD-PG to just talk about something without talking about society as a whole, so I thought: why don’t I spend the end of this essay claiming I know how we can fix one of the main paradigms that society uses to interact with each other? Why not! I definitely understand what these things are better than everyone else and it also WON’T consume 9 months of my life on-and-off.

Then those thoughts ballooned, and the other half will have to wait. Oops. Oh well, it flows better this way anyway, and it’ll stop it from consuming more of my life. Rest assured future blog posts will be shorter because my god I’m not letting this happen again.

In some future thing, I’ll analyse the indie web compared to other online media, and you can swap Hypnospace with indie web and get the same result. I’ll speak of personal websites in very good terms. I’ll even position them as vital! Or maybe I’ve scattered enough pieces here and there throughout this one that I don’t have to write it at all and I can be done with it after I link A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton, and say some words like “self-hosting” and “interoperability”, and allude to the importance of tools that are easy to use (without generative AI slop threatening to Grey Goo Scenario all human creativity) like Flash, and maybe also link to Jay Tholen’s writing on his own formative experiences making games as a teen using The Games Factory. If I didn’t have to write a big thing next time, that’d be nice!

In the future I also want to talk about what Hypnospace specifically doesn’t have, namely, queerness and adult content. If you look at Hypnospace Outlaw and go “this is my ideal version of the internet! I want the internet to be like that now!”, keep in mind that you’re saying that about Hypnospace, a platform that in-universe is created by the same kind of for-profit tech startups that got us into this mess. It’s worth examining not just what is present, but what is missing, and thinking about what missing things we should reintroduce. You can read “The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet” by Avery Dame-Griff and get a rough idea of everything I want to say there ahead of time, but I still want to talk about these two works in combination myself.

Until then, let me leave you with this: It may be hard to envision a future where the internet is better than it is now. The things that are easy to do in this moment are the things that tech companies have spent billions of dollars on making easy. Part of countering this is investigating big things: completely dismantling the advertising and intellectual property models we have now, investigating alternate technologies that are resilient and actually decentralised like what PierMesh is doing, and investigating ways of creating and maintaining hardware and software, like the permacomputing movement, that aren’t contingent on exploiting the people in the imperial periphery.

One other huge thing that we can do right now is discuss what is good and what is bad about the internet, but discuss it in depth and in the context of the world. We can build that better internet together, but we need to be thinking about how first, so let’s not only start the conversation but start doing things now. While you wait (or don’t wait) for future writing from me, there’s a lot I can suggest. I’ll suggest it all, and if that’s overwhelming, pick just one and go from there. So, here’s some things you can do:

I think personal websites are cool. I think you should go to https://neocities.org/browse and figure out which ones you like and which ones you don’t. I think you should try to make things on a personal website that aren’t just streams of posts, and try to arrange your site more non-linearly. Maybe look into that post I linked above on digital gardens, a philosophy of web design that centers imperfection and connection, or look at my notes page to see how I did something similar. Think about how you can collaborate with others online, and how you can mentor and be mentored. Think about what you see online and what you don’t see, or what you used to see, and try and find (or make) what you miss. Actively try and search for things instead of relying on algorithmic timelines.

Of course, there’s things to consider for those other broad subjects too. Some suggestions for those: Fix up old computers. Write software that runs on those old computers. Try and replace software you use with open-source software, where it’s safe and practical to do so. Use weird social media that’s interoperable. Look into modular, replaceable, repairable, open-source hardware. Try and investigate and use other methods of computer/internet use that rely less on advertisers or the ISP model or labour exploitation, like the ones I linked above. And of course, all of that will be easier if you follow those constellations of links, or make some yourself, and communicate with others, and let others teach you, and let yourself be taught.

So that’s your homework task. Maybe you can write a little bit about this somewhere. Maybe you can make that public, or just keep it private. Maybe you can talk to people about it, maybe even me! Maybe you can just keep it in your head. Or, if you really wanted, maybe you could never think about any of this ever again. But people are thinking about these things, whether you do or not. You are allowed to as well. The web is the medium that allows you to choose. So turn it over in your head, if you want. Maybe, with these tools, we can figure out some way to reverse the internet spinning toward ruin and spin it toward being the tool of human liberation that it not only could have been but can still become.

When (if) I write those other things, I’ll link them here. Thanks for reading!