HTML quiz, 2021, updated 2024
Beyond its physical-virtual interface, the internet exists in our imaginations, a space fabricated from its existing systems and our spatial understanding as bodied beings, for in spite of its manifold functions, only human imagination could have rendered this network of code into a place. The black rectangle disclosing replies becomes a room in which we stand in the dark with another person, speaking mind to mind. A web page or social media account manifests as a storefront window displaying a selection of wares.
The fictional version of the web written for The Unknown Self is based on memories of the internet in the very earliest days of social media and before widespread digital surveillance. In that iteration of the internet one could be free in the darkness of night, lit by the pale luminance of a screen, and the imagined darkness of a less developed web, akin to an empty field—absent of many of the systems that have been virtually built up around us since then.
In today’s internet, a veritable megalopolis of separate but interconnected systems, we are forced to present avatars of ourselves built to showcase who we believe ourselves to be, or at the very least, who we wish ourselves to be. Perhaps a better question is, who do we feel free to be? For those surveying this version of the virtual world with disquiet, take heart. What was made can be unmade, or, new worlds can be dreamt, coded, and uploaded into the collective consciousness, worlds where we can allow ourselves new autonomies.